As you might know, I have this slight... thing... about backups. Due to the fact that during my working life, quite a few hard disk drives have gone under, so having a backup of stuff is really, really important for my peace of mind. 

Which means, too, that periodically old backups need to be removed. That's something I always have a hard time with - but this time, it wasn't made hard by my internal resistance to deleting old files, no, it was made extra hard by Windows itself.

Before I swapped out one of the drives, I did a full copy to an external HDD, which means that a full, and theoretically run-able Windows installation resides on that disk. Which is not needed anymore, so I told my computer to delete it.

It didn't.

Turns out that the Windows files are not owned by me (even though logged in as the administrator), but by some straw figure thingie called "Trusted Installer". Who does not permit me to delete the stuff.

There's a workaround (of course there is), which makes it necessary to go into the security settings of the folder and swap the owner (to myself, of course). Which I tried to do, but suddenly, the disk was full... and it was not possible to change the settings anymore. Because, well, no space.

I am still confused as to how it could get fuller than before (there wasn't too much space left, but not next to nothing!) but I did manage to find a few things that I was allowed to delete, and now hopefully the owner swap will run its course, and I'll be able to make space again.

Oh Windows. I could have done without these shenanigans...

There's actually new stuff in the shop - I've finally managed to take pictures and get the new kids in. It's fibres for spinning this time - first of all, two nice, naturally coloured types of wool, from the Bergschaf breed. The lighter variation is a nice, warm brown:

The second colour is a very, very dark brown - so dark that it can quite legitimately called black. I like both variations, but the black is my current favourite. 

And the third new fibre in the shop? It's.... cotton!  While that wasn't the most common fibre in the Middle Ages in Germany and the surrounding area, it was in use - for padding at first, but later also as the weft thread in fustian, for instance.

Because of a series of chance, I learned how to spin on a hand-spindle using cotton... which may have played a role in my persisting penchant for spinning thin yarns with high twist on heavy spindles... because cotton needs quite a bit of twist to make a stable thread, and I had limited amounts of fibre, and if you're a spinner, you can probably guess what happened.

Because after finding out about the pesticide use and water use of conventionally grown cotton, I've switched over to organic cotton or none at all, so this is (of course) also organic cotton. 

You can get all three from my shop, finding them among the spinning fibres, of course. 

It's been a good while now since I've run out of the brass pins in the shop, but somehow there was this and that and things didn't line up, and I never got around to sitting down and making new ones. 

Today, though, I really felt like doing something practical again for a bit, after all the website and writing things, and I got out the metal-working supplies and started a bit of pin-making.

It begins with preparing the heads, which are made from wrapped wire, then cut into bits: 

Then shanks are cut and hammered into the little head coils, and then I do some more hammering to make sure the heads are decently stuck on the shanks, and then the annoying bit starts: sharpening the tips.

The photo shows half-finished tips on some pins. I'm still not completely happy with the workflow in that part of the process, but at least I'm getting pins already. Some more grinding, and some more testing of possible methods to come... and soon, pins to come back to the shop. Yay!

Today was, again, mostly eaten by website shenanigans - a bit of testing here, a little tweaking there, a lot of finding out what still needs to be checked, tweaked, or resolved. Among that, primarily, is the fact that there are a lot of broken or malfunctioning links due to changes in the URL structure, and it turns out not all of that is easy to fix with a simple redirect. Not because there wouldn't be the possibility of the redirect, but because apparently there's some issue with the multilanguage setup of the site...

The problem mostly impacts the blog, so it's not the end of the world, but it is rather irksome. I'm also not yet happy with how the shop looks, with all the items dancing up and down, and the buttons happily appearing further up or further down, but changing this is not something I can do in just a few minutes.

I'm pretty sure that there is a way to get it all lined up properly, but that most probably requires some more knowledge in css and doing stuff that contains the word "flex", and the main problem with that is that it needs extensive testing, because you tweak things to look good in one browser and with a certain width of the window, and then you switch to something else and suddenly it looks like shit combed over. 

So for now, I'm going to settle with "hey, at least it's functional" and see if I can resolve the issue without too much of a headache, and too much time down the drain. After all, there's workshops coming up that I have to prep for, and there is a rather urgent need to make more spindle whorls, and then there's a presentation being planned for the second half of February that I'm very, very hyped about. More to follow about that as soon as I can tell you!

It's always good to have open access publications available - and if you are looking for OA Journals, you might find this Directory of Open Access Journals helpful. 

And if you're reading German and looking for something about clothing regulations in the Early Modern Ages, there's a fairly new book out about those from the archives of Wismar:

That week has flown by, somehow. Well, most of the last two days was gobbled up by the website migration, and there's still a chunk of issues to fix - though I managed to get one or the other already. Like this totally not helpful huge floating image of the basket when you're shopping. Or trying to shop on your mobile phone.

The intention behind this was to have a nice, accessible way to get to the shopping cart or basket or however you want to call it from anywhere inside the shop. So I made this medium-pretty basket image at one point (and there was the idea of replacing it, at some time, with a more medieval-style basket image, but, well, things happened) and inserted it to float at the top of the screen.

Which it does. Unfortunately, with the changed layout of the responsive design, on small screens it blows itself up to maximum size and is not helpful for shopping in peace and quiet anymore... due to overlaying most of the shop. As a customer, that would really annoy me. (Have I mentioned that running my own webshop has made me much more mellow in regard to things not working properly in other webshops? At least partly. Some things annoy me even more now.)

Fortunately, that was rather easy to solve - I just forbid it to display below a certain screen width. Whew.

Other things are not quite as easy; a lot of stuff has changed with the transition to the new major version, and now I have to find old files with my changes again, find out where the new files that have the same info in them are living now, and adapt the new files. There are also issues with changed (and thus broken) links, and the necessity to set up redirects for those. So the list of tasks to do is currently still growing - and I am looking forward to the point where it will shrink again!

So. I hope now that everything was tested sufficiently yesterday and today, and that things will work out without too many issues. Which, potentially, include unwanted design changes in the main site, in the shop, and other glitches there. If you notice anything, please do let me know! 

There will be some layout and design tweaking in the shop in the next days, as the layout I had and preferred was shot by the last larger update of the shop software. Ah, the endless joys of websites and their shenanigans. (To be honest, though, I quite like most of the website work, for a change. I wouldn't want to do it every day, but it is rather nice to be able to tweak things, or take care of some issue myself.)