October 31, 2011

Mirrors that look like holes in the wall and other Eindhoven Design Academy graduation projects

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 3:27 pm

Yesterday was the last day of the Dutch Design Week. Part of the event was the graduation show of the Eindhoven Design Academy, which was visited by Trendbeheer (we already mentioned Michael Kluver’s chairs).

Latvian Germans Ermics graduated with these mirrors that look like holes in the wall.

Other projects included cat videos from show cats by Thalia de Jong, a meltable dinner table by Tom Gottelier (complete with built-in heater to help you melt it back into shape), a self-photographing room by Monique Habraken, a leather holster for kids instead of guns by Elise Metekohy, a cargo bike that can roll like a regular bicycle by Alexander van Diggele, and much more.

Trendbeheer visited the exhibition and took lots of pictures.

(Photo by Trendbeheer / Jeroen Bosch, some rights reserved)

Tags: , ,

Artist in wheelchair painting largest portrait of the Netherlands

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 9:06 am

Robin Grasmeijer is painting Princes Máxima in a hangar at Twente Airport, and it is to be the largest painting ever made in the Netherlands.

The painting will be 10 x 15 metres in size. Grasmeijer expects to have his painting finished in the summer of 2012. He is still looking for a building to attach the painting to.

A complicating factor is that Grasmeijer has to paint from his wheelchair. Working in an ill-ventilated factory in which he had to handle polyurethane originally left him paralysed from the neck down in 1997. Later he regained 90% of his strength in his arms and hands.

(Link: Trendbeheer. Video: Youtube / Robin Grasmeijer.)

Tags:

October 29, 2011

Michael Kluver reimagines classic chairs

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 12:22 pm

The designers of the classic chairs of the twentieth century did not just manage to come up with a striking look for furniture, they also tried to reinvent the chair. Michael Kluver, a 2011 Eindhoven Design Academy graduate, decided it was time to turn these iconic designs back into “Just Chairs“.

Shown here from left to right are the Mackintosh, Rietveld, Breuer and Eames inspired chairs. Trendbeheer has handy links to the originals, and mentions that they are on display at the Graduation Show of the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven—the last two days of which are taking place now.

(Photo: Michael Kluver)

Tags: , ,

October 28, 2011

World-class gymnast and convicted criminal gets into porn

Filed under: Online,Sports by Orangemaster @ 3:06 pm

Top Dutch gymnast Verona van de Leur, now retired, is a well-decorated athlete who has earned her placed in Dutch gymnastics history.

Unfortunately, she has made the news several times this year for much less glamourous deeds. First, she was accused and found guilty of blackmail. Last year she snapped pics of a couple that was having an affair and then asked them for 2,000 euro to keep quiet. To make things worse, the cops found child pornography on her computer, but for whatever reason, that went away. Her past is full of family stories that include embezzling and threats as well.

Van de Leur started a company that deals with sex pictures and is about to embark into the world of porn as a webcam girl. Her argument for anyone who wants to point fingers at her, at least for the porn part, is that ex-athletes are looked down upon when they go south while it’s OK for actresses to pose nude in magazines.

As if people didn’t already picture gymnasts naked when watching television…

(Link: welingelichtekringen.nl, Photo of Gymnastics hall by battlecreekcvb, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,

October 27, 2011

Hardcore brown rats run amok in posh Amsterdam

Filed under: Animals,General by Orangemaster @ 4:42 pm

Amsterdam and surely many other Dutch cities have lots of rats, what with these damp, age-old canals and all. And no, not the cute little grey mice that could adorn some Anton Pieck painting, but the bigguns that a posh neighbourhood like Amsterdam South is not expected to have running around.

According to newspaper De Telegraaf, the Marie Heinekenplein is “swarming” with them. The square has many outdoor cafés as well as a supermarket where a woman claimed to have seen about 30 of them in one go. As usual, businesses and locals have complained about the situation, but are being ignored by the city. Although everyone is responsible for making sure there’s no food left around, the city apparently does not pick up the trash often enough, which doesn’t help. Amsterdam’s innercity garbage collection is mostly done by stacking it someone twice and week as if it were the suburbs, which is not something other big European cities do.

And poisoning them is an option, but apparently about 39% of these rats can take it. “Research done by Wageningen University shows a large number of rats in the Netherlands have a genetic make-up which allows them to develop resistance more quickly.”

