September 14, 2013

Phonebloks, a modular open mobile phone platform in search of manufacturers

Filed under: Design,Gadgets,Sustainability,Technology by Branko Collin @ 11:43 am

Eindhoven-based inventor and designer Dave Hakkens is a man of ideas and his latest idea, a mobile phone of which you can swap out parts when they break down or get too old, is getting a lot of attention on the Internet.

The idea behind Phonebloks is to commoditize the hardware behind the mobile phone in such a way that not manufacturers but consumers get to swap out parts—a sort of Lego for mobile phones. There would have to be a ‘Blok-store’ where you could order the parts you want (at a suitable mark-up of course) all the while feeling good about yourself for not throwing out your entire mobile phone when you get tired of parts of it.

Hakkens seems to have learned from a previous project, a power strip called Plugbook, which he ran on Kickstarter but which failed to reach its target. In order to show your interest in Phonebloks you do not have to pledge your own money. Instead you voice your support via Thunderclap in the hope that manufacturers and investors will sit up and take notice.

(Via my Facebook page where people were ‘liking’ the damn thing by the boatloads. Illustration: crop from Dave Hakkens’ video.)

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September 7, 2013

Kid Baltan’s experiments with electronic music

Filed under: Music,Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:12 pm

In 1956 Dutch electronics giant Philips decided to see if there was a future for electronic music. It created a Studio for Electronic Music (STEM, also the Dutch word for ‘voice’) and let composers/engineers Tom Dissevelt, Dick Raaijmakers and others work there.

The studio was part of Philips’ famous research facility NatLab, a name which aided Raaijmakers in finding the stagename Kid Baltan (the reverse of Dik Natlab). From 1956 to 1960 composers had access to the most sophisticated technology and used tape splicing to combine sounds into musical compositions. Raaijmakers explains on Youtube how it worked.

Somewhere during that time Edgar Varése worked for nine months at STEM on his Poème électronique.

Philips lost interest in the project. STEM was moved to the university of Utrecht and Dissevelt and Raaijmakers moved on to other projects. Today STEM lives on at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague where Raaijmakers taught Electronic and Contemporary Music from 1966 to 1995. Last week Kid Baltan died at a retirement home in the same city at the age of 83.

(Links: Weirdomusic, NRC. Photo by Wikimedia user Rosemoon, some rights reserved.)

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July 9, 2013

The Dutch love Lucie on their satellite navigation

Filed under: Automobiles,Technology by Orangemaster @ 11:45 am

I’ve spotted a trend amongst my Dutch friends who own cars. They use TomTom sat nav, incidentally a well-known Dutch brand, but prefer to drive to the soothing sounds of the Belgian Dutch (notice I didn’t say Flemish) female voice over the ‘standard Dutch’ voice from the Netherlands, also known as ABN (‘Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands’).

The reasons they gave me include “Belgian Dutch is sexier”, “The Dutch woman sounds depressed” and “I can understand the Belgian Dutch pronunciation more clearly”. Even a quick lurk at some Dutch language forums shows that ‘Lucie’ (The Dutch Belgian voice — here she is for real, scroll down a bit) is considered quite the favourite. Her voice is ‘warm’, while the Dutch voice is more staccato (‘choppy’) in my humble driving opinion. As for the depressed bit, the Dutch voice lowers in tone at the end of sentences as if she were bored telling you were to go all the time. It could be my foreign ears, it could be my friends’ predilection for the exotic, who knows.

Lucie, or Hildegard, which is her real name, recorded the TomTom voice in just one afternoon and earned back in the early noughties no more than 450 euro. Anyone want to chime in as to why they like Lucie better or why they would actually rather use the Dutch voice or even the male equivalent? Do tell.

(Photo Photo of TomTom by LettError, some rights reserved)

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July 6, 2013

Police officer sews Twitter handle onto uniform, forced to remove it

Filed under: Fashion,Technology by Branko Collin @ 3:33 pm

Sergeant Fred Stork is a beat cop in Eindhoven and is also on Twitter. He thought it would be fun to sew his Twitter handle, @brigadierSTRYPi onto his uniform, but after a reporter tweeted about needle work, his superiors told him to remove it.

A spokesperson told Algemeen Dagblad: “There are national regulations for a police uniform that an officer may not deviate from.” The spokesperson liked the initiative though and added, “who knows, one day this may be possible. But ‘The Hague’ must first give permission.”

The word ‘brigadier’ in the handle @brigadierSTRYPi means ‘sergeant’ and ‘STRYPi’ is likely a reference to the Strijp neighbourhood which is part of Fred Stork’s beat.

Interestingly, sergeant is the lowest police rank in the Netherlands where the insignia does not consist of stripes, but of a sword over a crown surrounded by laurel.

See also: Neighbourhood cops that twitter.

(Photo: politie.nl)

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July 2, 2013

Dutch prisons to be equipped with computers for inmates

Filed under: Technology by Orangemaster @ 11:41 am

Justice minister Fred Teeven is seriously considering putting computers in prison cells to cut down on reintegration teachers and guards. The computers will have little or no Internet (a little Internet sounds a lot like being a little bit pregnant) and no e-mail.

Sitting in a cell for your crimes with a computer sounds so similar to sitting in a cubicle with a computer at work (with Facebook bans and all) that it barely qualifies as jail time. I can picture a hacker doing jail time this way and having a blast. The smart money is on how fast porn will get on those computers.

So if technically there’s no Internet and e-mail, what’s the point? Playing Minecraft?How is that supposed to help anybody reintgrate into society? It sounds like another big waste of money to me.

