Netherlands and more

Available connectors

All available connectors in this TV are located at its rear side:

Namely they are:

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As time passes by, TV diagonals grow, so do our appetites. TV screens of 50-55 inch, which seemed huge just a few years ago, are the mainstream nowadays and can be found in any decent electronics store. They also provide the best size to price ratio, as I reckon.

But screw the ratio! We’re going to be looking at a 75" monster Samsung UE75HU7500 today, the exact model number is Samsung UE75HU7500LXXN (it’s a Dutch variant of the device since I’m living in the Netherlands).

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It’s been a while since my last gig report, time to catch up with the latest developments in the Dutch rock world. I’ve a perfect occasion as I’ve seen two live rock legends.

The project called The Gentle Storm, which is just one year old, were presenting their debut album The Diary in the Amsterdam club Melkweg (I’ve seen Pagan’s Mind there before).

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A short announcement about a new subscription option.

If the term RSS seems completely foreign to you, there’s now a Good Old E-mail subscription option available for those who want to stay current with my blog. This way you will receive automatic updates by e-mail. Of course, you can unsubscribe at any time.

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This year I’ve visited Ghent Light Festival, just as I promised a year ago.

The festival, which is held once every three years, proved to be immensely popular. Streets, hotels, restaurants of this small town could hardly cope with the horde of light-worshippers.

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We had a great time celebrating the New 2015, together with our Russian and Ukrainian friends.

Here, outside of our homelands, we’re still friends, you know.

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So we’ve settled in Houten. It’s time to go in particulars on how we sought a house.

Looking for a house has a special name in Dutch: huizenjacht, which literally translates as “househunt”. During the hunt we gradually figured out a number of criteria:

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In my last post I told you about upgrading an iMac with a solid-state drive (SSD). These drives are very fast (read throughput is usually ca. 500 MB/s if connected via a 6 Gbps SATA III) and completely silent.

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It’s been exactly four delightful years when the HDD in my iMac 27" informed me it couldn’t take it any longer. “Disk I/O error”, it said.

At that moment I already had plans to upgrade it with an SSD (solid-state drive). Those are much snappier and completely silent since there are no moving parts inside.

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While euro and dollar are enjoying a record growth in Russia, we’re enjoying one of the warmest autumns on record here in Holland, yet again. Whatever caused it, sanctions or global warming.

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I’ve finally managed to move my blog from Blogger onto a self-developed platform.

The new address of the blog is: yktoo.com/blog.

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Even though I’ve now settled in Houten, I keep visiting Amersfoort now and then. I’m still doing aikido with Joginder Singh.

On September 7^th our dojo gave a demo on a “district day” Vathorstdag 2014 (Vathorst is the district in Amersfoort our dojo is in), just like six years ago.

I didn’t participate this time, but was filming instead. There was also another cam, so the idea was to put both footages together nicely, and I volunteered for that.

I’ve tried a number of video editors for Linux, most of them proved to be utterly unusable (Pitivi wouldn’t allow me to edit track properties, OpenShot lacked the very basic timeline shift function, Shotcut quit abruptly after adding a clip, Kino is discontinued long time ago). Finally I’ve tried Kdenlive, and that one is absolutely fantastic! I was surprised how quick and hassle-free video editing can be nowadays. All in all it took me about a couple of hours, including the final render.

The result is under the cut:

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