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.
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!
Update: the new version of the website is now live; all comments have been retained and copied over from the old version.
Below is the original message:
A new version of yktoo.com will go live on Monday August 19, 2019. Not so much has changed in the looks of the site, but inside it’s totally different.
In this regard its RSS feed links will change:
https://yktoo.com/en/blog/atom (Atom) or https://yktoo.com/en/blog/rss (RSS)
A while ago I’ve made a decision to migrate off Disqus, which is arguably the most popular external commenting system for website owners.
We’re four days into a record-breaking heatwave here. An “orange alert” (code oranje) has been declared in almost every province of the Netherlands:
The 75 years old absolute temperature record established back in 1944 has been broken yesterday.
The version 2.2.2 of Sound Switcher Indicator has been released. It immediately follows the version 2.2.1 and includes a hotfix for the PulseAudio auto-reconnect feature.
Anyone who has been in the software development business for a while, is certainly familiar with the hassle of arranging, keeping track of, pulling, committing etc. of dozens of local Git repositories being used or developed.