Dutch gamers in Rotterdam have scored a Guinness world record for the most hours of consecutive gaming: 50 hours playing Red Dead Redemption. The old record was held by Chirantan Patnaik from India at 40 hours 20 minutes, according to the print version Dutch daily De Pers.
The attempt to break the record was organised by Dutch company Vogel’s Products that wanted to promote a Sony PlayStation 3 controller.
In other news, astronaut-inventor Wubbo Ockels is at it again. For the past five years he has been working on a hybrid, energy-neutral ketch called Ecolution and it is almost ready.
The boat has a diesel engine that drives electric engines that in turn drive the propeller. When the boat is sailing, the process is partly reversed and the propellers generate electrical power which is stored in 10,000 kg of batteries that double as ballast. This Ethereal-like design generates a maximum of 20 kW, and the batteries can store up to 300 kWh, which should be enough to satisfy the hungriest of on-board luxury appliances.
Ecolution is marketed as a sailboat that can be operated by anyone, as computers and electric motors do the heavy lifting.
Anyway, go read the PDF, there’s too much to mention here. The Ecolution will be on display during Hisway 2010 (August) and will then be operated for test runs from Scheveningen until June 2011.
I love a good troika: First, we had Guus Hiddink vodka, then Trump vodka made in The Netherlands and now, hi-tech Medea vodka from Schiedam, the birth place of genever (gin).
Medea vodka has a programmable LED label. It can be up to 225 characters, which is more than a Twitter ‘tweet’ (140 characters) or a text message (160 characters). You can turn off the text to save batteries, if so inclined and a bottle costs 30 euro. Being a regular buyer of vodka, Dutch vodka is often pricy at 30 euro a bottle, as compared to Polish and Russian vodka at 15-20 euro a bottle. But hey, this time you get a gadget with your booze.
Oh and by the way, the music in the video is Chopin’s Prelude No. 4 in E minor (Op. 28), which is the work that French composer and artist Serge Gainsbourg’s song ‘Jane B.’ is based on. You get that tidbit extra, as Serge drank more vodka and other alcohol than you drink water.
Filed under: Gadgets,Weird by Branko Collin @ 8:29 am
The Dutch Army Museum is exhibiting 100 of its most remarkable weapons. Among them is this brass knuckles slash revolver slash dagger (slash!).
Apart from this perfect way to shoot yourself in the chest while trying to knock somebody out, hidden weapons such as ballpoint pens, walking sticks and belt buckles are also on display. Moreover, personal arms of Prince Bernhard, General Snijders and a gun that was used by the 1975 Malukan train hijackers will be shown.
The exhibition will run from March 18 to October 31.
Noise pollution, Dutch style: some 16.5 million of us are packed into a small country and the people living in the four big cities known in Dutch as the ‘Randstad’ (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague) often live in old houses that have very little isolation. I have friends who refuse to live anywhere with upstairs neighbours, and in my case here in Amsterdam I can hear the neighbours’ dog yelping at passers-by. When I lived in Nijmegen, the old man downstairs had the telly on really loud. The day that stopped, we found out he had passed away.
We can’t just move to the country: for most jobs you need to leave within 10 km of your work because beyond that employers would have to pay for your travel costs and therefore will not hire you. Coming by car means major traffic jams, and so we live in town and often bike to work. You can’t rent anything in the country, you have to buy, which many people can’t do. Oh, and in the country, they have bored youth with noisy, high-pitched scooters driving around, which has become a major noise pollution issue.
So tape your neighbours in the hopes of getting them evicted is a new strategy in the country’s second biggest city, Rotterdam. Granted, many people will pipe down if you ask them nicely, but many people, and I am sorry to say, usually with children, have no idea what kind of anti-social racket they are making.
“Since February, Rotterdam is offering possible victims of ‘noise pollution’ a noise-o-meter to monitor the nuisance. The noise-o-meter is part of a campaign to counter ‘neighbourhood terror’. According to a city survey last year, some 49,000 people in the Netherlands’ second major city say they regularly suffer serious nuisance from neighbours. The noise-o-meter offers ‘an objective measure of the sound, which gives us a stronger legal case in case of an eviction request,’ said city executive Hamit Karakus about the new weapon.”
Who said trying to quit smoking couldn’t be fun? On 1 March, Lianne Sleebos of the Delft University of Technology will be launching My Stop Buddy, an app to help people stop smoking. For a mere 2,99 euro, you can choose an English or Dutch app that will support you for 21 days. Fill in a personal profile and you will get activity suggestions to help you not reach for a ‘cancer stick’, lots of jokes about health and information on how much money you saved by not smoking. You can also push buttons according to you mood and you’ll be told why you’re going for a smoke according to it. It sounds like a nagging grandmother so far, but hey, I haven’t seen it yet and I do hope it works. I am curious about the English version, translations and all.
And although 2,99 euro is much cheaper than a pack of cigarettes, the iPhone isn’t, but OK you can get one for free with a certain telecom provider here in the Netherlands.
Filed under: Art,Gadgets by Branko Collin @ 8:49 am
A team of nine people was necessary to run this wooden clock on November 27 for twenty-four hours in Rotterdam, at the place where the central railway station used to be.
Every minute the foreman called out the time, and his helpers then deconstructed and reconstructed the required digits. The clock was designed by Mark Formanek and produced by Mothership. Other volunteers filmed the complete running of the clock, the result being another clock.
For those who grumbled about my taste in coffee before, here is the other end of the spectrum. Kees van der Westen (first name pronounced like ‘Case’) from Waalre, Noord-Brabant, has been creating coffee makers since the 1980s. This is one of his latest, the Speedster.
A previous incarnation of the Speedster was made in a limited series of 6, sold to friends and relatives. The price of the current version? A mere 5,000 euro.
We strongly emphasize the need to contact an experienced espresso machine technician locally. The Speedster is a commercial machine that needs to be installed properly. Also for maintenance/service later in its life, a technician who knows espresso machines is essential.
Coffee Geek says, and I paraphrase, that the Speedster is a decent espresso machine. (“Just about perfect,” I believe that is their exact wording.)
Dutch science writer Rik Kuiper of Utrecht has a cool blog called the The Museum of Unintended Use, which features objects that are used differently than they were intended. Feel free to send Rik pictures of stuff at unintendeduse (at) gmail.com and follow him on Twitter.
Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of things such as an old bath tub turned into a table with a sheet of glass over it, wooden wine crates DJs use to store 45s or the plastic shopping crates stored vertically that serve as shelves in one of my co-blogger’s bathroom. When I was young my mother fashioned plastic buckets and belts for us to go blueberry picking and I use a twist tie on the zippers of my luggage so it doesn’t open by mistake and can be opened quickly.
Kuiper adds stuff almost daily to his online museum. The main criterion is that the object’s conversion has to reversible. As he explains, a lighter being used as a can opener can still be used for its original purpose, but a design coat made from old post bags cannot.
(People of the NRC that we quoted: Your link to the museum is broken (leads to some empty German page) and it’s ‘museum’, not ‘musueum’ in the caption.)
In other news, astronaut-inventor Wubbo Ockels is at it again. For the past five years he has been working on a hybrid, energy-neutral ketch called Ecolution and it is almost ready.
