September 15, 2011

2012 government budget hack explained

Filed under: IT by Branko Collin @ 7:24 pm

Ha ha! As Dutch News reports:

The government’s 2012 spending plans have been leaked on the internet, a day ahead of their official publication.

A spokesman for the finance ministry has confirmed the leaked documents are genuine. They were apparently found by hackers on a part of the government website which was not protected by a password.

And here’s how NOS Nieuws explains the hack:

[Somebody] typed in the address of last year’s budget, and changed ‘2010’ in ‘2011’.

The original budget busting tweet can be found here.

Traditionally the yearly budget is presented on Prinsjesdag, Day of the Princelings, after the Queen addresses both houses of parliament in joint session. Reporters who promise to not divulge the contents of the budget get an advance copy—others just wait until the traditional leak. In 2007, the budget was sent to the press in the form of a USB stick.

Dutch News has the low down on the contents of the budget, by the way.

(Photo of marechaussée practicing at the beach for a Prinsjesdag parade by the ever prolific Facemepls, some rights reserved)

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September 14, 2011

Dutch punk band Heideroosjes calls it a day

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 9:57 pm

Arguably one of the Netherlands’ best known punk bands internationally, De Heideroosjes from Horst aan de Maas, Limburg, have decided to stop making music after 22 years. Their last album entitled Cease Fire will be out on 21 November. The band started out called Fire, so this last album has a full circle ring to it.

Founded in 1989, the band has been on Epitath records in California for years, arguably one of the world’s best punk labels. They sing in English, Dutch, German and the dialect Limburgish (see below). Contrary to so many other bands, De Heideroosjes have had the exact same band members ever since they started, and they claim that stopping won’t be easy to do.

And in 1998 friend and music lover Guuz Hoogaerts wrote their biography entitled ‘De Heideroosjes, een teringtyfustakkeband’ (‘De Heideroosjes, a freakinfuckinfantastic band’)(rough translation, pardon the pun, the Dutch bit is in reference to one of their older songs), being a big fan of good music from Limburg. The book tells us how the band earned their internal status not by ‘blowing the right people’, but through hard work, great songs and remaining true to their ideals.

Even Lady Gaga actually ‘ripped off’ the intro of De Heideroosjes’ song ‘We Are Share the Same Sun’ in Electric Chapel. Follow the above link and compare, I’m convinced.

De Heideroosjes – Jerry rules in the land of the free (in English)

De Heideroosjes – Boore Lul (‘Dumbass farmer, rougly) (in Limburgs)

De Heideroosjes – Wurst und Käse (Sausage and Cheese) (in German)

(Link: volkskrant.nl)

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September 13, 2011

Blinded by false research about meat eaters

Filed under: Food & Drink,Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:02 pm
anti-meatjpg

Professor Diederik Stapel from the University of Tilburg was recently suspended for making up research that the media actually took seriously and wrote about. The university is apparently looking into his previous ‘research’.

His latest nonsense that hit the papers was that meat eaters are more ill-mannered (aggressive, selfish, asocial, you know) than vegetarians. Professor Roos Vonk of the Radboud University in Nijmegen ran with this story and got nailed for doing so, once the media figured out it was made up. She claimed that she never thought for a moment that it could be false. Vonk explained that her expectations were that vegetarians were more empathic towards others than meat eaters, which turns out is 100% pure crapola. Vonk used to chair the animal activitst group Wakker Dier and is a member of the Party for the Animals. Call me crazy, but I suspect she’s a vegetarian.

She candidly admitted to have been stupid about trusting this research as she did have some doubts about Stapel’s methods. Human behaviour has shown throughout history that people believe what sounds good to them all the time.

And if Vonk truly believes that meat eaters are douche bags, she’ll want to buy into any nonsense that says what she would like to think could be true, making her vulnerable and gullible. You could argue that by not eating meat you’re doing a good thing, but placing yourself above others for that reason makes you a douche bag and in this case, a blinded, crappy scientist. It insults the intelligent, open-minded vegetarians and vegans out there that are not douche bags, for starters.

Oh and if you need to believe that your lifestyle choices are better by denigrating others, you’re also a douche bag.

UPDATE: Vonk eats meat sometimes, albeit organic. She admitted on Dutch telly that if the research had shown the opposite or that it didn’t matter what people ate, she wouldn’t have bothered with it. She also thinks meat eaters have a superiority complex, while she’s in fact the one thinking she’s a superior douche bag.

(Link: www.gelderlander.nl, Photo: veggieunwrapped.com)

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September 12, 2011

Zone 5300: Fool’s Gold special

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 8:23 am

Woot! Fool’s Gold gets six pages in the autumn edition of Zone 5300, instead of its usual two. Like.

Frits Jonker and Milan Hulsing are assisted this time by Erik van der Heijden who waxes lyrically (and analytically) about his collection of golden age advertising key fobs. The golden age of advertising key fobs, that is, i.e. the late sixties.

There’s also a long interview with the comics intendant of the Fonds BKVB (the state sponsored Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture), Gert-Jan Pos, who got to give a lot of cash to comics makers in the Netherlands in the past two and a half years, and whose office is about to end.

Until September 21 the foundation is organising an exhibition of up and coming comics artists, among which Artez Zwolle graduate Jasper Rietman (illustration) who hopes to be published abroad in the near future.

Marcel RuijtersThere are a bunch of long(ish) stories by Marcel Ruijters (illustration, about the chess games of Teresa of Avila), Rob van Barneveld (invisible guinea pigs), and Maaike Hartjes (weddings in Hong Kong).

Another long comic is a story from Pieter van Oudheusden and Jeroen Janssen’s upcoming album (as yet nameless) loosely based on the all too short life of “perhaps the Brian Wilson of the nineteenth century” (as Van Oudheusden puts it), Franz Schubert. The short story Der Tod und das Mädchen (illustration) focuses on how Schubert got syphilis.

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September 11, 2011

Bettie Serveert reunites with drummer for band’s twentieth birthday

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 3:21 pm

Twenty years ago Bettie Serveert was the sort of indie rock band that made producers everywhere pay attention, but they never managed to surpass the success of their debut album Palomine.

Yesterday the band reunited with former drummer Berend Dubbe for a special birthday gig on which they played the entire Palomine album at Paradiso in Amsterdam. According to 24 Oranges reader Jeroen Mirck, who was there, “Bettie Serveert played songs like Tomboy, Balentine, Kid’s Allright and Brain-Tag with as much urgency and as dynamically as in the early nineties, as if the songs had been written yesterday.”

The name “Bettie Serveert” means “Betty to serve” and is a reference to Betty Stöve, a Dutch player who managed to reach the Wimbledon tennis finals in 1977.

Listen to title track Palomine here.

(Photo: bettieserveert.com)

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September 10, 2011

Laura Dekker in Australia

Filed under: General,Sports by Branko Collin @ 11:23 am

Two weeks ago ‘sailor girl’ Laura Dekker reached the shores of the Northern Territory of Australia, and not a moment too soon.

Her boat Guppy was in desperate need of repairs as both the genoa and the rudder had broken down. In Darwin she re-united with her father who had flown in to celebrate her sixteenth birthday (September 20). From that day on she has about a year and week to complete her global circumnavigation if she wants to become the unofficial record holder of being the youngest person solo sailing around the world.

In the past months Dekker sailed past the country of her birth, New Zealand (she has dual citizenship), even though she professed a desire to visit. Says stuff.co.nz:

Her manager, Australian Lyall Mercer, [said] today Dekker did not take her New Zealand nationality lightly and had especially embraced it since starting to feel “disconnected” from The Netherlands after courts there stopped her from embarking on her trip when she was 13.

“Yet she has failed to find any support from New Zealand, unable even to source a New Zealand flag that she wants to fly from her boat ‘Guppy’ for the duration of her trip,” Mercer said.

I wonder if there is not more to that story. In August 2009, Elsevier reported that the New Zealand authorities had threatened to seize Laura’s boat for reckless behaviour if she ever entered one of the country’s ports while sailing alone.

The best place to follow Dekker’s exploits is still her blog, which she keeps in both English and Dutch. Dekker spends her days playing the guitar, writing her book, and reading. Still no word on if she has ever touched her homework.

See also: more stories about Laura Dekker.

(Photo of an entirely unrelated boat by the US Navy)

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September 9, 2011

Satnav on smartphone guided by music

Filed under: Music,Technology by Orangemaster @ 4:53 pm

Aspiring boffins at the Eindhoven University of Technology have developed a smartphone app for Android that helps cyclists navigate to their destination by using music. By using the phone’s satnav, a cyclist can listen to their favourite tunes the way they always do, but, for example, when they have to turn left, the music will be harder on the left, allowing the cyclist to focus on the road.