(Link: phys.org, Photo by Ken Mayer, some rights reserved)

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July 1, 2013

Unofficial Android store to open in Arnhem later this year

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 8:30 pm

A manufacturer of customized Android-based devices is planning to open an Android store in November, Retailnews.nl writes.

GOCAL, the company behind the initiative, wants the store to become a place where customers can feel and experience Android-based devices from different manufacturers.

The company sees its O-Droid Store, which has not been endorsed by Google, as a mixture between an Apple Store and a Starbucks, meaning coffee will also be served. GOCAL also hopes to be able to offer products through its store that are not yet available in the Netherlands.

Androidics.nl adds that there are currently two official Android stores in Indonesia with another one planned in New Delhi. According to the site there are no indications that Google is planning Android stores outside of Asia.

(Illustration: Google Android logo)

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June 17, 2013

Bitcoin income shall be taxed, Dijsselbloem says

Filed under: Dutch first,Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:19 pm

Dutch people who accept payments in the new Internet currency Bitcoin will have to pay income tax on the funds they receive. Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem confirmed this two weeks ago after parliament had asked questions about Bitcoin, Nu.nl reports.

According to the minister, the “alternative virtual currency” cannot be seen as “electronic money” because it fails the definition set by the Dutch law. Dijsselbloem also reported that approximately 2% of all Bitcoin users in the world are Dutch, and that these Dutch owners possess about 20 million euro worth of Bitcoin. At the time of writing 1 Bitcoin represents about 75 euro.

Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet helpfully explains that the Wet financieel toezicht (the law on financial control) defines electronic money as a monetary value that

  • Is stored electronically.
  • Represents a claim on the person or organisation who issues it.
  • Is issued in exchange for money to make payments with.
  • Can be used to pay both the issuer and others.

Since Bitcoins do not represent a claim on the issuer and they aren’t necessarily issued in exchange for money, they aren’t electronic money. The reason you still have to pay income tax is simply because the law on income tax doesn’t mention money. Any form of income, whether that income consists of money, goods or Bitcoins, is susceptible to being taxed. The problems start when you have to pay these taxes though, because the Dutch tax office only accepts money. Your revenue will somehow have to be valued in euro before you can calculate how much you have to pay.

I can well imagine that the belastingdienst (tax office) isn’t going to chase down small time Bitcoin users just yet. I remember the first time I became self-employed and asked the belastingdienst for a VAT number. The man on the other end of the line laughed at me and said they could not be bothered to issue me my number for the couple of hundred guilders I expected to make that year.

Another complicating matter according to Engelfriet is that Bitcoins aren’t financial products either. That would mean you will have to pay VAT (‘btw’) over the Bitcoins you receive, which would make trading in Bitcoins less attractive for the Dutch.

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June 6, 2013

World’s first transatlantic 100 Gbps links Maastricht to Chicago

Filed under: Dutch first,Technology by Orangemaster @ 3:10 pm

Today, during the last day of the TERENA Networking Conference 2013 (TNC2013) held in Maastricht, the ‘largest and most prestigious European research networking conference’, featured the first-ever demonstration of a transatlantic 100 gigabits-per-second (Gbps or one billion bits per second) transmission link for research and education between North America and Europe.

Demonstrations of the intercontinental 100 Gbps link included big data transfers between Maastricht and Chicago, Illinois taking a few minutes instead of several hours over the public Internet. This first transatlantic 100 Gbps link for research and education will advance high-end projects such as the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the ITER fusion reactor in France and similar international programs.

Short but powerful, as the Dutch would say.

(Link: phys.org, Photo by Jacek Szymański, some rights reserved)

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May 31, 2013

Charging your phone at the train station in Rotterdam

Filed under: Dutch first,Technology by Orangemaster @ 7:00 pm

The folks at Dutch Rail (NS) are currently testing a post called the ‘ChagR’ (pic with complicated instructions) that would allow two commuters at a time to charge up their mobile phones for free while they wait for the train. Some 110,000 people take the train every day from Rotterdam Central Station, so if this were to be implemented, more posts would be a must.

Although Dutch Rail has said to be thrilled about the idea, commuter response has been apathetic, with only 40 people having used the post, which works for micro USB, iPhone and even ordinary batteries. The instructions are apparently long-winded and more testing is needed, but the idea is not bad.

I would rather charge my phone in the train and ideally plug in my laptop there as well. I picture easy smartphone theft as well and two people at a time is way too little charging power.

(Link: blog.phonehouse.nl, Photo of train by Flickr user UggBoy hearts UggGirl, some rights reserved)

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May 24, 2013

Ethically sourced smartphone looking for pre-orders

Filed under: Sustainability,Technology by Branko Collin @ 11:22 pm

A Dutch company has started building a mobile phone that they say is made from conflict-free materials by well-paid workers while also addressing what happens once the phone has reached the end of its life.

The phone is called the Fairphone and the manufacturer is still looking for customers who would like to pre-order one. Apparently they need 5,000 orders to start production. Currently they’ve sold 2,400 phones, 48% of their goal. The pledge drive lasts for 19 more days. Techcrunch calls this the world’s first ethically sourced smartphone.

The Fairphone runs on Android, uses a quad core processor, has dual SIM trays and both a front and rear camera. The price is 325 euro.

UPDATE 6 June: they have their 5,000 orders and have crowdfunded 1,6 million euro.

(Video: Vimeo / Fairphone, Image: crop from the video)

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