I stumbled across this video today - and thought you might enjoy it, too:

(My day was also spent with video stuff... I have filmed the last bits, and now am cutting. There is to be SO MUCH cutting... as usual, I would like to say so much more than time allows!)

Random pictures! No, not here - though speaking of it, you could actually have one:



The random pics I am talking about are actually on my phone... and are helping me to learn Finnish. I've posted a while ago about some of the things I learned about language learning over the years. One of the things that is a rather new tool for me, and that I enjoy a lot, is getting little images and charts and explanation pics via feeds on Instagram. There's a hashtag that I follow where a lot of these turn up, and if there's an especially helpful one, or funny one, I take a screenshot and save the image.

However, having the stuff is good, but not completely helpful yet - these things will only get more language into my brain if I can actually see them. So I've looked for a smartphone widget that picks random images from a folder and displays them.

There's a few of them in the GPlay app store, but most free ones that I tried had some trouble, or cut off the image if it did not by chance fit the frame, or were otherwise annoying. But a few days ago, by pure chance when looking again, I found one written by a German developer called Zufallsbild. This little thing does exactly what it should - you can select a folder or several folders and have it swap the image after a given time, or swap to the next one yourself. It scales the image to fit into the frame, too. Which means that I'm now very happy, and get to see all the nice and funny things on my phone home screen, one after the other.

So if you're looking for an android app for displaying images on your phone, because just having all those funny or nice or beautiful things is not enough... maybe it's the thing for you, too!

It feels weird to be working on Fridays again - though I am certainly not running out of things to do! Especially not with the current video project going on... which I'll now return to, for the last few sections. Though with the weather currently outside, it is hard to be inside and working, we have cool but very bright and sunny weather here.

Which is good - as I still have a very last fleece in the wool washing basin outside, and the warmer it is, the quicker the washing goes. That means it's not very quick currently, nor is the drying. Every little bit of sunshine helps here, as well as taking the drying wool inside soon enough in the late afternoon, before the evening dew is falling. I forgot to do that yesterday, so the result is a fleece that is at least as wet as when I put it out... maybe even a tad wetter.

I'm not completely sad about that bit of forgetfulness, though, as this morning it looked utterly beautiful:

While we're all waiting to see how things pan out - both the development of the elections in the US of A, and the development of the pandemical numbers now that restrictions are in place about everywhere in Europe - here are a few things to keep you amused, occupied, or distracted:

I've recently discovered that Eventbrite offers a lot of events (oh thank you Captain Obvious), including quite a lot of free ones where you can join and enjoy a show, or listen to an academic talk, or take part in a course to learn something. Some universities run their course bookings via Eventbrite, too. You can check out the portal here; a search for "archaeology", for instance, gave me 14 pages of hits with events from a flintknapping demonstration to info about aerial archaology.

Alex Makin has a new installment on her blog "Early Medieval (Mostly) Textiles - Christina Petty talks weaving 2/1 twill on a warp-weighted loom here.

If all that is not enough, there's more: The Being Human Festival is also offering a number of events online, with all kinds of different things from quizzes to films, from many different disciplines within the humanities.

Enjoy!

Well, we're certainly living in interesting times, aren't we?

If you had asked me this time last year about historic events in my lifetime, I'd have said "the fall of the German Wall and 9/11", and I'd have been fairly sure that that would be it for the rest of my life. They were, after all, both events with quite a lot of impact on how things went on afterwards. I wouldn't have dreamt of something like a pandemic coming up to turn all our lives upside down, in a way.

And now we're all waiting to see who will win the election in the US. Which will also have an impact, probably a huge one, on our collective future. No matter the outcome, I do suspect that there will be not-so-nice side effects, either because someone completely unsuitable to the job will stay at the helm of a whole freaking sub-continent with more problems than you can shake a stick at for another four years, or because said person will try to do exactly that even though the vote does not set him there.

I'm sort of following how the counting goes, and it is fascinating how far from the actual outcome some of the predictions were. It's also frightening in a way. I cannot understand how anyone could vote Trump again, after all the things that went pear-shaped during the last four years, but very obviously a lot of people are firmly convinced that he'd make the better president, or is the better choice, or whatever.

Which, again, means interesting times. I think I could have done with a few less world-changing events in my lifetime so far, actually!

 

Well, here I am. Still doing video stuff... which means that one of the work desk chairs (or, more precisely, a stool) is sitting in the living-room-turned-video-studio. Which means that my old desk chair is back at my desk, and the Most Patient Husband is using his regular chair... and Madam the Cat thus lacks a chair.

Which has been commented upon loudly and verbosely. Cat-verbosely. At least her cat bed is free of stuff (sometimes she doesn't use it for a good while, and I start piling things up on top of it, and then I take them off again and put them away when she expresses interest in sleeping there) so she's using it now. When she's not hanging out over my arm on my desk, that is, during the time that I take care of computer work. Such as blogging.

So currently, I have a very warm right arm; the rest of me is not so warm because I sort of forgot to put on a sweater after the last filming stint, which I started in a t-shirt when it was a good bit warmer a few days ago, and now I'm stuck with that shirt. (Yes, I could change it, but I sort of prefer to look the same, as much as possible, throughout.) And stuck with the level of warmth it provides... it's not too bad, though.

Next step is editing the bits already taken care of, and seeing where that puts me time-wise, and then doing some more video-ing. At least now I have a routine that promises to make some cutting aspects easier - such as holding the clapper into each camera as it starts recording, which should mean I have a written title and take reference for each clip and can line them up more easily. I also have figured out how to align camera 1 (used for the "long shot" and camera 2 (used for the showing-small-things shot) and mount them on their tripods so that hopefully one run through will show all the bits that I need to show. Bonus feature: It's just a lot of fun to use a clapper!

I'll know more soon... after cutting.

It's November now, and Germany is in what the politicians call "Lockdown Light" - which basically means that events are cancelled, leisure centres are closed, and people are requested to cut down on their social contacts as much as possible. Meetings in private or public are limited to a maximum of five people from two households, but schools stay open and it's still possible to go to work (unless you work at a leisure activity centre like a gym, or at a museum, which is closed.)

For us personally, there won't be much of a change from the last weeks. We've already had severely limited in-person contacts and are both working from home. We'll miss bouldering at our gym, but had reduced our visits the last four weeks already because it was rather too full for our peace of mind in some of the time slots that we could make. For now, I have a video project that will keep me well occupied the next week or so, especially since the start was a bit, um, not going as smoothly as I would have hoped. But I think I have stuff better set up and adjusted now - and hope the whole thing will turn out well!