The application can be used around the world and can be downloaded as of next week for lucky Android users. iPhone users will have to wait, something that is often the other way round.

I’ve seen or heard nothing of this app, but I already have some issues with it. Using satnav (GPS function) on a smartphone sucks energy out of a battery like a vampire sucks blood (comes with a warning, too), so I cannot imagine using something like this for a real long bike ride that would require any serious directions. Is this something we really need? Will the app respond fast enough or even properly? Some of the best satnavs for cars have problems with certain countries and small roads. When do people need a map when they’re on a bike? That’s right, for a long ride. By then your phone will have died and you’ll have to sing the rest of the way. And I’m not even going to get into people who are hard of hearing or easily distracted.

If anyone uses this in the near future, please tell us about it.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl)

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September 8, 2011

100 years of Fokker airplanes and some beer

Filed under: Aviation,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 1:23 pm

Two weeks ago in Haarlem I popped into Dutch café in den Uiver, named after KLM’s Douglas DC-2 airplane, Uiver to have a beer and look around again at the cool Dutch airplane memorabilia on the walls. Lo and behold, that weekend besides Haarlem’s Jazz Fest, it was also the Centennial Festival of the Fokker Spin or ‘spider’, the flight of Anthony Fokker’s airplane ‘Spin’ that flew over St. Bavo Church 100 years ago, an aircraft he built and flew when he was just 20.

Although bankrupt in 1996, Fokker airplanes are still around today in KLM’s fleet and are an important part of Dutch aviation history. The Fokker Trimotor, as used by Richard Byrd to fly over the North Pole, is probably the best known of his planes.

For the occasion, Haarlem’s young beer brewery Jopen, of which I could go on about with many stories, brewed a Fokker Spin beer. In den Uiver had it on tap, and it had a proper bitter yet sharp after taste. But never ever drink and fly.

(Link: cloggie.org)

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September 7, 2011

A fire evacuation song for kids

Filed under: Music,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:36 pm

A Dutch site about children, pregnancy and the likes, peuteren.nl is offering the free download of a song children can sing when they leave a burning school building or during a fire drill.

According to the site, the story goes that someone somewhere wondered if there was a song the kids could sing to keep their focus on getting outside in a stressful situation. Here’s ‘Het Ontruimingslied’ (‘The Evacuation Song’), easy to sing for Dutch kids as young as two-years-old.

Someone who works with kids please tell me if this is a brilliant idea or just plain weird, I honestly don’t know.

An excerpt:

We moeten nu naar buiten
Stap voor stap in de rij
Iedereen verzamelen
De deur is al nabij

(roughly)
We have to go outside
Step by step in a file
Everybody gather together
The door is not too far

For the Dutch teens who do understand German, there’s always the punk rock classic by Extrabreit, Hurra hurra die Schule brennt (Hurrah Hurrah The School is Burning).

(Link: nieuws.nl)

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September 6, 2011

A big bike full of kids back from school

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 12:37 pm

De Cafe Racer has launched this 10-seater school bus which comes equipped with pedals for “most of its occupants.” I think this means some kids just sit there, but I don’t quite get that.

This eco-friendly vehicle is powered entirely by pedalling kids, although the driver can switch on an actual motor if they want to get going.

The company also makes bikes with a bar like the beer bikes we posted about. Then, there’s also cargo bikes for 8 kids, with an adult peddling along.

The cities and towns in the Netherlands have a very well divided space for cyclists and drivers. When I used to work as a bike courier, before bike paths in Montréal, Canada, you had to cycle on the right-hand side of the road and be very aware of fast traffic around you that may even hit you (happened at least three times, once even caught on film). Cars hit your handle bars and send you flying (BTW I wore a bike helmet). Or there’s that time someone opened a car door on a fellow bike courier roommate and the pointy end of the door ended up in his chest, sending him to the hospital.

In the Netherlands you can bike without fear of cars on the bigger bike paths, although racing scooters are the new danger. However, it is relatively safe for these kinds of bigger bikes, even on busy streets since so many people cycle in general and cars are more aware of cyclists. And traffic is much slower, too.

(Link: thenextweb.com, Photo: De Cafe Racer)

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