(Links: telegraaf.nl, www.dutchnews.nl, Photo of Brown rat by Jean-Jacques Boujot, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

October 26, 2011

Reddit postings scrolled for your reading enjoyment

Filed under: IT,Online by Orangemaster @ 1:15 pm

Popular news site Reddit has users who post thousands of links and pictures every day, so that other users can vote and comment on them. Dutch programmer Jonathan Bouman made himself a mashup called Scrolldit.com (Scroll Reddit, although the Dutch enclined may have also read ‘Scroll dit’, which means ‘scroll this’ in Dutch), making the barrage of posts easier to read by automatically filling your screen up with stuff to read using key words. You can scroll to your heart’s content and you can even check the NSFW (Not Suitable For Work) button when you’re at the office.

Bright.nl tells is that making the app was very inexpensive for Bouman, which is good because ScrollDit.com went viral yesterday and in just 9 hours had already had 500,000 visitors.

(Link: www.bright.nl)

Tags: , ,

October 25, 2011

Dutch have fastest Internet connections in Europe

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 9:48 am

The Register writes:

The Netherlands have the fastest Internet connections in Europe according to a State of the Internet report by Akamai, with more than 68 per cent of Dutch broadband lines clocking in at 5Mbit/s or more.

[…]

The fastest Internet in the world is found in Japan, with 59 Japanese cities filling out the Akamai list of the 100 cities with the fastest broadband. Brno in the Czech Republic has the fastest connection speeds of any city in Europe at an average of 8.3Mbit/s. No UK cities make the top 100.

Global average connection speed grew 43% in the last year. The Netherlands is also the country with the highest level of broadband adoption in the world, with 68% of the households having a fast connection.

In case you’ve never heard of them, Akamai are the people who used to host large files for large companies until Amazon shouldered its way into the market. (I am sure they’re still doing fine.) In other words, they know a thing or two about connectivity.

See also: Gigabit internet connection to the houseboat

(Photo by Joe Frisino, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

October 24, 2011

‘Leave Napoleon and his white horse alone’

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 4:33 pm

The Amsterdam Museum has managed to raise 12,500 euro for the restoration of the huge painting ‘The Entry of Napoleon in Amsterdam’ (pic), representing the submission of Amsterdam by the French 200 years ago. They need 30,000 euro to complete the restoration and the money so far has come from crowd funding.

The ‘battered’ painting can currently be seen for free at the museum’s Schuttersgalerij (Civic Guards Gallery), along with a collection of portraits of prominent Amsterdam people, something to do if you’re downtown Amsterdam and you need a break from the tourists and your shopping.

“Each year, the citizens involved in the Civic Guard would pay a high price to have their portraits painted. Only the wealthy could afford such a luxury and so developed this portrait collection of wealthy Amsterdam citizens. Many of the famous artists from the 17th century were commissioned to paint these artworks, including Rembrandt.”

The general view seems to be ‘leave the painting alone’. The cracks and wear are part of the painting’s history and the faded colours have their charm. If anyone wants to see the painting in its current state, visit the museum before the end of the year.

(Links: www.nieuwsuitamsterdam.nl, cityscouter)

Tags: , ,

Piet Hein Eek designs furniture for mail order company

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 12:04 am

The guy behind the scrapwood craze of the nineties, Piet Hein Eek, has collaborated with mail order company Wehkamp on a wooden furniture line.

The line contains three oak tables and two oak chairs, Bright reports. The cheapest item, the chair shown here, costs 200 euro.

Piet Hein Eek is known for exclusive and pricey products, whereas Wehkamp (€ 488 million turnover in 2010) is known as relatively cheap. Eek wanted a change of pace, as did Viktor & Rolf (H&M) and Hella Jongerius (IKEA) before him.

Update 2 November 2017: removed a broken link.

(Photo: Wehkamp)

Tags: , ,

October 22, 2011

Phone companies may not let thugs force teenagers to buy subscriptions

Filed under: General,Technology by Branko Collin @ 4:03 pm

A type of crime that I had not heard of before is that Dutch teenagers are being forced by peers to buy them expensive mobile phone subscriptions. Back in February consumer watchdog show Kassa reported that this sort of thing happens on a large scale.

Stores that sell these subscriptions tend to close their eyes to this problem. Arnoud Engelfriet reported two weeks ago that in a surprising verdict, a judge said that even though they are not a party to the crime, telecom companies can still not hold the victims to these crimes to the contracts they entered into.

An eighteen year old girl from Rotterdam was forced under threat of violence to enter into several contracts with KPN subsidiary Telfort. Dutch law says that if you entered a contract under threat, you can rescind the contract. The court also weighed heavily that forcing teenagers to buy cellphones and mobile subscriptions is a common enough practice that Telfort should have been suspicious, especially now the victim bought five subscriptions at five different stores in a single day, which is uncommon.

(Photo by Macinate, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , , , , ,