Charge your mobile by swinging
Photo by Koen Laureij.
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!
Mortgage interest rates in the Netherlands are at record low
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.
Sugar cylinders and coffee hemispheres
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!
Xiaomi Mijia E-Ink thermometer review
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.
My entrepreneurshipVAT number for zzp’ers is (finally) to be replaced
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.
Querying any vehicle’s data by its number plate
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).
Google: quick and paranoid
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.
Second dan Aikido Aikikai
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.
Sound Switcher Indicator is granted a free JetBrains license
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 yktoo.com website code goes public!
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.
A kind of magic: two-sided conventional USB
Recently I’ve come across a couple of USB cables of Chinese origin (what else).
Cables that are a real innovation in my view. Carrying just regular USB Type A or Micro USB connectors, they can be plugged in both ways!