I’ve made a sampler of the Dutch texts that were published at Project Gutenberg in August and September. In a month I want to attend the Communia workshops in Amsterdam on how to establish the public domain status of works, and my plan is to print a couple of these booklets and distribute them there. However, I figured other people might want to sample Project Gutenberg too, so I uploaded my Nederlandse Project Gutenberg Reader to The Internet Archive for all to read. It contains fragments from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Jules Verne’s Cesar Cascabel, C. Joh. Kieviet’s Gouden Daden (history), Herman Robbers’ De Vreemde Plant, J.J. Cremers’ Betuwsche Novellen, C.S. Adama van Scheltema’s Mei-Droom (drama), and a short piece by W.-F. Rondou on how to recognize counterfeit honey. You can download it in PDF and ODT (OpenOffice.org) formats.
I can make these pretty easily, so should there be any interest for such samplers, just let me know and I’ll produce one every two months or so. The sampler is set up as an actual booklet. OpenOffice.org Writer let me set wide inner margins, and Acrobat Reader 9 will let me print it.
September 21, 2008
Dutch literature at Project Gutenberg
Tags: Kieviet, Project Gutenberg, public domain
September 20, 2008
NRC as English language daily
Last Tuesday Dutch evening paper NRC Handelsblad launched an online, English language version of itself. The paper will publish a “selection of news items, background pieces, reports and opinion pieces.” Located at http://nrc.nl/international/, the online English NRC partners with amongst others German magazine Der Spiegel, which has had its own English online section for a while now, and Robin Pascoe’s Dutchnews.nl. The Dutchnews.nl staff will take care of the copy editing and journalistic translation, according to NRC’s press release (Dutch).
NRC International is aimed at “foreigners who cannot read Dutch, and who are interested in quality Dutch reporting.”
See also: a short history of NRC at Wikipedia.
Tags: English, NRC newspaper
September 19, 2008
Recently discovered Jewish interior will not be wrecked for now
A uniquely preserved WWII Jewish living room in Amsterdam will stay intact a little bit longer. The room which we wrote about last week, was discovered last year by a student at that time Alexander Westra (currently of the University of Amsterdam). AT5 reports that Lebo, the company that now owns the house, has stopped the wrecking works of the property.
The house used to belong to banker Korijn who died in 1942, after which his entire family was deported to the concentration camps where they died at the hands of the Nazis. One source called the room “more authentic than the Anne Frank House.” After the war, the house at the J.J. Viottastraat in Amsterdam came into the hands of Catholic theology students who barely touched the room, although Westra apparently did uncover some traces of parties.
In the next month and a half the owner will look at possibilities to preserve the room which is built in the Amsterdamse School style. One possibility is to turn the luxurious room into a museum.
According to a spokesperson for Het Schip, the museum for the Amsterdamse School, focus for this architectural movement usually lies on exteriors. To answer a question asked earlier by one our readers, Jay Vos, the spokesperson did not know of any books that focussed solely on Amsterdamse School interiors, although the museum is currently working on a book that will also document these interiors.
The students who lived there recorded a corny video invitation to their new year’s bash in the living room last year, which 24 Oranges discovered at that wonder-wasteland of archeology, YouTube.
Photo: Alexander Westra, republished with permission. Westra sent us several photos, a selection of which we showed in our earlier article.
Tags: Amsterdam, Amsterdamse School, holocaust, interior design, Korijn
September 17, 2008
Amphibious bicycle: GBO’s Di-Cycle
Dicycles are nothing new, and if you count styrofoam treadmills neither are floating dicycles. But I have yet to see something like GBO’s bike path hogging concept, amazingly called Di-Cycle, which can do both.
This true amphibuous bike won Helmond’s GBO the Brabantse Spelen design competition in 2005. Unfortunately, the design has never left the conceptual phase, but fortunately you can still go gawk at it at the Fiets exhibition that runs until October 5.
See also: Bike your house around.
Photo by Designhuis / Patrick Meis. Via PSFK and a long string of other design blogs.
September 16, 2008
Gigabit internet connection to the houseboat
A quick technology lesson for the easily intimidated: an Internet connection speed of 1 gigabit per second translates to a single high definition movie off the internet onto your PC in a minute. In theory.
A recent study shows that the Netherlands is the country with third best broadband Internet connection, after Japan and Sweden.
Jealous cries were heard from across the globe, bemoaning the lack of local governments’ willingness to innovate, but the position of the Netherlands has probably less to do with the innovative nature of its citizens and more with the way the country urbanised during the industrial revolution. Many railroads not just connecting cities but cutting through right to the city centres makes it easy to lay cables, especially if this network of rails is already owned by the government.
