There's a Day for everything these days, it seems - on Friday, it was World Nutella Day (at least according to the twitter hashtags popping up in my feed), and today is Computer Cleaning Day (or so a more or less spammy newsletter from gmx is telling me).

Well, cleaning the computer is never a bad idea, especially if (like me) you are inclined to keep an extra copy of something just in case... or copy a file temporarily and then forget to delete the copy. Also Windows sometimes goes off to place a huge file or three on its disk space, just because it can.

So, just in case you find yourself in need of computer cleaning, here's some of the tools I use. They are all free as well (yay!) so there's nothing to lose:

For general cleaning up and removing of temporary files - CCleaner (the same company also offers a defragmenting tool that I also use). This can also clean up the registry (always do a backup first, just in case) and de-install programmes you don't want anymore, plus clean your autostart folder (helping make the computer start faster).

For finding and removing duplicate files - AntiTwin. This one also lets you filter for size or compare files only from two different directories, which can come in pretty handy.

For checking if there are any abnormally huge files hanging out on my computer (recently, it was a 1.4 GB text file, courtesy of Windows, called CBS.log), I'm using SequoiaView. This used to be downloadable from the TU Eindhoven, but it seems it's no longer available. My search engine tells me that TreePie would be an alternative, though. This programme shows you the size of the individual directories and files on your drive, so you can quickly see what is taking up a lot of space and what isn't.

A few days ago I already did a post on how to clean out old updates from Win7 and Win8, so if you find that your system has been grabbing a lot of space for itself, you might want to give that a try as well.

And, of course, cleaning the computer might also mean cleaning the fan - if your machine is rather hot or you can hear the fan labour as it's working hard, opening it up and getting rid of all that chaff and dust might be a good idea. There's usually instructions available somewhere on the net on how to clean the fan - and most machines aren't as hard to do as the one in this video:

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:

A friend recently told me she now has Windows 10 - which she didn't want. It did not care for her wants or wishes, however; it just went ahead and installed itself.

If you're running Windows and would like to avoid the same thing happening, you can use the GWX stopper tool - explanations and download link can be found here.

If you're guessing now that I am using this thing, you're completely right - I would like to decide myself when to change operating system, thankyouverymuch!

I spent the morning going more into the up-and-coming relaunch, and I did manage to do a test migration into WordPress, so there will be some changes to this blog's looks before the year will end.

The new shop design is also coming along nicely. It will be much lighter, and much cleaner, and there will be larger pictures. Overall, I really like it a lot! There's still a few issues to be solved and snags to be taken care of, and changing the old pallia.net site over into Joomla will mean a bit of re-writing of text and menu restructures (read: a good bit of work, including thinking and figuring out the best way for stuff), but I have hopes it will all work out eventually.

Apart from that, I managed to break my xampp programme (the thing required to test-drive a web page on your own computer, under the charming name of "localhost") and to actually fix it again (by deleting a single line of code that had crept in through an aborted installation of WordPress). Whew!

Now, however, I will have to put this project aside for a bit, as the Textile Forum is coming up (I can't believe it is already almost November) and there's still a few things to prepare for it. Packing linen cloth for our next test run regarding linen dyeing, for instance!

Sabine and I have been thinking about the chemistry involved with dyeing linen for a few years now, and we did a first trial run on exploring linen dyeing at last year's forum. One of the possible influences on how well the linen takes the mordant (which is usually not very well at all) is the pH of the mordanting and dyeing liquid, so we set out to test this.

Last year's test results. As you can clearly see, there was not much dye taken up by the linen fabric, regardless of the pH adjustment of the mordanting and dyeing baths.

We'll try different concentrations of alum this time. We've also planned to test a pre-treatment with sulphur fumes, though the required sulphur strips have not arrived yet - I'll keep my fingers crossed that they will come today.

The reason for sulphur pre-treatment? It seems that the metal components of the mordant bind to wool through a connection to the sulphur bonds the wool has. So if it's possible to sulphurise the linen, it might be possible to have a much better mordant uptake, and thus dye uptake. Next week we'll know more!

Today was a good bit more successful than yesterday. It looks like I finally found the issue with the Joomla! migration to 3.x (there's an extra folder in the libraries that messes up everything, and once that is deleted, all runs smoothly); a quick facebook query resulted in multiple comments that you don't mind having to activate JavaScript to see anything too much; and the template I found does look like it could be a nice solution for my site, both for the main site and the webshop.

