It's time for a summer break!

I will be off the blog until August 17. If you wish to see me in the meantime, you can come to the Archaeotechnica in Brandenburg, where I'll be taking a break from the break and work for a weekend.

Chocolate was, apparently, always a thing for the military. There was Pervitin laced into pralinés dubbed "Hausfrauenschokolade" (housewife chocolate), and it was also mixed into chocolate bars as "Panzerschokolade" (tank chocolate). And in case you are wondering now what that Pervitin brand name stands for - it's meth. (Yeah.)

A different kind of chocolate, also for military use, but not used as a drug delivery agent, was the D ration chocolate bar. That is, well, mostly harmless or so it seems, and if you are intrigued now, Tasting History has a podcast about it:

Well, turns out I should have caught up a bit earlier on this new-fangled e-invoice thing, because, as it turns out, handing an invoice into the federal state of Baden-Württemberg (and probably the others these days, too) requires formatting it as a nice, sleek, validated e-invoice.

So. There I am. Fortunately I am using a lovely book-keeping programme that is able to whip up such invoices. Not so fortunately is that it is Neuland, as Germans would say, to me and I have to figure out all the bits and pieces that have to go in there (and are still missing). 

It's on the way, though. And then at least I'll know more about this stuff, because it will probably not be the last thing I deliver to some public or state institution. At least I hope so! 

So. I have a new video cookie thingummy gadget that makes you agree to Youtube cookies, but it is not yet working everywhere... only on the main site. The blog with all its videos still needs a solution, and that either means some database roughhousing and then some code kicking, or finding a different plugin (meh), or maybe getting some solution from the blog software maker.

For now, I will be waiting to see what said blog software maker will say; I also have a vague idea about how the kicking and roughhousing might be done, though I do prefer to, um, not do it.

(All this because the Data Protection Smurf wants you to know that youtube, aka google, will get your data, and wants you to agree, and because I do not want to pester you with some "agree to these cookies" thing only - and only! - because you might watch youtube. Because, in case you have not noticed yet... this site only uses essential stuff, and thus you don't need to do this banner-clicky-thing.)

Which means... there's fewer and fewer extensions or solutions that need to be dealt with. A few more are outstanding related to the shop, but I might  be able to do without them, and then there's the small issue of the template, which is not really suited to the next version, and I would like to have something more robust and with less extra code anyways. 

Otherwise... yeah.

I also have done some foot measurements for a planned exhibition that involves, you have guessed it, shoes. All the other things will still have to be done, too, but starting from the bottom, that was the top thing on the agenda. (It was a little weird since that is, for a change, not a rock-solid hard plastic figurine, but one with a little more malleability. I am really not used to that!)

The website stuff is progressing slowly and, of course, eating up more time than it was planned to feed to it. But, well, at least there's progress. Then I finally did some of the promised reading, and it's almost done as well, so tomorrow should be sort-of-back to normal (as in doing shop stuff, writing an outstanding invoice, and going back to work on some other project prep).

Weather outside is still warm, though not insanely hot - that is, unfortunately, promised to come next week, or already end of this week, and nobody knows how quickly it will happen and how hot it will get. So our plans for doing a bit of holiday stuff might have to be amended to allow for the weather.  

The Little Cat seems to have recovered a bit. She's now getting a special nice (pleasantly-to-her-nose) stinky mussel powder that is supposed to help with bladder health. We will see!

There was a little website work done today, and then I realised that I had one of the extensions that were currently found out to have a vulnerability on the site. So after a little bit of hectic checking, verifying, and so (as you do), it should now be completely fixed (at least the part in question has been deactivated and will be completely removed once I have installed and tweaked the replacement). 

Moral of the story: Check your things. And, yes, be lucky sometimes so you catch stuff like that before something really awkward, or annoying, happens...

The heatwave, for now, is broken (at least back to a manageable level), which is very nice, because the Little Cat is feeling well enough to hang out on my desk while I work, and that means a warm, furry, purring cat on my arm and against my body. Which is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it will get a little warm after a while.

Otherwise, there's lots and lots of the boring stuff happening now that the summer break is slowly coming nearer, and the exciting hose project is finished: Taxes, book-keeping (the second quarter is over, so yay, filing stuff), and finally sending stuff long promised and reading things that had also long been promised to be read.  

I've also done a few more tweaks to the website in preparation of the update, and I am hoping to manage some clean-up and housekeeping while I'm at this stuff. The current template that everything runs on is a third-party one, and while I'm not unhappy with it in general, it's also getting a little outdated... so I'm more or less decided now to use the core template in the future.

Which, however, means a good amount of poking and prodding so it looks similar to the thing I have, or, option b, decide how I would like it to look even better. As option a is possibly more tweaking work but less thinking work, I am currently tending to that.

But, lovely readers of this blog and users of this site, now is your chance to let me know what you love, hate, or miss on these pages! It would really help me to have feedback (even if I can't promise that I can follow through on everything).