August 12, 2014

The NoPhone, the no-tech smartphone for addicts

Filed under: Gadgets by Orangemaster @ 10:27 am

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There are people addicted to using their smartphones, and maybe you’re one of them. Fear not, you can buy or ask someone to buy you the NoPhone, so you can finally have conversations with humans instead of checking your phone the whole time.

Dutch creatives Ben Langeveld and Ingmar Larsen together with a couple of New Yorkers thought up the 3D printed NoPhone, a black rectangular bit of plastic that feels like a smartphone in your hand, but isn’t one.

According to them, a person touches a smartphone about 150 times a day, significantly reducing a person’s real-life interaction. The NoPhone is like the pen a smoker puts in their mouth to ease cravings.

I bet people would buy the NoPhone for someone else as a huge hint that watching them stare at their phone is annoying. In fact, Langeveld and Larsen made the NoPhone with that specific type of addict in mind.

(Link: www.adformatie.nl, Photo: NoPhone)

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August 11, 2014

A sunken kitchen and letting all the sunlight in

Filed under: Architecture,Design by Orangemaster @ 9:35 pm

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An 85-year-old apartment in Amsterdam was recently redesigned by MAMM Design of Japan to provide maximum sunlight for an apparently non-Dutch family of four, which explains the very bright white walls.

The sunken kitchen is quite nifty, creating more space vertically, and by taking away stairs, walls and a part of the upper floor, the designers managed to get sunlight to spread all over the house. Although it looks a lot like an office space in the pictures (see link), I’m still impressed by what this Japanese firm did to a Dutch flat, considering how well they deal with small spaces themselves.

(Link and Photo: www.dezeen.com)

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August 10, 2014

Miffy creator Dick Bruna retired two years ago

Filed under: Comics,Design by Branko Collin @ 10:34 pm

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Last month the retirement of 86-year-old Miffy creator Dick Bruna was suddenly world news. But there was nothing newsworthy about that fact according to Stadsblad Utrecht: Bruna retired two years ago.

“News about nothing”, Marja Kerkhof called it. She is the manager of publisher Mercis, the company that will continue to release new Miffy books based on an archive of Dick Bruna’s drawings of the past 60 years. “We will only use original drawings by Dick Bruna. We will not be using other artists.” Bruna has made over 3,000 Miffy drawings. Currently there are about 130 Miffy books.

Kerkhof used the sudden attention for Bruna’s retirement to squash rumours that the artist suffers from dementia in AD: “When I see him, and I visit him regularly, he knows exactly who I am, where we’ve met and how long we’ve known each other.”

Next year Bruna’s studio will be moved to and exhibited at Centraal Museum in Utrecht. The same year the start of the Tour de France in Utrecht, Bruna’s home town, will be Miffy-themed.

(Photo of Miffy in un-Bruna-like garb at this year’s Tour de France by Thomas Bresson, some rights reserved)

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August 9, 2014

17th century book of watercolour paints by A. Boogert

Filed under: Art,Design,Gadgets,Technology by Branko Collin @ 3:39 pm

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Eric Kwakkel found this extensive 800-page book on how to prepare and mix watercolour paints in an online library in France.

It was published in Dutch in 1692 by one A. Boogert:

He explains how to mix the colours and how to change their tone by adding “one, two or three portions of water”. To illustrate his point he fills each facing page with various shades of the colour in question […]. To top it he made an index of all the colours he described, which in itself is a feast to look at.

The book is called ‘The Clear Bright Mirror of the Art of Painting’ (‘De Klaerlighte Spiegel der Verfkonst’) and is written in plain Dutch. Unfortunately I keep tripping over Mr Boogert’s handwriting, otherwise I might have treated you to a couple of paragraphs. Due to the nature of the work (three colour printing wasn’t available until the late 19th century), it is likely that the author produced only a single copy. And it’s very cool is that this copy survived.

Shown here are two opposite pages of the index (“blatwijser of regisster”).

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August 8, 2014

Cabin pressure for Ryanair at Eindhoven Airport

Filed under: Aviation by Orangemaster @ 12:33 pm

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On 4 August, Eindhoven Airport decided to close for air traffic at 15:45 sharp and hold a ceremony for the C130 aircraft bringing back more bodies from flight MH17 shot down in Ukraine.

A Ryanair pilot on approach to the airport at 15:32 got turned away by air traffic control (ATC) and told there would be a one hour delay for landing, which eventually forced the plane to divert. The pilot told the tower that they planned to get in on time between 15:30 and 15:40, a flight plan that was approved beforehand. When refused landing, the pilot got upset. A former Dutch pilot recorded the verbal volley and a YouTube controversy was born.

The former pilot completely understands the Ryanair pilot’s frustration who did everything he could to land his plane on time before the airport closed. For the many people on the Internet who hate Ryanair, it would be too easy to say that the pilot had no respect for the dead, which Ryanair says is not the case, and why would it be. The pilot was very much on time and if we believe what we hear, ATC isn’t really giving them a good excuse as to why they couldn’t land before 15:45 besides letting us assume that the events were not very well coordinated, as echoed by the pilot.

Perhaps the pilot could have stopped arguing earlier and just diverted as instructed, but not trying to land the plane with an approved flight plan would have also made him and Ryanair look bad. I can imagine it was easier to try and convince ATC since they weren’t saying why they couldn’t land, which probably would have appeased the pilot and given him something to pass on to the passengers, so that they wouldn’t blame Ryanair. I don’t see why the tower didn’t say ‘sorry we messed up, please understand’ and get Ryanair to divert instead of stubbornly not giving the pilot a straight answer. The Airport could have also easily closed for more time than they needed considering the circumstances. Bad communication all around, with a distinct hint of cultural differences.

