The final phase of Android Developer Challenge I is now complete. Out of 50 teams of finalists, 10 teams received a $275,000 award each and 10 teams received a $100,000 award each. One of the $275,000 winners is Eric Wijngaard with his mobile operating system PicSay.

PicSay allows you to quickly add word balloons, titles, and props to the pictures you have taken with your mobile phone camera. Enhance them further with various color correction, highlighting, and distortion effects, and then easily share them with your friends and family via e-mail, your blog, or photo sharing sites on the web.

(Link: code.google.com)

Apartment Therapy visited the 70 square metre home of American radio maker Ruth at the beguinage in Amsterdam. The complex, simply called Begijnhof (Dutch for beguinage), lies smack in the middle of the city and is open to the public. Located just off one of the busiest streets in the country, the Kalverstraat, it’s a sea of calm on the inside.

A begijnhof, or beguinage, is a secluded garden around which devout women lived a life dedicated to their faith, outside the formal structure of the church. Unlike nuns, beguines took no vows and kept any property they might have. There are dozens of former beguinages in the Low Countries. Although the houses were typically small, beguinages are still sought-after property because of their court-yard lay-out.

De Begijnhof is no longer home to beguines, but still only women live there. Should you wish to do the touristy thing, and should you be able to find De Begijnhof, access is free, and the beguinage has a couple of trumps up its sleeve other than just being there and being unique. It sports one of the two remaining wooden houses in the center of Amsterdam (1470). The panels of the pulpit of the English Church were made by Piet Mondriaan, and there’s a second, Catholic church hidden somewhere behind the gables.

Photo by Andreas Praefcke, some rights reserved.

The anti-leeching saga continues, but for now and by popular request I’ve switched the images back on in the feed. More here.

The prejudice that comics are for people who don’t like to read books gained a new dimension this week with the launch of Donald Duck Junior magazine. NRC quotes Sanoma publisher Suzanne Schouten (Dutch): “The age at which children start with Donald Duck [magazine] went from 6 to 8 years old in the last few years. The magazine turns out to be too difficult for many 6 and 7 year olds. Children read less these days. That’s why we wanted to develop a magazine that is much simpler and with which children learn to read while having fun.”

As daily NRC puts it, Junior has “less text, bigger balloons, and simpler puzzles.” I took a quick look at the magazine in the super market today, and noticed that numbers were spelled with digits, and were emphasized. Also, the text mostly used short words, single or double syllable.

Image: SanomaCrossing.

We’re experimenting with a leeching blocker, and as a result you may see our regular images replaced by one that says “I am a bandwidth thief.” These images should only appear on the websites of leeches, not on 24oranges.nl itself. If you nevertheless see these images popping up, please report so here. Mention the web- or RSS-browser you are using, including version number, operating system, and how you are connected to the internet (proxy? firewall?).

Update: I’ve changed the RSS feed so that online feed readers no longer display images. Good or bad?

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Gizmodo went to Philips’ research lab in Eindhoven and made a short clip about magnetic, intelligent, LED-based display tiles. Presumably to be used for large stage displays, these tiles can be attached to each other without screws or cables, forming one big screen together. Once a tile is connected to the rest of the “swarm,” it figures out by itself what its position and orientation are, and immediately starts displaying the “missing” part of the image.

Philips has already been making hotel rooms according to similar principles (plug ‘n’ play).

Image: Gizmodo.

There’s war in pastry land. Bakers John and Petra Hartog have recently registered the name “skitaart” (ski cake) and are having their lawyers send threatening letters (Dutch) to other bakers who use the same name. A ski cake consists of a “vlaai” (pie) bottom, filled with yellow cream and cherries, and topped with powdered sugar foam. Baker Marco Lakerveld, a competitor from Wijk bij Duurstede, doesn’t worry about the Hartog’s trademark claims. He says he has managed to lay hands on a thirty year old baker’s magazine in which the name “skitaart” was already used.

Meanwhile baker Ruud van Oort, the inventor of the skitaart and the guy who sold his bakery to the Hartogs in 2007, is down in the dumps over this legal fight. He has been making his original for thirty years, but never worried about pie-racy (I so could not stop myself there—sorry!). Van Oort told Bakkerswereld (Baker’s World, Dutch): “This is so sad. I was always very proud that other bakers copied what I had created.”

You have to wonder why the Hartogs are so vehemently throwing away the reputation built by Van Oort. This cake could blow up in their faces in all kinds of interesting ways.

Via Boek 9 (Dutch). Photo by Inkswamp, some rights reserved.

There is a petition going around that basically pleads for having the right to say no to the paper version of the phone book and the yellow pages (Gouden Gids). It’s not about taking it away from the elderly that do not bother with computers or people who actually use a paper copy, it’s about not so many of these guides ending up in the bin. Thousands and thousands do and these folks think it’s time to put a stop to it. This picture is actually of my own version waiting to be recycled yet again this year.

You can sign and read about the petition in Dutch here: Stop De Papieren Telefoongids (Stop the paper version of the (Dutch) phone book)

(Link tip: From Twitter)

The famous diamond-bedecked skull by British artist Damien Hirst will be exhibited in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam from 1 November until mid-December. The museum’s director Director Wim Pijbes told De Volkskrant that the contract for showing the work is the strictest he has ever signed. “The skull has to be placed in a dark room without anything else around it. Everything we have to do is in the contract. We cannot mention who the owner is, either.”

The skull, that of an 18th century European covered in platinum and 8,601 diamonds, was sold in 2007 to a group of investors for € 75 m, the largest sum ever paid for a work by a living artist.

(Link: dutchnews.nl, photo ad.nl)

The Olympic athletes arrived home today, and they were given a warm welcome at the 1928 Olympic stadium in Amsterdam. I live right around the corner, and decided to take my crummy old digital camera there. As luck would have it, the organizers had decided that the athletes would enter through the front gate, where there is ample opportunity for non-accredited press (i.e. l’il ole me) to climb onto flowerbeds and the pedestals of pompous statues.

Below you see Anky van Grunsven (gold, dressage) being interviewed by famous sports presenter Tom Egberts. It was very hard to get a photo of her not grinning like a maniac, but here she had to be serious for a moment. She was one of the first there, and being a gold medal winner had to wait until the end to enter the stadium, and she was all smiles all the time.

More below the fold…

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