Meanwhile, a company called Draka has developed fibernet connectors for houseboat owners, so that they too may be connected to the Citynet initiative which aims to hook up almost all of Amsterdam to a 1 gigabyte per second fiber optics network before 2010. Shown here is Olivier Ax in front of his houseboat. So what do these owners of the first fiber optic connections do with all that speed? Whispers around the Internet say they first throttle it to 20 megabit per second, because the faster subscriptions are too expensive.
Photo: Draka. Also via Toby Sterling.
Tags: broadband, cable, fiber, fiber optics, house boats, houseboats, Internet
September 14, 2008
Spectacular theatre group Dogtroep to close shop
Dogtroep = wild theatre, outdoors, stunts, “live locations”, pyrotechnics, using the scenery, spectacle, and none of these for much longer. Citing reduced subsidies, the life-blood of their expensive type of theatre, the “troupe” will give one more series of shows called To Be To Not To be, and then quit. Their last show runs from September 15 to October 5.
Says Curving Normality in a farewell review:
Combining abstract narrative with the outstanding locations of their performances, the absurd visual compositions and daring stunts made their performances unsurpassed. I’ve seen them flood a ships-dock with a million liters of water (yes, some in the audience had some seriously wet feet), paraglide inside theater Carré (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), but also perform more tender scenes using small light after sunset in their out-door locations.
As always, the location the Dogtroep selected for yesterday’s performance was closely tied to their narrative. Using the outdoor location provided by the remains of the old steel factory ‘Montan’, the actors literally dug to find the unknown history of this forlorn place. Will they, the Dogtroep, become such a place themselves, or is there another message to be seen in this? As they say for themselves, the basis for this performance “at the edge of existence” are the plans, personages, and dreams that emerge from the crater they dig themselves.
Via BN/De Stem (Dutch).
September 13, 2008
Copyright judges: “copying unnecessarily is always bad”
Copyright law professor Dirk Visser interviewed 17 judges of so-called “intellectual property” cases (copyrights, patents, trademarks) and found some remarkable similarities:
- Cases are mostly decided in the first instance (usually of a Kort Geding, the fast track for law suits that demand speedy attention),
- Judges feel that creating confusion or misleading is always wrong,
- Judges feel that copying in itself is not bad, but copying unnecessarily is.
Unfortunately the article with the results is behind a pay wall, so I have to rely on this summary by Boek 9 (Dutch). The suggestion though seems to be that cases are decided on moral, rather than sound legal or economic grounds.
According to Boek 9, public research and expert opinion barely influence the judges—their experience being that such studies and statements are almost always imprecise, manipulated, one-sided or contradictory.
Tags: copyright, judges, law, patents, trademarks
September 12, 2008
Woman sues over lamp bearing her name
This is the hanging lamp Bettine, named after Dutch table tennis diva Bettine Vriesekoop and made of 315 ping pong balls. It was created by Diaz Kleefstra and is being sold by him, and those of you who religiously follow design blogs will yell “old hat!” The lamp’s been out for a while.
What’s new is that Vriesekoop is suing Kleefstra for the use of her famous name. “It’s not about the money,” she tells Algemeen Dagblad. Oh, it’s so about the money, her lawyer says. Looks like they’re in the same newspaper but not on the same page. It’ll be interesting to see what intellectual property right the lawyer will claim, but as happens with so many of these cases it will probably all end in arbitration and settlement. In the meantime Kleefstra has removed the name from his website, but not the lamp.
Photo: Diaz Kleefstra.
Tags: lamps, law, ping pong, table tennis
September 10, 2008
Life-like drawing of an abyss by Julian Beever in Rotterdam
English (says Wikipedia) artist Julian Beever went to Rotterdam this week to draw one of his world famous optical illusions for insurance company Centraal Beheer at the “Koopgoot” (Shopping Trough, not the real name of this mall). Check out his many other stunning trompe-l’oeils.
The text “Even Apeldoorn bellen” is the company’s catch-phrase and means something like “now would be a good time to call my insurance company.”
Photographer unknown. Via Advertolog and Dutch Cow Girls (Dutch).
Tags: Centraal Beheer, chalk, England, Julian Beever, street art
September 9, 2008
Bucks for biking
Biking to work can net you 5 euro a day from 22 to 26 September, if you live along one of the five designated routes of the Fiets Filevrij campaign. The organizers, local and national governments and cyclists’ unions, hope to call attention to the use of bicycles as a means to reduce the rampant traffic jam problem. After registration participants have to print out their own bar code which they must then scan at booths along the bicycling routes. The routes are all between cities, and therefore longish.
Photo: Fiets Filevrij. Via Dagelinks (Dutch).
Tags: driving, incentives, traffic jams