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Visited the horticultural show in Heilbronn 74072 / Germany. It’s amazing how the city could look with more green here and there… and way less cars.

An electric mobil parcel station beside a charging station.

There were a few things of particular interest for me. The first thing is that is is obviously possible to have bees within a city and _many_ people walking right next to the beehive without angering the bees. Didn’t know this is possible.

Bee hives right next to people visiting the show. Some could even be opened to check on the bees.

Next was this FarmBot. It’s a opensource CNC farming machine that basically anyone with some skill can rebuild. It uses some 3d printed assets but the rest is kinda off the shelf stuff. Sadly I got no good picture of it since this late in the year it was not in use any more but the website has all the fancy presentations:

https://farm.bot/

Unexcepted was a group of people on rafts demonstrating the historic trade of Timber Rafting. I’m not sure but I think this particular group is also from Schiltach that I visited several times before. Nice icing 🙂

Historic Timer Rafting

I’m surprised that I found interesting stuff at all. Not much into gardening so it was a pleasant surprise to find so many points of interest on the show. We were even short of time in the end without seeing all of it. Sadly it’s the end of the season so there won’t be further chances for this. Was a great day and I finally did see the finished Experimenta from the outside. Last time I visited it was still under construction.

https://www.buga2019.de/de/index.php

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Visited the Museum Of Everyday Life in Castle Waldenbuch 71111 / Germany. This town is known for it’s chocolate factory of Ritter Sport but it does indeed have a very nice medieaval town core – timber-framed buildings included.

The museum itself is simply great. The place is huge and there is so much to see. It was also a great place for the kids who in opposition to usual museum trips did not just run from room to room. The exhibits really catched their attention and we spent a surprisingly long time inside.

My personal highlight was the opportunity to see the Family Swevia and Reisecen live showcasing their deeds. Two great living history groups that really do put a lot of effort and research in their presentations.

  • Turned-over shoe
  • Kemp for sewing leather
  • Beeswax candle making
  • Cooking Box
  • Riveted chainmail
  • Turned-over shoe

https://reisecen.de/

https://www.familia-swevia.de/

https://www.museum-der-alltagskultur.de/

https://www.waldenbuch.de/zielgruppen+englisch/home.html

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I was late for this party anyway but getting off isn’t that easy.

Cleverdevil has some good pointers on freeing yourself from Facebook but the suggested tool fb-export requires an AccessToken for the Graph API Explorer. For this one has to set up a developer account with Facebook.

That’s not freeing [for me]. That’s entangling even more because this step requires a phonenumber or credit card with Facebook. A step I managed to advert so far.

So yeah, I guess my quest goes on. This may work for others tho.

https://github.com/danburzo/fb-export

https://cleverdevil.io/2018/freeing-myself-from-facebook

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Visited the 8th Dobler Spectaculum at Dobel 75335 / Germany where we got to hang out with friends from Die Schlegler e.V. – means we were sitting around in their camp, ate their food and relaxed while everyone else was working.

  • Borrowed a gambeson
  • Clear rust with oil and sand.
  • Group unboxing

Just kidding – we helped as well, of course, but ran for the hills when a storm approached 😉 It was nice to hang out on a medieval market again. Something I haven’t done a lot in a very long time.

https://www.dobel.de/gaeste/veranstaltungen/8-dobler-spectaculum-id_1158/

http://www.schlegler.de/

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We revisited Schiltach 77761 / Germany today and this time we were lucky. The Schüttesäge museum was open just as advertised. It’s free to visit and has a donation box.

Beside the framesaw and it’s water mills it also shows the history of Timber Rafting and Tanning in the area. A really small but nice museum.

After some refreshments – it was a very warm day this time – we moved over to the city museum that had a lot of stuff that could be touched or experimented with. A lot of fun for the kids. It also hosts a tiny library with books about the town – including several well known books about half timber by e.g. Manfred Gerner. This one is also free and has a donation box.

One of the most fascinating items on display is the model of the former “Zum Adler” inn (1604), that can be seen from the window of the museum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schüttesäge_Museum

https://www.schiltach.de/en/Home

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Today I run into domain abuse while working on a WordPress project due to a typo in the TLD. A foreign server happily served me the requested files but with spiced content. This looked unsuspicious at first glance.

Now this is something that doesn’t happen every day [to me]. I haven’t touched PHP and WordPress in years so I don’t have a workflow established for this any more. Today I got the job to upgrade some legacy system. So I checked out the project from git, configured some dnsmasq magic and launched a local PHP development server and browser.

I was astonished when the project came up in the zero profile development chrome and the first link I clicked opened a new tab presenting me with some scam ringing all alarm bells. I’m on localhost! And Linux! What happened? Do we have an infected project in our git repository? So I started digging.

This should all point to my local dev domain at 127.0.0.1 that has no public DNS records at all.

Wait, this doesn’t look right. Looks like I made a typo replacing the WordPress WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL in our local wp-config and got a doubled dot de. That’s not going to localhost but it’s still loading JavaScript files. No file came back with 404 – Not Found error so at first glance nothing suspicous happened beside the CSS looking weird. Most files were empty but with some exception – as you can see.

