September 23, 2008

Dutch crime reporter De Vries wins Emmy

Filed under: Shows by Orangemaster @ 12:14 pm
Peter R. de Vries

TV crime reporter Peter R. de Vries has won the international Emmy award for best current affairs programme for his investigation into the disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway on the Caribbean island of Aruba in 2005.

The show, screened on Dutch television in February, featured secret recordings of the main suspect, Dutch teenager Joran van der Sloot talking about how Holloway died and how he got a friend to dump her body at sea.

Almost half the Dutch population watched the programme. The show, or fragments from it, was also broadcast in the US.

De Vries accepted the award at a glittering ceremony in New York on Monday together with Natalee’s mother Beth. They dedicated it to the memory of the dead girl.

‘This is the prize of prizes,’ De Vries is reported as saying. ‘You only win this once.’

(Link: dutchnews.nl)

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September 22, 2008

Dinner table with built-in marble track

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 12:53 pm

Marbelous is the name of this table with a built-in marble track. Designer Tineke Beunders of the Ontwerpduo studio created it earlier this year. Beunders bases her works on vague childhood memories. I wonder if she mixed up the marble track — which was fun because you got to make it yourself — with the cutting board that had a gravy groove.

Photos: Ontwerpduo. Via Bookofjoe.

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September 21, 2008

Famous geek Mark Hoekstra dies suddenly

Filed under: Gadgets,General,Technology by Orangemaster @ 9:38 am
Mark Hoekstra

Mark Hoekstra, Dutch blogger and hacker, has passed away at the age of 34 after suffering a heart attack last Wednesday. We at 24oranges found out on Twitter this morning. We mentioned him once last year because he did really cool stuff: Illegal but fun broadband access.

Quoting TUAW: “Many of Mark’s hacks and adventures are thoroughly documented on his blog, geek technique, evidence of Mark’s creative drive and problem-solving ability. He was a geek’s geek in the proudest sense of the word.”

(Link: tuaw)

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Dutch literature at Project Gutenberg

Filed under: Literature by Branko Collin @ 9:01 am

I’ve made a sampler of the Dutch texts that were published at Project Gutenberg in August and September. In a month I want to attend the Communia workshops in Amsterdam on how to establish the public domain status of works, and my plan is to print a couple of these booklets and distribute them there. However, I figured other people might want to sample Project Gutenberg too, so I uploaded my Nederlandse Project Gutenberg Reader to The Internet Archive for all to read. It contains fragments from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Jules Verne’s Cesar Cascabel, C. Joh. Kieviet’s Gouden Daden (history), Herman Robbers’ De Vreemde Plant, J.J. Cremers’ Betuwsche Novellen, C.S. Adama van Scheltema’s Mei-Droom (drama), and a short piece by W.-F. Rondou on how to recognize counterfeit honey. You can download it in PDF and ODT (OpenOffice.org) formats.

I can make these pretty easily, so should there be any interest for such samplers, just let me know and I’ll produce one every two months or so. The sampler is set up as an actual booklet. OpenOffice.org Writer let me set wide inner margins, and Acrobat Reader 9 will let me print it.

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September 20, 2008

NRC as English language daily

Filed under: General,Literature by Branko Collin @ 3:34 pm

Last Tuesday Dutch evening paper NRC Handelsblad launched an online, English language version of itself. The paper will publish a “selection of news items, background pieces, reports and opinion pieces.” Located at http://nrc.nl/international/, the online English NRC partners with amongst others German magazine Der Spiegel, which has had its own English online section for a while now, and Robin Pascoe’s Dutchnews.nl. The Dutchnews.nl staff will take care of the copy editing and journalistic translation, according to NRC’s press release (Dutch).

NRC International is aimed at “foreigners who cannot read Dutch, and who are interested in quality Dutch reporting.”

See also: a short history of NRC at Wikipedia.

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September 19, 2008

Recently discovered Jewish interior will not be wrecked for now

Filed under: Architecture,History by Branko Collin @ 5:30 pm

A uniquely preserved WWII Jewish living room in Amsterdam will stay intact a little bit longer. The room which we wrote about last week, was discovered last year by a student at that time Alexander Westra (currently of the University of Amsterdam). AT5 reports that Lebo, the company that now owns the house, has stopped the wrecking works of the property.

The house used to belong to banker Korijn who died in 1942, after which his entire family was deported to the concentration camps where they died at the hands of the Nazis. One source called the room “more authentic than the Anne Frank House.” After the war, the house at the J.J. Viottastraat in Amsterdam came into the hands of Catholic theology students who barely touched the room, although Westra apparently did uncover some traces of parties.

In the next month and a half the owner will look at possibilities to preserve the room which is built in the Amsterdamse School style. One possibility is to turn the luxurious room into a museum.

