I did maintenance work on my blog, touching all the posts. As my blog is also a Fediverse instance needed to take great care that changed blogs did not get posted there again. Of course, some of them escaped, and I had to post – again – writing about this!

I found a workaround to keep posts from escaping, but it was error-prone. If you absolutely need to know: Older posts were seemingly configured for “Do not federate”. But yet: I had to explicitly set as being federated, and then configure them back to “Do not federate”. Only then they would not escape!

I sifted through 400 blog posts, setting featured images and changing the post layout to blocks finally. Yes, this blog pre-dates the Block Editor! Even after I had nailed down the workaround, I got the sequence of clicks wrong two times.

But it as been very interesting which posts escaped again:

https://elkement.art/2014/01/15/in-praise-of-textbooks-with-tons-of-formulas-or-the-joy-of-firefighting/

tl;dr: When I had been super stressed out as a traveling cyber security consultant, I avoided burnout by … sleeping even less and reading physics textbook at 4:00 AM in the morning.

I have written his ten years ago – and still find it applicable! Math-heavy physics textbooks are still what I reach for when I want to clear or sharpen my mind – to be prepared for whatever non-physics task I need to tackle!

The “art” image in this post is like mirrors facing each other, but using software. The source image is from Microsoft’s Windows 10 theme The Beauty of Books. I used a virtual machine and a Teamviewer session looking at each other”, and I took great care to program away all the menu bars :)

And there was yet another post that got out:

https://elkement.art/2012/12/31/2012-the-year-we-make-contact/

… a quick end-of-year update plus found poetry, reporting on my decision to move away from Public Key Infrastructure and focus on renewable energies.

The preview image is one my recent Lissajous Figures code art – I have been time-traveling to the old posts, adding a proper featured image. I had dreaded adding illustrations back then, so I had often cross-linked Wikimedia images. This post had a public domain image of an antique wall clock featuring beautiful parts of wood and metal. In 2018, when GDPR was around the corner (EU General Data Protection Regulation), I removed all linked third-party stuff on all my websites.

I sprinkled some of my older illustrations over my blog posts, and in this case I had used the iconic computer virus: An image once created by the Chief Engineer for the – Microsoft FrontPage :) – website of my my very first freelance IT business, in the late 1990s.

It was this version that had been shared to the Fediverse in 2025, in a post dated December 2012 :)

Screenshot of a fediverse post by elkement via the AcitiviPub plugin, showing the intro of a 2012 blog post and a large illustration of a computer virus depicted as a friendly worm.

I think I picked the virus because it was also the main image of my Why I Left Academia Story. I kind of regret that this post did not escape, too!

https://elkement.art/2012/11/26/the-dark-side-was-strong-in-me/

OK. It seem my blogging has reverted to my weird, 2012 blogging style, self-referential and stream-of-consciousness.

But today is the 27th of November, and I have recently launched a physics art shop – so I should rather do a Holiday Post shop update post, I guess. The self-referential circle or spiral is closing on itself: Nothing could represent my way of thinking about physics and math – or rather feeling them – like my fluffy blankets. Math is my blanket, cozy, shiny, and protecting.

~

Photo of a throw blanket with mathematical art folded, on the backrest of a couch. 50in × 60in fluffy shiny blanket printed with reproduction of traditional manual geometrical construction originally created with watercolor pencils on paper. Colored in the style of stained glass, main colors in the drawing: Orange, yellow, light green, dark green. Created by elkement 2025.
Photo of a throw blanket with mathematical art laid out on an off-white leather couch. 50in × 60in fluffy shiny blanket printed with reproduction of traditional manual geometrical construction originally created with watercolor pencils on paper. Colored in the style of stained glass, main colors in the drawing: Orange, yellow, light green, dark green. Created by elkement 2025.
Photo of a throw blanket with mathematical art, on a chair in retro design. 50in × 60in fluffy shiny blanket printed with reproduction of traditional manual geometrical construction originally created with watercolor pencils on paper. Colored in the style of stained glass, main colors in the drawing: Orange, yellow, light green, dark green. Created by elkement 2025.
Photo of a throw blanket with mathematical art laid out flat the floor (tiles in rusty metal design) of a room. 50in × 60in fluffy shiny blanket printed with reproduction of traditional manual geometrical construction originally created with watercolor pencils on paper. Colored in the style of stained glass, main colors in the drawing: Orange, yellow, light green, dark green. Created by elkement 2025.
Blanket printed with my geometrical drawing Circles to Circles 4 – available in my shop.

I have been writing about the joys of old-school geometry often – about painstakingly creating step-by-step what code could do quickly. These drawings and especially these blankets are the perfect embodiment of what I feel when manipulating math in my mind or on a sheet of paper.

The series Circles to Circles shows how a circle on a sphere is stereographically projected onto a circle in the equatorial plane. For each drawing, I have picked a different position of the circle, different viewpoint and different colors. See the making of the series in this post (again, not federated, unfortunately ;-) )

https://elkement.art/2025/06/04/circles-to-circles-6-the-making-of/

The original drawings are only 21 centimeters wide (size A5, about 8 inches wide). I have scanned them with an enormous resolution to print every little wiggle of my pencil strokes in detail on these blankets!

~

Get a blanket here to surprise the geeky / math / physics / tech / science person in your life:

Screenshot of elkement's store for physics art merche, showing the page with throw bkankets, printed with geometrical drawings.
elkement’s physics art store for merch – showing the page for blankets!