Finally Friday - a little bit more of writing work to do, and then I'm looking forward to the weekend, first a little bit of knitting conference tomorrow, and then some time to fully relax and do nothing on Sunday. 

Where hanging out (or falling off the wall) in places like this counts. Maybe not as doing nothing, but more as a relaxing activity.

And then next week there's spindle whorls to sort (a fresh delivery has arrived today), and distaffs to prep and send off for the workshop in March, and maybe some more pins to make. It's definitely not going to be boring then either! 

... that old banking cards and credit cards are electronic appliances. At least in Germany, according to the law, because they contain a chip!

Which also means that you're not supposed to just cut them up and put them into your domestic trash; they should be handed back to the bank, or placed into the appropriate recycling station.

Here's a nice little instruction on how to cut them up, by the way. (That mightbe handy outside of Germany as well...) I wonder, though, how they are going to recycle the tiny, cut-up chip? 

Something for the German speakers today - the GNM (Germanisches Nationalmuseum) in Nuremberg is offering a position as museum education specialist for two years, to re-design part of the permanent exhibition. If that's in any way interesting for you, check out their full description of the job here on the museum website.

 (And just in case you did not know, if you're looking for a job in Germany for historians or related subjects, H-Soz-Kult is a good place to check. The position listed above is also there - and lots more.)

 Insight of the day? My website is rather large, taken everything together (the years of blogging, with images, have added up, and so do the shop pictures). Which means that if I take backups of the site (a good thing), I should sort of keep an eye on where I put them, and at some point delete them again.

I've been pretty good at doing that on the website/server itself, as there's limited space available there and I would have run out long ago otherwise. Not so good at keeping track of the backup backlog and buildup on my computer itself, where I'll pull older backups (but not so very old) before deleting them from the server, just in case. Or, when there's a larger change on the website coming up or a migration is necessary, I'll pull backups down and do a local install. 

Migrations and larger changes usually mean a generous number of backups, too. And I've been rather happy to close the thing after getting everything up and running when I did those larger changes... which means that the backups stayed in their little corner of my computer. No problem and nothing wrong with keeping them for a month or two, mind you, until it's clear that everything is running smoothly with the new setup.

However... after a month or two, I'd totally forget about having them. Until I've recently come across some, neatly and nicely labelled (as opposed to others) and realised how much space they are eating up, all of them combined.

So I've been doing a bit of maintenance on the side. Just in case you now feel like that might be something you should maybe do, here's my two favourite tools for finding and deleting stuff that has served its purposes:

WizTree - this scans your drive and sorts folders by how much space they take up. There's also a nice visual to quickly show you what you have, and how large individual folders and the files therein are. 

Anti-Twin - this looks for duplicate files and lets you remove them (either by selecting them manually, or by folder, or other criteria). It has not been updated since 2012, but it's still downloadable and does work with Windows 10, and according to the site also Windows 11.

As always, make sure you know what you're doing before deleting things - but don't be like me and hold on to ten year old double backups, just in case! ; ) 

Lead is, as probably everybody knows, a toxic metal - so it's not an utterly good idea to use it where it's not absolutely necessary. 

It was, however, widely used in a lot of places throughout history, because it's not only toxic, it's also very useful for a lot of things. Lead is soft and malleable, it can stand a lot of stress before breaking (it stretches instead), it makes a nice white (lead white), and it has a very low melting point - all things that led to lead being used for projectiles, water pipes, roofing, ceramic glazes, lead crystal, stained glass windows, and a plethora of other stuff (fuel additive, if you're looking for a rather modern example...).

Today, there's good replacements for lead about everywhere. However, in some instances in conservation and restoration, lead can still be a critical element, without a good replacement. Sometimes matching the original materials is crucial to prevent unwanted reactions between the original and the reconstructed parts. 

However, due to the toxicity, there's the plan to ban lead completely from being used, in all of Europe. This has been petitioned against by conservators. One of the issues is the primary ban of lead, the second issue is the very hard limits on lead "pollution" in the workspace. The petition, which is supported by German conservators, is currently running and on the EU portal. You can support it by signing it (that will require you to register, for free, on the portal) - and I'd be delighted if you would do so, and spread the word to other people too!

The petition on the EU portal can be found here, under 0724/2023. You can read more about the petition in German on the page of the Verband deutscher Restauratoren. 

It's finally Friday (though where did the week go so fast?) and it looks like there will be scones, and games, and some general relaxing... which sounds like just the thing.

So... with this random photo of madder roots, let me wish you a good weekend! 

It's still the time of the year for winter foods, and that means... cabbage (or at least includes it). I like cabbage in about all of its forms, including the much-disputed Brussel's Sprouts, and I have a few favourite and go-to preparation types for the different kinds of cabbage.

In case you're looking for medieval recipes for cabbage, Christopher Monk, who's doing research and recipe recreation of medieval recipes, has you covered. Check out his Cabbage Pottage blog post, with a number of recipes for more or less enriched cabbage dishes - spiced up and thickened with egg yolk if you're cooking for a lord, for instance.