August 13, 2013

Shoplifter leaves with photos instead of tablet

Filed under: Gadgets,Photography by Branko Collin @ 1:05 pm

Since last week the Amsterdam police are looking for a shoplifter who changed his mind while robbing a Kruidvat drugstore located in the De Pijp district.

Initially the man tried to steal a tablet computer that was stored in a display case, but later changed his mind. He left the fancy gear behind and took off with somebody’s printed photos. The man took off on a bicycle.

The video below shows the man entering the store and taking the tablet from the display case.

My theory is the man came in to collect his photos, saw an opportunity to acquire a tablet he had no money for, then realised the bulge in his jacket would look suspicious at the register. OK, so it’s not a very good theory. What do you think was in those pictures?

The video doubles as a free instructional film on Dutch bicycle etiquette. The shoplifter first secures the rear wheel using his wheel lock, then does the same using a chain lock.

(Photo/video: Politie.nl (YouTube))

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August 12, 2013

There’s a Metal Bible for lost Frisian metal fans

Filed under: Music,Religion by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

Here I thought fighting music containing satanic messages had long been given up as a futile pastime back in the late 1980s, but that was before I went to my first Frisian metal festival and found out that Bible thumpers still want to convert metal lovers. In all fairness, the guy running the stand looked pretty normal with a black t-shirt and shorts (and is apparently a metal fan), with the exception of his stand full of bibles and using God as an excuse or explanation for his life choices.

The Metal Bible was being handed out right at the entrance of the Into The Grave metal festival, a small one-day event in downtown Leeuwarden, fantastically located at the foot of the leaning Oldehove tower and on an actual burial ground. It featured eight bands, local, European and American ones of different styles and was quite cheap (6,66 euro early bird price, 10 euro afterwards).

The Metal Bible started in 1996, with a ‘metalhead’ who wanted to share his love of God with metal fans, but finally kicked off in 2002 when said guy realised that the Bible was being used to approach other notoriously God-hating groups, such as bikers and footballers. The first edition of the Metal Bible was published in Swedish in June 2005, then a Dutch version was published in 2007. In 2011 it was published in English and German and 2012 in Spanish and Polish.

Regardless of its content, which reads like brainwashing to me, it is nicely made, with testimonials from metal bands and other people whose lives were turned around by reading the Bible.

If the good book was such a good read (I was forced to read a lot of it back in Catholic school), then you shouldn’t have to ‘metal it up’ to get your target group to read it. Sexing something up must have some connection to the Devil, but then every good book needs an antagonist.

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August 11, 2013

Open season on sperm donors in the Netherlands

Filed under: Health by Branko Collin @ 1:19 pm

City governments are pressuring single mothers to reveal the name of the fathers of their children, so that they can then force said fathers into paying some sort of alimony, Dutchnews reported last Friday.

Apparently a man from Rotterdam, Eric van Deurzen, was ordered by a court to pay either the city or the mother 486 euro a month. (If I am being vague it’s because my sources are.) Volkskrant quotes two law professors, Paul Vlaardingerbroek and André Nuytinck, as saying that only the mother can bring suit.

Professor Nuytinck told Gelderlander that this also puts certain kinds of sperm donors in a tough situation: “Sperm donors who haven’t gone through a sperm bank may have difficulty proving that they did not conceive the child. For conception [as a legal term–Branko] there needs to have been intercourse.”

Since everybody is being so incredibly vague I had to do my own homework here.

Title 17 of Book 1 of the Dutch Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek) states that “he who conceives a child that only has a mother […] is obliged to contribute to the cost of rearing and caring for the child until it reaches the age of majority […].” Although the law does differentiate between a father, a conceiver (verwekker) and a donor, it does not state that there is a difference between a donor and a conceiver when it comes to financial responsibility for raising a child.

Several websites and professor Nuytinck do make that distinction though, which leads me to believe that there must be a separate, more specific law detailing the rights and responsibilities of sperm donors somewhere. Not all the cost of artificial insemination are covered by basic health insurance and in 2010, a lesbian couple was refused treatment by a hospital in Leiden.

The law I quoted above seems to have especially dire consequences for gay couples. The partner who is not the parent only has rights if they’ve gone through official, sometimes homophobic channels and the donor has expressed the wish to remain pseudo-anonymous (in the Netherlands a child always has the right to know its father once it turns 16).