That’s not my expected source.

So I run that IP against the IP Abuse DB and it checked out with various reports including a “took over my blog” report. Yeah, I guess that happens when you’re going to login to your blog. This IP ships any file you request back to you but with it’s own flavoured JavaScript. That’s what happens when you do a typo and someone else is just waiting for this. And it happened to my dev setup since I made a search and replace without enough caffeine in my blood to spot the typo and without bothering to set up SSL and CORS for developing.

Requesting without “subdomain” results in an critical error.

So yeah.. you can throw any domain at this. It will happily serve malware, or spam or whatever it’s up to today. It’s just waiting for a typing error.

The 127.0.0.1 one is fetched by my local dnsmasq

There’s a lesson here. Watch careful what domain you really use. Don’t be lazy and make use of SSL/CORS even in development. I can’t help me from having some respect for this idea and there are probably others doing the same.

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I’m dabbling in IndieWeb for some time now but didn’t fully embrace it [yet]. There was no real need since I’m running my own blog for years so I’m already half-way there. It is a thing tho especially for people that are simply tired of not owning their content any more.

I noticed that a lot of publications I wrote myself over the last years are simply forgotten and burried in some silo. Ever wrote an article on say FB? That’s basically lost after just a week. Nobody will ever find or read [or even search for] it again.

It’s similar with publication platforms. They arise and pass by in such a short time nowadays that it’s hard to even keep even track of.

So I decided to revive my own blog. That was when I stumbled about IndieWeb that scratches exactly this itch. Looks like I’m not the only one. Jlelse, for example, seems to go all in (even in a remarkable short time).

https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/indieweb/

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Visited the museum of local history in Dornstetten 72280 / Germany, that is part of the “German Timber-Frame Road”. Didn’t look like much from the outside but I was very wrong on this. It’s located in the old tithe and fruit barn of this former administrative city.

The place itself was first mentioned in 767 AD in the Lorsch Codex and became a city in the 12th century and even gained the right to hold markets later on.

The museum stretches over three floors of the two restored barn buildings and has a lot of stuff from various periods on display. So much can be seen that it’s opening times of just 2.5h are simply not enough to take a closer look at everything.

The medieaval part is – as usually – of more interest for me but I really enjoyed the other displays as well. Especially since we were basically just 3 visitors so we got an extended tour with lots of background information for free. Well, I donated some money later, of course 🙂

  • The tithe and fruit barn by Eleonore Kötter
  • Historic Town Seals of Dornstetten from 1276 to 1508
  • Dornstetten 1836
  • The Holy Grale of Cities in the 13th century: Stadtluft, Hirsebrei und Bettelmönch (ISBN 978-3806210590)

I was especially happy to find my holy grale of cities in the 13th century on display: Stadtluft, Hirsebrei und Bettelmönch (ISBN 978-3806210590).

https://www.dornstetten.de/gaeste/museen/heimatmuseum-dornstetten-id_264/

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Visited Hechingen-Stein 72379 / Germany [again] to take another look at the reconstruction of a Roman Villa Rustica. It’s a large Roman countryside estate from the 1st to 3rd century AD that was discovered in 1972. The excavation site was turned into a museum with reconstructions on the original foundations.

It’s a very huge areal including smithies, a mill and even a dedicated temple area that can probably finally be visited starting next year. Plenty of the local findings can be seen in the museum. Visitors can move freely on the areal and discover plenty of interesting stuff.

The place is also a lof of fun for the children. They offer plenty of games, costumes, a playground and ice cream of course.

http://www.villa-rustica.de

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ISBN 978-3920801-93-3

Visited Dornstetten 72280 / Germany, that is part of the “German Timber-Frame Road”, for a lecture about Konrad Albert Koch held at the museum of local history (and that’s worth another visit).

Koch was an artist who lived from 1869 to 1945. He spent most of his life travelling to dozends of churches in the area to restore or paint various frescous and paintings. Not much of his work is wildly known but since a common scene on all of his pictures was discovered more and more work of him shows up nowdays.

We learnt all this from the speaker Peter Wagner, who invited to the lecture. A lot of the work of Koch can be found in his book “Der Burgenforscher Konrad Albert Koch” (The castle researcher / ISBN 978-3920801-93-3).

The more important part for us however is that Koch also started to paint castles and keeps – or what was left of them. Over time he got such a good understanding of medieaval structures that he started to draw castles how they might have looked like based on excavated ruins. People began to show up and helped to dig whenever Koch was in the area and his drawings became very popular. And they still are, in fact. Many of his pictures are still used to show how castles looked like on various historic sites.

And here is an interesting fact: Many of the castles and keeps were virtually recreated again using modern high-tech and latest archaeological insights. And many look very close to how Koch imagined them back then. And that’s from a time when the railroad was still on the raise and the choice of travelling was to trek or walk.

The pictures are from the beautiful market place of Dornstetten where we spent some time waiting for the beginning of the lecture.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Albert_Koch