(Links: www.nieuws.nl, www.omroepbrabant.nl, Photo of a dress-up co-pilot clearly sitting in the wrong seat)

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August 7, 2014

Queen Máxima makes Vanity Fair’s best dressed list

Filed under: Design,General by Orangemaster @ 5:13 pm

Much to the delight of the Dutch, Queen Máxima has made Vanity Fair’s list of international best dressed for 2014, along with fellow royal Crown Princess Mary of Denmark who have a lot in common. Both women were ‘commoners’, have non-European origins, are nearly the same age and both have a lot of children. The list also features Kate, Duchess of Cambridge who has also made the Hall of Fame list for appearing numerous times.

A television show in 2012 claimed Belgians had called Argentinian-Dutch Queen Máxima “photogenic but phony”, usually not having much to say about their own Belgian Queen Mathilde besides that she is ‘professional and actually born of Belgian nobel ancestry’, as opposed to being a ‘commoner’. Both Máxima and Mathilde are surely friendly to each other, Mathilde being the godmother of Máxima’s second daughter Princess Alexia and all.

Máxima caught the attention of VF by wearing a green vintage dress worn by her mother-in-law Princess Beatrix then Queen Beatrix. Yes, Máxima also wears Dutch fashion by designers like Jan Taminiau, but sadly that is not what got people’s attention.

(Link: www.fashionaddict.nl, photo from 2006 by the Netherlands Government Information Service, used with permission)

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August 6, 2014

Lab meat inspires futuristic cookbook

Filed under: Animals,Food & Drink,Science by Orangemaster @ 4:07 pm

Back in early 2012 we told you about lab produced meat being made, and in late 2013 about the meat finally hitting the grill. Now it’s time to level up with a test-tube cookbook called ‘The In Vitro Meat Cookbook” written by Dutch-based scientists, chefs and artists and recently presented in Amsterdam.

“While some dishes are innovative and delicious, others are uncanny and macabre,” such as roast raptor, dodo nuggets and oysters grown from meat stem cells.

The idea was not to get people cooking so much as letting people imagine future possibilities.

(Link: phys.org)

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August 5, 2014

Philips develops headset that reads thoughts

Filed under: IT by Orangemaster @ 10:54 am

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Inspired by the wishes and needs of ALS patients who gradually lose motor functions including their ability to speak, “the Emotiv wireless EEG neuro headset uses sensors to tune into electrical signals produced by the brain to detect a user’s thoughts, feelings and expressions in real time.” The headset addresses two major issues of ALS sufferers, namely regaining the ability to communicate with the people around them (friends, family, loves ones) and regaining control over the things around them (TV, lights, Internet).

Patients’ thoughts are registered by the headset, which passes the commands on to specially developed software in an app or tablet. The information is then passed on to specific devices around the house, as shown in the video below. Dutch ALS patients and associations have responded positively to the headset so far, but there’s no ready-to-use version of it on the market yet.

The video is in English, with English subtitles.

(Link: www.bndestem.nl, Photo: emotiv.com)

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August 3, 2014

Unions object to amateur bus drivers

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:29 pm

buurtbus-syntus-michael-1988Currently more than ten percent of the bus drivers in the Netherlands work without pay, Volkskrant reports.

Volunteer drivers are used on unprofitable routes, or so the companies that employ them claim. On the other hand Labour union FNV Bondgenoten claims that the amateur drivers are putting paid bus drivers out of work.

Egmond Online writes that line 408 from Egmond-Binnen to Egmond aan de Zee currently employs over 40 volunteers. Els Geugies, chairwoman of Vereniging Dorpsbelangen Egmond-Binnen (Village Association Egmond-Binnen), says that volunteers don’t just drive: “We also need to make schedules, fill up on fuel and clean the bus inside and out.”

Last month the city of Rijsen started using people who are on welfare as cab drivers. Hermien ten Bolscher of cab company Taxi Gerritsen told RTV Oost there weren’t happy with the cheap competition: “As it happens we were also unemployed when we started [four years ago]. We have had to make some big investments in cars, licenses and other things. It is wrong that we now have to compete with cab companies that get subsidized.”

It’s not clear from the article whether the unemployed cab drivers are forced to work for free. None of the articles mention if the amateur drivers have received training.

See also:

(Photo by Michael 1988, some rights reserved)

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August 2, 2014

Louis van Gaal makes club owners richer already

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 3:22 pm

louis-van-gaal-paul-blankThe football season has yet to start, but new Manchester United head coach Louis van Gaal is already giving the club’s owners plenty to be happy about.

The six children of late American entrepreneur Malcolm Glazer are about to make a load of money by selling 5% of their shares in British football club Manchester United, Yahoo! writes. The share price rose steeply after the announcements of both Louis van Gaal as head coach and Adidas as main sponsor, going from 14 USD to 19.31 USD last Wednesday, raising the value of the club to to approximately 3.2 billion USD.

The Glazer family will make an estimated 155 million USD on the sale and will hold on to the majority of shares. In order to underline their intentions, the shares they are selling have reduced voting rights.

Earlier in his career Van Gaal won major awards with Ajax, Barcelona and Bayern München. In his previous job as coach of the Dutch national team, he managed to reach third place at this summer’s World Cup, the more impressive considering that most his players came from lesser leagues such as the Dutch Eredivisie.

Manchester United’s prospectus warns buyers that the club’s worth largely depends on successes in the European campaign, according to The Independent.

Photo by Paul Blank, some rights reserved.

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