Have you ever wondered about that thing called the European Union? Here's a nice video that explains it all.*

* More or less.



Speaking of the EU, there's news about the VAT stuff. Here's a roundup on how the start of the new rules went - not pretty. However, there's still some hope: There will be a meeting of the EU VAT Action group with Donato Raponi (yay!), and they are assembling case studies for this, so if you are affected by the rules, that's your chance to get heard. There's also an Action Challenge currently running - go here to get challenged.

After the more depressing please-help thingies I posted yesterday, here is a different one where you can help. I've stumbled across this through the chat on HabitRPG (I posted about this before, here) and it's an absolutely fascinating project - though if you want to join in, it will take a few hours of your time.

Voices, like fingerprints, are something deeply personal. For a lot of speech-impaired people, though, there are communication machines with only very few standard voices to choose from. VocaliD is a project that aims to remedy this, by blending the sound characteristics extracted from sounds the speech-impaired person can make with the (missing) rest of the voice-forming properties from an actual human voice. And you can actually become a voice-donor and help with that!

Rupal Patel explains it all in much more detail and depth in her TED talk. Which I found deeply touching - she really does bring the point across that a voice is a deeply personal thing.

If you are game to help now, you can go visit VocaliD and support them. For the moment, they are recording English speakers, but my guess is that if this works nicely, there will be a demand for other languages as well (and also, maybe, more than one language spoken by a single person).

Sometimes it feels like things are trying to fall to pieces, or go pear-shaped, in nicely regular intervals. These days, though, there's the Power of the Internet that can be harnessed to actually change some things...

so if you have a few minutes to spare today, maybe you are willing to help with these?

First, the biggest issue. There's been ACTA and TTIP, and now it seems to be time for the next one: TISA. Just like the last ones, it has been mostly discussed behind closed doors, and just like the last time, it's high time for us to protest such lovely and helpful ideas as privatisation of water supply or passing bank data on to other countries (at least that's what has been hinted at). I'd say no thanks! (Whatever things are being discussed really, just the fact that it's being done behind closed doors is enough for me to feel uneasy about it.)

There are petitions in Switzerland and Austria as well as in Germany, if you search for "stop TiSA" on the 'net. You can sign for the German version at Avaaz, or at change.org, or at both if you're so inclined. Please help also by spreading the word.

A little smaller, but also in need of signatures is this petition against a very serious budget cut for Swiss archaeology: The government is cutting the budget for archaeology in the Kanton Schaffhausen by more than half until 2018. More than 70% of the regular job positions will be terminated and fixed term positions will not be renewed.  This will be a massive loss of work capacity - and means that it will not be possible to get the necessary archaeological work done. Please sign the petition against this and help keep archaeologists in their (very rare) full-time jobs!

It's become quiet over the holidays about the EU VAT and VATMOSS (or WhatMess, as it should be titled, probably). The topic is not off the table yet, though, and if you've been on Ravelry recently, you will have noticed the Notice next to the EU flag.

If you are confused now and would like to have a nice analogous explanation on how the new rules work (or don't work), I recommend Hannah's Banana Story.  Carolyn Jewel blogs about her problems with pricing in the new system, especially regarding ebooks, and Cheryl Morgan has similar problems. (Her final thought? Amazon will profit from this, a lot. Which is exactly what I suspect. Say, wasn't the intention of the new rules something along the lines of curbing the advantage of the Big Players, among them said Big River Store who ships from wherever tax was cheaper? Hmmm....)

The new tax regulations are in force since January 1, and I have no idea how all the single traders selling digital content are handling it - since there has been no change in the legislation yet, as far as I know. Personally, I'm very happy that I only have one digital knitting pattern these days, and since it hasn't seen any sales for a while (which is a pity, but there are plenty of hats around, so I can sort of understand), I've just taken it off Ravelry for the time being. (Should you want one, drop me an email.)

I'm staying tuned to the EUVAT Action site and the Digital Microbusiness Group, but there's not much happening on either at the moment, and I hope that means the groups are in contact with those in charge in the EU, busily trying to solve the problem, and too busy to post news.

If you can, please spread the word about this, or fill out a survey on the EUVAT Action site, or take one of the other actions listed there. The more that speak or write about it, the better!

While I've been absent from blogging, interesting stuff has accumulated - plus new things came in, like this note today:

The Guardian: German anthropologist exposed as fraud.

The Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands has made its collection of public domain images freely available on the net, and is very content with the outcome. There's a paper about it here.

And the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremburg is planning an exhibition on early modern dress - due to start sometime this year, as far as I understand the plan.

Something technical to round it up - should you be worried that some spammer might have access to your email and personal data, you can use this handy Identity Leak Checker to find out.

The EU vat rules have occupied me some more yesterday... and I'm very happy that I only have one pdf knitting pattern to sell, and that should be easily solveable by either continuing to sell it via Ravelry or taking it down come January. If that rule is really going to apply to physical goods in the future, though, things will look differently.

For those of you who enjoy graphic depictions of stuff, here's the comic listing the typical options for small businesses selling digital content:

(Comic by Dave Walker)

It's time for links again!

Here's one to an ongoing comparison of fingerloop braids, together with instructions for each band, from Silkewerk.

Variations on yarn-overs, from Ysolda's blog. Just in case you want to tweak the size of your yarn-overs to make them exactly the same size.

If you read German and like things that make noise and stink (also known as ancient fireweapons), the page of the Bummsbrigade Hamborch should be just the thing for you. (If you don't read German, they are working on an English version of the page, according to said page, and you could look at the pictures of their stuff, "Zeug", meanwhile.)