Things That Happened During Summer (part 1)

So... the things that happened during the summer break? A lot of them, and, in some cases, not enough. But... let me start from the beginning.

I managed to get a COVID-19 vaccination just in time to have gotten the second shot before the Textile Forum, but not early enough for it to count as fully vaccinated. (It did give me a much better feeling for venturing into Belgium, though.)

There was also major buying of things at that point, to my half-delight and half-dismay. Our old printer, a laser printer that we bought sometime more than a dozen years ago, had refused to calibrate properly for a good while now. So picture quality had been not so great for a time, but now it was getting worse, and printout quality slid just over the edge of being acceptable to me. I use the printer for my business printouts, for instance for the instruction sheets, so having a decent picture quality is indisputable. I would have preferred to keep the machine, but all trials of getting it re-calibrated, including downloading a number of potentially helpful software thingies (all not helping at all), failed. So the search for a new one began - and we now have an ink printer, which can be fully calibrated and will hopefully last for at least as long as the old one did. The new printer is an "eco" model using large ink tanks that can be refilled with bottles, which also means that maintenance will have a smaller impact, materials-wise, than replacing the toner cartridges of the old one, or replacing ink tanks with integrated printer heads (which is what the ink cartridge system does).

The next replacement was my trusty old computer, which still ran on Windows 7. Hey, I'm an archaeologist. I dig ancient things. In this case, however, it became more and more troublesome in different places, and the machine itself became slower and slower. Whenever I was required to use Teams, for instance, Win7 could just not cope with that anymore, and the whole thing became as slow as a frozen slug. I'm pretty sure the old computer was as old as the printer, by the way - but I can actually not remember how old it was.

The old machine had received various upgrades over the years, such as new HDDs (larger, and faster, of course) and more RAM, and a new fan, but, well... it just was not up to the modern and new requirements anymore. Which meant... looking for a replacement. The Most Patient Husband of Them All pointed me towards a type of machine that has a fancy small SSD drive as main hard disk, which means very quick access, and the possibility to mount a second, normal HDD so I could just re-pot my old drive into the new machine. That sounded very good! I found one as a refurbished used machine and ordered it. It arrived, and the usual headache for transferring everything from an old computer to a new one ensued. It was medium-bad, nothing really horrible happened, but it did take some time and there were a few glitches - and once everything was transferred, I opened the thing to put in the old HDD, to find, to my great dismay, that there was no frame to hold the drive...