There is a lovely stack of wonderfully teal-coloured wool sitting around here, waiting to get turned into a sweater:

[caption id="attachment_2175" align="alignnone" width="600"] These two have more friends, of course. One sweater's worth of them.


They're not going to get cuddly and up close to knitting needles just yet, though - there are a few other things that need finishing or taking care of first (such as the sprang thing that is still waiting on its frame, happily, for instance). I've done the swatch already though, and picked out a pattern - the wool will, eventually, turn into a nice cardigan.

Eventually.

Speaking of turning yarns into knitted items, I've been following @WoolsackUK on Twitter for a while now, and one of the recent tweets linked to an article about knitting with a specific technique in Yorkshire, called "swaving". From what the Knitting Genealogist writes on that blog, the technique is lost today - but it does sound like a fascinating field of study. If you're interested in old knitting techniques, you might enjoy that article (and possibly others on the same blog.)

It's the start of February, and Doug has curated all the Blog Carnival entries for the Archaeology Grand Challenges. It's 60+ posts from all over the world, and from a lot of different perspectives - from sex and gender over personal identity challenges to funding, finances, and archaeology and games. If you like to read about archaeology, go check out these blogs - you might find something to put on your reading list!

If you're more interested in knitting, there's a project called "Centenary Stitches" focussing on the knitting done at home for WWI soldiers. The project has also resulted in an exhibition currently being shown at the National Archives in Kew, Surrey (ending March 19).

Jim Hines has posted a long article about the Puppies in 2016, linked to the upcoming Hugo nominations. It looks like there might be less of a kerfuffle and less nastiness this year in the nominations and the voting - at least I hope so. In case you can nominate, or are just interested in current sf/f lit that is eligible, you can take a look at Hugo Recommendations, or jump right to the huge spreadsheet list of eligible nominees here.

In case you don't care about that stuff at all - here are links to cats doing Extreme Napping, and tiny cats sleeping, also thanks to Jim Hines. Our little cat does some napping at the moment, too, but it's not as spectacular...



Speaking of spectacular, though - there's been a mammoth find (literally!) that points towards a much earlier human activity in Arctic zones than previously thought. This also could include earlier human presence in North America.

Over at Ossamenta there are links to several opportunities - bursaries for attending the Association for Environmental Archaeology on the Orkneys, their research grant, plus a fully funded PhD in York about Mesolithic bone tools. Check out the blog post to learn more.

I've discovered Yoga a good while back (in spring 2013, actually) and have been doing a little bit of yoga once a week, sometimes skipping it, and sometimes adding in a bit of extra yoga time since then. With the sort-of "life reboot"* that I have going on at the moment, started off by the weight-loss-myth-busting book that I read in early January, I've returned to the mat with more dedication again - and yesterday, I discovered that Do Yoga With Me (which is still my favourite place to go to for yoga class videos - if you're interested in yoga at all, do go check them out) has a 14-day challenge up, featuring fourteen classes with Fiji McAlpine.

Well, technically this challenge started on January 10, so I'm a bit late to the party. I'm also not completely convinced that I will not need a day inbetween to take a break, as Fiji is incredibly fit and I find her classes rather challenging, to the point that I have in the past taken a look at a few of them, or did the first bit and then gave up, switching to something less taxing. I did the first day of the challenge as my morning bit of sports today, though, and I managed to get through it with just a few little extra breaks (because while I'm not at the very low end of a fitness scale, I am definitely way, way less fit than I could be).

So I'm feeling a little tired now, and quite happy with myself. Which is actually a very nice combination. Tomorrow? I'll try day two, and I'll see how it goes.

 
* Looks like that is a Thing at the moment, too - Wil Wheaton has started his reboot back in October last year. Alasdair Stuart of the Escape Artists (free podcasts for Fantasy, SF and Horror) is in week 3 of his new fitness plan of working out 5 times a week. And there's probably a lot more people that are doing something similar right now - after all, the start of a year is a good time to take stock and change things for the better.

When taking breaks, I like to go and check what is happening on Twitter. I don't post there often, but there are a lot of tweeters that post things I find amusing, and occasionally a retweet lures me to yet another twitter account, and I follow yet another one.

This happened this morning, when I stumbled across @AcademicsSay. If you are in academia, have been there, or are interested in it - check out that twitter feed. It is a wonderful mix of the hilarious with the slight sadness that comes from knowing that life is exactly that strange, and that weird. Also there's the potential of luring you off into strangenesses, such as this article about a satirical article regarding evidence-based medicine.

The guy behind this account also has a blog called SAS Confidential, which promises quite a few interesting reads as well. Which I will resist to look at for now... because, you know? I should be writing.

 
[caption id="attachment_2162" align="alignnone" width="640"] "French archaeologists at work 2015 Pompeii" by Jebulon - Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:French_archaeologists_at_work_2015_Pompeii.jpg#/media/File:French_archaeologists_at_work_2015_Pompeii.jpg


To me, Italy is the place where the Romans were, the place where culture had its heyday in Antiquity. The place where Things Happened that I had to learn about in school even though they happened in a country far to the South of Germany - because they were so important. (The founding of Rome. The Roman Empire. Latin. Well, that didn't happen, that was spoken, but it was a huge thing for a long time.)

So you'd think that a place like that would be proud of its heritage, right? And take good care of it, including the archaeological sites? Well. That would be nice, but unfortunately, it's not true.

The Italian Ministery of Cultural Heritage is planning to cancel the Archaeological Heritage Offices, through a reform that will impact Italian archaeology, including rescue archaeology. This is major bad news - if anything, Italian archaeology needs more funds, and more support, and more action. Case in point? Pompeii, the world-famous site, has been crumbling for years and is in ever more danger of falling apart completely.

As is usual today in cases like this, there's a petition going on at change.org to make the ministers re-think their decision. It's still fairly new, and thus still fairly small. Please help make a difference and help save Italian archaeology by signing, and spreading the word - thank you!

I've recently upgraded my trusty little computer with more RAM (from 4 to 8 GB), and I've thus lost some more space on my harddrive to the ever-present hiberfil.sys (which the system uses for hibernation mode, and which is roughly the same size as the RAM).

Unfortunately, this meant that my windows partition had become very, very full. As in just a few hundred MB of space left - which is not enough for practical purposes.

One solution would have been to disable hibernation mode, which allows you to get rid of the hiberfil.sys. (In case you want to do this, here are instructions on how to turn it off or on.) Since I'm using the sleep mode often, though, this was not a choice for me.

I'm using CCleaner regularly to throw out files that are not needed anymore, but the disk had gradually gotten fuller and fuller in spite of this. The likely culprit, since I'm also taking care to de-install programmes I don't use anymore, and keep as much data off the C: partition as possible? Windows itself.

So I did a little searching around, and found out that there is a (fairly hidden) option to remove older updates from the computer. Windows stores these (because it's not paranoia to keep everything, right?), but for a system that is running okay, this only makes very limited sense, and it can take up a lot of space. In my case, it was almost exactly 10 GB that got cleared!

And here's how you do it for Windows 7 or 8: