I am back! So what should I catch you up on?

It's still ridiculously hot outside. The extreme heat was also the reason for a change of plans that we made for the summer holidays - we had planned to go cycling for two weeks, but I am, unfortunately, not functioning well when exercising at temperatures of 30° C outside. So our first change of plans was to go for a paddle on the Main instead. This plan dried up together with the water levels in said river, which were too low for paddling on the interesting parts.

So Plan C (good thing that the alphabet has a few extra letters) was made, and executed, and that was a short but very beautiful hike on the Goldsteig. The German love of over-engineering and over-securing things does not stop before hiking trails, so we did enjoy one of the "premium trails" this country has to offer... which means that in theory you can see the next trail mark (usually some painted or printed sign) already when standing at the previous one. The theory doesn't always come through in practice, but most of the time, so it's actually very nice for strolling along without looking at a map, gps, or other orientation aid for most of the time. (It would be possible to walk without any kind of map, actually, but it was nice to check at some points where we were in relation to the next place of interest.)

For me, it was also a bit down nostalgia road as we passed places that my Grandma had lived in, or talked much about. We were only walking for four days, but could enjoy some nice quiet nights in the tent and had absolutely perfect weather for hiking. We came back and the weather got hotter again, so we could not have hit it better. Bonus effect: That hike was on our list for a long time already, but was too long for a weekend and too short for a normal summer holiday. 

Other stuff happened as well during the summer break - or, well, did not happen. This would have been a sensible solution for the new EU packaging and waste regulations; unfortunately, there was no agreement in the relevant groups, so everything stayed as it was in the previously published version. The TL;DR for this: no matter how large your shipping volume, you have to pay a lot of money for licensing fees, making EU shipping for most small players unaccessible. I will post a longer rant, with things you can do about the thing, tomorrow.

What else did not happen? The full re-launch of my website (and nobody is surprised here, I think). At least it's getting there, or maybe creeping there; most of the software availability issues have been resolved now, the blog has shiny new updated software compatible with the next version of Joomla, and the new newsletter software and template is almost good to go (in spite of my messing up the migration repeatedly. Sigh.)

Also going on, though in the background: Prep for an exhibition that is to have one man from an image coming to life. These days it's technically possible to take the image of a face and have it transformed into a life-sized 3D head, but not everything that is technically possible is also... well, the smartest or most affordable option. In our case, it's a question of the budget, and I'd rather get proper fabrics than an overly nice head. So the plan is to take the figure we have and fit it with a buff that will be printed with the face of the painting figure. Was that in any way understandable?

So anyway I got to the funny part of fitting a disembodied head (as it's easier to handle) with one of my buffs and, for aligning the painting face as best as possible, marking some key spots (with, of course, my beloved charcoal). It looks rather funny:

It also fits only semi-well over my own facial features, because my ears are higher up than the head's ears, and my nose is smaller and therefore my ears are further to the front than the marked ones. Or something like that - I could not see it for myself, because unlike special fancy full-face masks for morphsuits, this material is not really see-through.

Now we will have to see how this all plays out, and how it will look once we've got it, and got it on the figure. Fun times! 

It's time for a summer break!

I will be off the blog until August 17. If you wish to see me in the meantime, you can come to the Archaeotechnica in Brandenburg, where I'll be taking a break from the break and work for a weekend.

Chocolate was, apparently, always a thing for the military. There was Pervitin laced into pralinés dubbed "Hausfrauenschokolade" (housewife chocolate), and it was also mixed into chocolate bars as "Panzerschokolade" (tank chocolate). And in case you are wondering now what that Pervitin brand name stands for - it's meth. (Yeah.)

A different kind of chocolate, also for military use, but not used as a drug delivery agent, was the D ration chocolate bar. That is, well, mostly harmless or so it seems, and if you are intrigued now, Tasting History has a podcast about it:

Well, turns out I should have caught up a bit earlier on this new-fangled e-invoice thing, because, as it turns out, handing an invoice into the federal state of Baden-Württemberg (and probably the others these days, too) requires formatting it as a nice, sleek, validated e-invoice.

So. There I am. Fortunately I am using a lovely book-keeping programme that is able to whip up such invoices. Not so fortunately is that it is Neuland, as Germans would say, to me and I have to figure out all the bits and pieces that have to go in there (and are still missing). 

It's on the way, though. And then at least I'll know more about this stuff, because it will probably not be the last thing I deliver to some public or state institution. At least I hope so! 

So. I have a new video cookie thingummy gadget that makes you agree to Youtube cookies, but it is not yet working everywhere... only on the main site. The blog with all its videos still needs a solution, and that either means some database roughhousing and then some code kicking, or finding a different plugin (meh), or maybe getting some solution from the blog software maker.

For now, I will be waiting to see what said blog software maker will say; I also have a vague idea about how the kicking and roughhousing might be done, though I do prefer to, um, not do it.

(All this because the Data Protection Smurf wants you to know that youtube, aka google, will get your data, and wants you to agree, and because I do not want to pester you with some "agree to these cookies" thing only - and only! - because you might watch youtube. Because, in case you have not noticed yet... this site only uses essential stuff, and thus you don't need to do this banner-clicky-thing.)

Which means... there's fewer and fewer extensions or solutions that need to be dealt with. A few more are outstanding related to the shop, but I might  be able to do without them, and then there's the small issue of the template, which is not really suited to the next version, and I would like to have something more robust and with less extra code anyways. 

Otherwise... yeah.

I also have done some foot measurements for a planned exhibition that involves, you have guessed it, shoes. All the other things will still have to be done, too, but starting from the bottom, that was the top thing on the agenda. (It was a little weird since that is, for a change, not a rock-solid hard plastic figurine, but one with a little more malleability. I am really not used to that!)

The website stuff is progressing slowly and, of course, eating up more time than it was planned to feed to it. But, well, at least there's progress. Then I finally did some of the promised reading, and it's almost done as well, so tomorrow should be sort-of-back to normal (as in doing shop stuff, writing an outstanding invoice, and going back to work on some other project prep).

Weather outside is still warm, though not insanely hot - that is, unfortunately, promised to come next week, or already end of this week, and nobody knows how quickly it will happen and how hot it will get. So our plans for doing a bit of holiday stuff might have to be amended to allow for the weather.  

The Little Cat seems to have recovered a bit. She's now getting a special nice (pleasantly-to-her-nose) stinky mussel powder that is supposed to help with bladder health. We will see!

There was a little website work done today, and then I realised that I had one of the extensions that were currently found out to have a vulnerability on the site. So after a little bit of hectic checking, verifying, and so (as you do), it should now be completely fixed (at least the part in question has been deactivated and will be completely removed once I have installed and tweaked the replacement). 

Moral of the story: Check your things. And, yes, be lucky sometimes so you catch stuff like that before something really awkward, or annoying, happens...