According to a spokesperson for Het Schip, the museum for the Amsterdamse School, focus for this architectural movement usually lies on exteriors. To answer a question asked earlier by one our readers, Jay Vos, the spokesperson did not know of any books that focussed solely on Amsterdamse School interiors, although the museum is currently working on a book that will also document these interiors.

The students who lived there recorded a corny video invitation to their new year’s bash in the living room last year, which 24 Oranges discovered at that wonder-wasteland of archeology, YouTube.

Photo: Alexander Westra, republished with permission. Westra sent us several photos, a selection of which we showed in our earlier article.

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Dutch graffiti artist looking at jail time

Filed under: Art,General by Orangemaster @ 8:50 am
Krae

Authorities in New York City have indicted a resident of the Netherlands who came there a ‘graffiti tourist’. According to the International Herald Tribune, US justice officials have issued an arrest warrant for Dutch resident Robbert Boxem, 23, from Zwolle who allegedly went to New York for the international graffiti event Meeting of Styles. He has been indicted on charges of spray painting a subway car and leading police on a dangerous chase, which occurred down the subway tracks! Boxem (aka KRAE) now faces charges of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. The paper says the 23-year-old from Zwolle could get up to four years in prison if convicted. The warrant was issued on Thursday after he failed to turn up in court.

That’s one way to draw attention to yourself. Terribly insightful comments made on the gothamist site (here below) include, “Dutch art has really taken a dive since the days of Van Gogh, Vermeer and Rembrandt” and “He must have gotten tired of running around in wooden shoes and sticking his finger in dykes.”

(Links: gothamist.com, dutchnews.nl, Photo: duncancumming)

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September 18, 2008

Urinal lift on a terrace kills business

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:55 am
Urilift

City hotel Queens in Amersfoort has a serious problem that is basically killing their business. The city council decided to place a urinal, albeit a nifty one that rises above ground at 10 pm, right on their terrace. Can you picture taking a leak while people are having a drink on a terrace watching you? Would you want to be watching while having your drink? Ickeepoo. Well, other people don’t want to either, and so the hotel owner is pissed (pun intended).

After having spent hundreds of thousands buying and renovating an old building on the popular Groenenmarkt, the city council chose her outdoor terrace as the place for the urinal. And according to the owner, Paula Brouwer, the day before she was to receive the terrace permit, there was talk of a urinal, and her permit has been tied up in red tape ever since.

The city council came up with a deal: we’ll give you the permit, but you have to close your terrace at 10 pm. All the other terraces are allowed to stay open until 1 am, so imagine how much business she’d be losing. She has refused and has lawyered up. Why does this have a maffia feel to it? It’s also proof positive the city screwed up.

(Link: ad.nl, photo: urilift)

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September 17, 2008

Amphibious bicycle: GBO’s Di-Cycle

Filed under: Bicycles,Design by Branko Collin @ 8:26 am

Dicycles are nothing new, and if you count styrofoam treadmills neither are floating dicycles. But I have yet to see something like GBO’s bike path hogging concept, amazingly called Di-Cycle, which can do both.

This true amphibuous bike won Helmond’s GBO the Brabantse Spelen design competition in 2005. Unfortunately, the design has never left the conceptual phase, but fortunately you can still go gawk at it at the Fiets exhibition that runs until October 5.

See also: Bike your house around.

Photo by Designhuis / Patrick Meis. Via PSFK and a long string of other design blogs.

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September 16, 2008

Gigabit internet connection to the houseboat

Filed under: Architecture,Online by Branko Collin @ 7:57 am

A quick technology lesson for the easily intimidated: an Internet connection speed of 1 gigabit per second translates to a single high definition movie off the internet onto your PC in a minute. In theory.

A recent study shows that the Netherlands is the country with third best broadband Internet connection, after Japan and Sweden.

Jealous cries were heard from across the globe, bemoaning the lack of local governments’ willingness to innovate, but the position of the Netherlands has probably less to do with the innovative nature of its citizens and more with the way the country urbanised during the industrial revolution. Many railroads not just connecting cities but cutting through right to the city centres makes it easy to lay cables, especially if this network of rails is already owned by the government.

Meanwhile, a company called Draka has developed fibernet connectors for houseboat owners, so that they too may be connected to the Citynet initiative which aims to hook up almost all of Amsterdam to a 1 gigabyte per second fiber optics network before 2010. Shown here is Olivier Ax in front of his houseboat. So what do these owners of the first fiber optic connections do with all that speed? Whispers around the Internet say they first throttle it to 20 megabit per second, because the faster subscriptions are too expensive.

Photo: Draka. Also via Toby Sterling.

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