And, hopefully, the blog. I'm looking into pulling all things together so blogposts will also be hosted on my own server, taking it out of Google's hands (as blogger is part of Google). My current plan is to leave everything here on the blog, but additionally migrate all the content to my own site, and then blog on there (with a link to the new place here, obviously). My hope is that the migration will solve the wonky search issues that Blogger has (if you have ever tried to find a post on this blog using the search box, you'll know what I mean - search is not really reliable). Plus it would have the benefit of my having to spend time on one site only, and to give my three places a similar design, finally.

I will only do it if I can do a clean migration, though, and I'm currently looking into options for that. The easiest and most straight-forward one that I found will not migrate comments or tags, though, so it's completely out (that was CMS2CMS, in case you want to know).

And now for something more textile-related - I have finally put the gold embroidery kit into the shop!

The core of the kit - motif drawn on cloth and mounted in frame, plant-dyed silk, gold thread and embroidery needles so you can get started right away!

 It is available here. The kit contains everything to get started right away, down to the embroidery needles (you'll need your own pair of scissors or shears, but that's it), and ample instructions - a sheet with specific instructions for the motif plus my book about gold embroidery.

I made a few photos of nice, colourful yarns as well, but I haven't yet figured out how to put the scarf kit into the shop. See, there was this co-production with Margit from Alte Künste, where we developed a lengthwise-striped scarf together, to be sold in a kit. Margit picked yarns, and I took care of the pattern - easy enough to remember it, interesting enough to keep you from dozing off while knitting.



The first batch of scarf kits is sitting here, ready to go get knitted, and we have twelve different colours for the skeins:


For each kit, you get to pick three skeins in colours of your choice (that's 150 g of wool alltogether). I'm trying to figure out how to make this selection process as smoothly working as possible, but the system is resisting a bit, so it might come down to you having to list your yarn choices in the comment when ordering. I'll give it another try tonight!

I was planning to post about something else today (new shoes! more Hugo thoughts! progress in the embroidery!), but my morning reading of semi-random internet stuff has left me frantically de-installing some Windows updates.

If you're using Windows and value your privacy, this concerns you. As you might have noticed, Win10 is being rolled out and offered for free for a while (where "while" might mean at least several months). I have completely ignored that up to now, as I'm happy with my Win7 and not planning to move from it unless absolutely necessary... so I've also missed the privacy concerns with Win10. Apparently, once you install the new OS, you allow Microsoft to look at or download (upload-to-cloud) almost all your data, and even pass it on. All. Your. Data. (More about Win10 privacy. And even more.) 

The agreements to this very broad, very inclusive data-sharing is included in the End User Licence Agreement. The EULA. You know, that long, long text of semi-legalese gibberish that almost nobody anywhere reads... so once you install Win10, you agree that MS may have All Your Data.

But. But! Similar tools to pull your data have also been rolled out, quietly, as updates to Win7 and Win8. If you have automatic updates enabled, or have manually installed them, your computer is allowed to share your data on Microsoft's terms.

There was no warning or easily accessible information about what the updates would do... so I did install them. I do value my privacy, and data security, so I would never have agreed to this had I been aware, and frankly, I'm really pissed at MS about this.

Really, Microsoft? Really? I am looking sternly at you. That is not good behaviour. Even a kitty can tell.

Fortunately, lovely tech-savvy people on the Internet have posted instructions on how to uninstall the updates that are passing on your data from Win7 and Win8. Which is what I am doing right now. Care to join me?

Oh, and please pass this information around to your friends, colleagues, enemies, whomever - data security and a right to privacy is for everyone. And Microsoft should not get away with this!

There's been a leak about a possible exploit for the Adobe Flash Player, so if you are having that thing installed on your machine (chances are high you have), you should update it as of right now.


You can do that by installing it from the Adobe website (don't forget to uncheck the boxes that say you totally want their crapware), or use this link to download the full installer you need and get it without the crapware stuff.

I do not want your antivirus thingie, Adobe. Go away.

Go download and install. Do it now. Seriously. Adobe classifies this as a real risk, and the how-to instructions on using the loophole in their code has been leaked to hacker sites. According to Adobe,

Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.   Adobe is aware of reports that an exploit targeting this vulnerability has been published publicly. Adobe expects to make updates available on July 8, 2015.

Theoretically, you could deinstall the thing completely and be utterly safe... but so much on the 'net these days uses flash that it could really prove a nuisance. If you are running Firefox, however, you could consider using noscript to block unnecessary stuff including flashy stuff when you don't want to see or use it.

And that's your internet security note for today. : )  Surf safely.