Today I’ve received a parcel from the almighty AliExpress. A pretty puzzling one.
You’d be puzzled, too. What do you think an “inflatable treasure” is?
Today I’ve received a parcel from the almighty AliExpress. A pretty puzzling one.
You’d be puzzled, too. What do you think an “inflatable treasure” is?
The Dutch will never stop to impress me with their ingenuity.
Being sustainable is now trending in Europe—and in Holland in particular. So in June 2019 my client, NS, has installed a special kind of swing at the Utrecht Centraal railway station.
This new attraction was presented during the “Sustainability Week” (Duurzame Week), and it can charge your mobile phone!
Interest rates on mortgages in Holland have already been sliding for about seven years.
Dutch banks traditionally update their interest rates in August following the propositions by the Ministry of Finance.
According to De Hypotheekshop, the average mortgage IR is 2.18% as of end of August 2019.
Today I’ve experienced a real paradigm shift. As I’ve found out, cubes are not the only shape you find sugar formed into (which has been my conviction for more then four decades to now). There also exist sugar cylinders!
I like Xiaomi gadgets and own quite a bunch of them.
I’ve been using their thermo-hygrometer Xiaomi Mijia for about a year now. This neat gadget provides temperature and relative humidity readings.
Each legal entity in the Netherlands receives a special identification number called btw-nummer shortly after the registration (btw is Dutch for “value-added tax”).
This number is necessary for invoicing, both domestic and international, and—obviously—for VAT payments.
So what’s so special about it? Well, it turns out that if you’re a self-employed entrepreneur, your VAT number is based upon your BSN identifier. Which is quite a blunder from the privacy point of view.
The Netherlands has a public service that provides information about nearly any vehicle registered in the country, given its number plate.
The service is called OVI (Online Voertuig Informatie or “Online Vehicle Information”) and is being run by the State Traffic Service RDW (Rijksdienst voor het Wegverkeer), whose responsibility encompasses road infrastructure as well as vehicle certification, including mandatory periodic checkups (APK).
There are sometimes things in the software world world that I, being a developer, still fail to understand.
One of such things happened when I’ve made the yktoo.com repository public on GitHub.
Even though it’s been more than a year, I feel I need to mend this.
On March 19, 2016 I’ve passed my first dan Aikido Aikikai exam. Then, a few months later, I received an official dan certificate from Hombu Dojo.
JetBrains, the maker of the most intelligent and versatile IDEs (IDEA, WebStorm, PyCharm, and others), has recognised my humble contribution to open-source software in the form of the Sound Switcher Indicator, and kindly granted me a free All Products Pack license.
The source code for yktoo.com 3.0 is stable enough to be open for general public, which is something I was going to do from the beginning.
You can now view it on GitHub.