It is still not clear to me why a municipal government would have standing in a case where they ask for the determination of fatherhood.

(Photo by Gniliep, some rights reserved)

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August 9, 2013

Solar-powered bicycle lights made in The Netherlands

Filed under: Bicycles,Design,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

The Pixio bike light has a built-in solar panel with a battery that charges up during sunny days when a bike is parked outside. Five days is enough for two years of biking with the lights on and the Pixio is already good to go for two years of biking with the lights on when you buy it. It comes in a range of colours, and a set of Pixios (back and front, as the law requires) will set you back 55 euro, but then those cheap bike lights and their batteries will run you a lot as well in the long run, never mind the stress they cause. It even has a locking mechanism so you can actually leave it on your bike, as long as your entire bike doesn’t get stolen or removed.

One obviously drawback is if you leave the lights on by mistake, but then that goes for battery-powered lights as well. Raise your hand if you’ve turned off someone else’s bike lights off as a courtesy. Parking your bike indoors like many people do won’t charge your light up, but then if you’re good to go for two years, you can cross that bridge when you get to it.

(Link: www.bright.nl, Screenshot: Rydon.eu)

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August 8, 2013

Kickstarting Dutch ideas: inventions and culture

Filed under: Bicycles,Design,Film,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 8:35 am

If you want to feel like an investor, maybe even invest in a project or just browse to get some ideas, have a look at these Dutch projects on Kickstarter. At first glance, films, software and design/inventions seem to be major categories, but I also saw some well-funded music.

Amsterdam: The Belll (yes, extra l), got funded. A customisable, loud, Dutch-made clip-on bell for your bike.

Groningen: The Last Holdouts: ‘One couple’s journey from Antarctica to Holland: A documentary about impossibility and the creative process’.

Amersfoort was the busy city at the time of writing, with three projects vying for cash, although one stood out: Doodle 3D, a sketching tool to print your own personal drawings on a 3D printer.

See also:

Charge your gear on the go using your travel bag (older pic above).

Two inventions—a charger in a safe, and a power strip in a book (and a bonus invention).

(Screenshot: Kickstarter)

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August 7, 2013

Nijmegen university fights British ban on car hacking research

Filed under: Automobiles,IT by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

A British judge has imposed a ban in favour of car manufacturer Volkswagen who claims that the publication of research on car-starting codes for luxury cars would be detrimental to their business. Roel Verdult and Baris Ege of the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen together with Flavio Garcia of the University of Birmingham wrote the publication ‘Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser. Since Volkswagen and other car manufacturers don’t want all those codes out in the open, they went to court in the UK and won. Oddly enough, much of the information has apparently already been floating around the Internet since 2009 but nobody really noticed until now.

The Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen is not taking it lying down and is going to court to fight the ban. The university claims that the researchers’ aim was to improve security for everyone, not to give criminals a helping hand at hacking into high-end cars. They argued that “the public have a right to see weaknesses in security on which they rely exposed”. Otherwise, the “industry and criminals know security is weak but the public do not”.

It seems to me that basing a security algorithm on secrecy rather than complexity is asking for problems once someone cracks the code, and assuming that that will never happen is not smart. The researchers didn’t do anything illegal yet they got a gag order. Why not comprise with a ban for like 6 months to let the car manufacturers get their act together? And do the researchers really need to publish damaging details to make their point that the security is weak? Stay tuned.

(Links: www.theguardian.com, www.bright.nl, Photo: guusterbeek.nl)

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August 6, 2013

Netherlands net exporter of football players

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 8:33 am

This year Dutch football clubs are getting at least 91 million euro for breaking up contracts with players who are set to move to foreign clubs, Volkskrant reports. That number is likely to become even higher since the 2013 summer transfer window doesn’t close until 2 September.

Midfielder Kevin Strootman from PSV (Eindhoven) earned his club the most money. He will move to AS Roma for 20 million euro. Volkskrant points out that the Dutch competition, the Eredivisie, has been drained of attackers. Out of the players that are leaving, five were in the top ten of top scorers last season. PSV had Dries Mertens and Jeremain Lens in that list—the Belgian and Dutchman are going to Napoli and Dinamo Kiev respectively. Ivorian Wilfried Bony of Vitesse (Arnhem) was widely considered too big for the Dutch top competition—his move to English mid-table Swansea seems a bit unambitious.

