I got a new battery for my trusty laptop today, as the old one is, well, trying to turn itself into a soft hillside. Not good. 

Still working on the Alpirsbach riddle, where lots of the grain directions on the actual photo don't match very well with the grain directions on the pattern drawing, and where the two legs were consequently probably designed/drafted individually and slightly differently in approach. Gnah.

One single white tulip is blooming.

There is a part of the Swedish Historical Museum website that has all the documentation drawings of the Birka excavations, and you can search the list and look at the individual graves all you want. Why do I know this? Because I had to find out today, when working on a translation from German to English, whether the thing with textiles attached in grave 901 was scissors or shears. (German can do a distinction if you write Bügelschere instead of Schere, but the latter can mean both, so unless there's an explicit Bügelschere, you never know. It was shears in the grave, by the way.) This translation issue reminded me of a friend's explanation why so many of the automatic translation programmes have issues with genders: Because it's much easier to have just one dataset for each language that goes to English and back, and to translate from, say, Finnish to Suaheli, you'd go Finnish - English - Suaheli. Which gets you odd effects if you are translating from a language with a certain distinction between things to English where this is lacking and back to another language that would in theory mirror the original distinction, but now it won't because the information got lost in the intermediate step. 

Since I have nothing really relevant to blog about today, here's an image of decorative cabbages:

...and that's it. Nothing more to see here today.  

So. There's still pondering taking place regarding the Alpirsbach trousers  legwear... because, well, my way of thinking.

The task is to make a reproduction of the trousers for an exhibition, which technically means that I could take the pattern published after the examination of the trousers garment, read the description, enlarge the pattern and then cut exactly that. But that, to me, would be sort of... cheating. I would much prefer to understand how the pattern was constructed originally, then re-do that construction process, and make the trousers with that re-done pattern.

Which, in turn, means that I have to understand the pattern. Not just which body measurement is found where in the thing, or where which part goes to sit on the body, or which bits to measure, or how much seam allowances to add to a given part, but also how to place the thing onto the fabric.

You see, in the original there's two main parts, and they look quite similar but they have different bits tacked on due to the fabric width not being enough to cut everything in one piece. My current hypothesis is that one leg was constructed first, cut out, flipped over, placed on the fabric and traced to make the second leg. For this, the (to me) logical choice would be to cut the right leg first, as this has only a small bit on the butt added in, and all the relevant long measurements are fully on the fabric.

It would look like this, laid out:

Some of the bits are very clear (there's a crotch middle spot, and the butt strip, and the foot part, and the thigh circumference), but the exact shape of the crotch cutout is a lot smaller and more pointed than a lot of the re-creation patterns of joined hose that I have found in other places.  So... is this correct? Will this work? How to reliably construct it?

Questions over questions. It does remain interesting, I can say!

...that my computer was not broken.

I had trouble getting it to turn back on from sleep mode after lunch, and re-starting didn't help either, so I ended up calling one of the computer shops in town - actually I called two. The first one told me "you'll have to come in and bring it so we can have a look" and then the second one called back (he didn't answer on my first attempt) and told me that in 50% of such cases, it's a hang-up in the BIOS and I could try to fix it myself by taking out the battery, doing a few longer power button presses, and then powering it back up.

To my very, very great relief, it did work! Because buying a new computer and getting everything settled with the new machine was really quite low on my list of things I'd currently love to do. It did bring the bonus insight that the battery is old and starting to turn into a more rounded shape, so a new battery is now on its way. (Via said computer guy - so he's at least getting a little bit of profit from helping out.)

So now I can do the printing that was not possible after lunch, and get stuff ready to go into the post tomorrow (instead of today). Whew.

The Most Patient Husband of Them All has surprised me with an explanation for the phrase "pop goes the weasel" which, in turn, had surprised him - and it's an unexpected textile reference! (Well, at least possibly.)

If we go and trust Wikipedia, one of the many explanations is that it references the spinner's weasel, also called a clock reel. There are, of course, some insecurities and other interpretations possible, but, well, it could quite well be that it did come from the clock reel, which makes a noise every X rotations (intended to let you know when a skein was complete, or a part-skein, depending).

Also, I really like clock reels. One day, I'd love to work with one of them, just to try it out.

I have received a mail today that my phone will not be receiving further updates. Meh. Big meh.

To be fair, I've had it for more than six years now. Fairphone, the manufacturer, originally promised support for five years after launch, and that was two years ago, so there was an extra two years bonus afterwards. I'm still rather miffed, as the phone is still fine and I am very much not looking forward to getting a new one ever. (The camera is iffy, but I've gotten used to that, and also I really dislike phone changes.)

To be fair even further, I've done some reading on it and apparently it's not just the laziness of the fairphone folks but also the fact that the chip manufacturers stop their support at some time, and voilà, there you go, everything gets harder. 

For now, though, things will still work for a while. After that I will have to see whether I need to switch to LineageOS, and if yes if my bank apps will still work on that. In any case, it's very much a case of meh, and I'm a little disappointed and a little sad. 

I am, as you might know by now, a staunch fan of the European Union and all its opportunities. I am only a medium big fan of the extra bureaucracy that can come with it... especially if there's rules that are long, convoluted, and not very easy to understand. 

Obviously, especially especially if they actually impact my own life and business. One of them is (or, phew, not really) the new regulations for better sustainability in packaging.

Packages and yes, that includes the packages sent out from the many, many online shops, make up a lot of the waste that we have today. They are, however, a necessary evil to some extent - and while I am all for reducing waste and have tried at the start of the online shop to use recycled packages, once you are above a certain volume, it's just not feasible anymore. One, you have to get the necessary amount of packages (and I don't order that much stuff!); two, it has to fit, at least approximately, the stuff you are sending out (no use if I have a huge box and pack one spindle whorl into it); and three, that means you have to search for a box that fits in your stack (which takes time, and a good bit of space for the stack if you don't want to collapse all the boxes first to tape them up again when they are needed). The switch to packages of set sizes and thus known dimensions, where I know that they will fit product X or Y, has made packing goods so, so much easier and quicker for me, so it's worth paying some money for the packaging just for that.

I'm also quite fine with the general idea of those causing the packaging waste to help with their recycling or disposal, though I will be grumbling about the steps in the costs for this, as I always pay more for the overhead than my small amounts of actual paper and tiny amounts of other materials. But, eh, well, I guess that's just what has to be done.

Now the EU guys have banded together and have decided it's time to do things more internationally if you send stuff to other places... or so. I've gone through the law, the short version of which you can find here (with a link to the long one) and if I understand it correctly, I'm too small for the whole stuff, but there's a German law which still lets me know they'd like my money for the waste management thankyouverymuch.

It's complicated. I'm pondering what to do now, but at least my first big fear - that I'd need to register everywhere, and pay fees everywhere because I'm offering to ship there - seems to have been unneccessary. Because, well, that would have meant the end of my international shipping...

I'll keep you updated once I have cleared stuff up some more!