The budgets of Dutch clubs typically do not extend far enough to retain top players. In the previous season, the ‘poorest’ English club, Queens Park Rangers, had 35 million British pounds to spend on player wages alone. By contrast, Feyenoord, the Dutch number four in spending, has a budget of 34 million euro for the current season—including but not limited to wages. It will come as no surprise that in Volkskrant’s list, England is the top importer in Europe of foreign players, having spent 316 million euro so far. Oddly enough, Spain, a country whose clubs are not exactly poor, beats the Netherlands as an exporter of football players. Its clubs earned 106 million euro at the time of writing.

See also: How to create a football star

(Photo of striker Wilfried Bony by Wikimedia user Ailura, some rights reserved)

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August 5, 2013

Night of the Butter made German entrepreneurs rich 50 years ago

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 8:44 am

After World War II the Netherlands took two small villages and an assorted number of small territories from the Germans as reparations, most of which were returned on 1 August 1963 in exchange for 280 million German marks.

At the time of the return, certain food stuffs like butter, coffee and cheese were much cheaper in the Netherlands than in Germany, Der Westen reports. A kilogram of butter was 2 guilders cheaper, which is 5 euro in today’s money. Smart entrepreneurs—the site doesn’t mention names—spotted an opportunity and drove 150 trucks worth of goods into the village of Elten on the night of 31 July, what later became known as ‘Butternacht’ (Night of the Butter). When the clock struck midnight, it is said these entrepreneurs made a profit of about 50 to 60 million guilders by ‘transporting’ goods from the Netherlands to Germany without moving the goods one inch and without having to pay import duties. Instead the border was moved. At the time a guilder was worth about 0.25 US dollar or 0.1 British pound.

The Dutch occupation doesn’t seem to have hurt Elten. Hundreds of thousands of tourists came to the town each year to look at the spoils of war and climb the Eltenberg, a 82 metre high hill. When the Dutch returned the town to the Germans, it was the only German town in the neighbourhood that wasn’t in debt, De Volkskrant wrote last Saturday.

Original Dutch plans for reparations included annexing large areas of the German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia and deporting the 10 million Germans living there, but the Allies and especially the US did not look kindly upon those plans and only allowed the annexation of an area containing some 10,000 people. Now, in 2013, the only land that hasn’t been returned to Germany since the war is the Duivelsberg, a hill near Nijmegen that was hotly contested during Operation Market Garden after it was taken following a short fire fight between the Able Company of the 508th USA Parachute Infantry Regiment and a German company. Much later during my student days it had turned into a famous local make-out spot.

See also: Murder on the border, about the Dutch-Belgian town of Baarle where you may cross a border simply by walking from one room to another.

(Photo derived from a newsreel by Polygoon-Profilti, some rights reserved)

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August 4, 2013

Drug dealer accepts payment in Lego

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:09 am

A 34-year-old from Groningen paid for his drug addiction by stealing expensive Lego and Playmobil kits, Spitsnieuws reports.

The addict told the court his dealer accepted payment in toys. The boxes he stole from a local toy store were valued up to 190 euro a piece.

Algemeen Dagblad quotes his lawyer who explained the popularity of Lego as follows: “Lego is easy to shift. Once children have been exposed to their first brick, they’re hooked.”

The justice department demands 265 days imprisonment, of which 180 days are suspended. The papers do not say what the suspect is supposed to be addicted to.

Fueling addictions with Lego, even if they’re not addictions to Lego, could become a trend. In 2011 a 21-year-old woman from Dublin was convicted to 200 hours of community service for stealing Lego, Transformer toys and bubble bath sets to pay for her heroin addiction, Herald.ie writes.

(Photo by Sunny Ripert, some rights reserved)

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August 3, 2013

Dutch comedian fined for smoking on live television

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:31 am

Dutch television chain VPRO was fined 600 euro last Sunday for letting heavy smoker and comedian Hans Teeuwen smoke during an interview. The VPRO hosts a summer filler chat show called ‘Zomergasten’ (summer guests) that features long, in-depth interviews with celebrities.

If the VPRO lets someone smoke again and gets caught, the fine could go up to a maximum of 4500 euro.

What if someone smokes during a play or a while making a movie? And as I write this, the media is still figuring out who will get the fine, the studio owner or someone of the VPRO.

All I know about Hans Teeuwen is that he dared perform in English

(Link: nos.nl. Photo: screen capture of VPRO’s programme.)

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