Netherlands and more

Blog about life in Holland

How to make a ham holder

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This is a how-to for making a jamón holder (a.k.a. ham stand or jamonera) from IKEA household products.

After all those jamón (Spanish dry-cured ham) stories by Alex Exler I’ve read, I felt an urge to give it a try. And one day I saw one in the local grocery store: Villar Jamon Serrano Reserva, weight ca. 7 kg for € 49.95. It is just advisable to get acquainted with jamón by tasting its cheapest varieties.

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Happy New Year (again)!

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Exactly one year ago, on January 1, 2012 I was late for the “New Year’s dive”, Nieuwjaarsduik, because it took me too long to find a parking space). Then I had to dive in solitude.

In case you have no idea what it is about: Nieuwjaarsduik is a stunning event when live people plunge into the water of a temperature slightly above the freezing point, organized in Holland nationwide by Unox. The main diving venue is in Scheveningen, near by the Hague, and people here run right into the North Sea.

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My scripts on GitHub

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Finally I got to create a public repository on GitHub for all my public domain utility tools (I had to fiddle quite a while with git filter-branch to extract all the ‘safe for public’ stuff from my home repo).

At the moment the following four scripts are available:

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Ubuntu/GNOME 3 XML wallpaper creation

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I already published a script that sets a random image file as desktop wallpaper. It has only one downside: you have to run it every time you want to rotate your wallpaper.

However GNOME since 2.28 allows assigning a slide show as wallpaper by providing an image list in XML format. There you can specify the order and duration for each image. Moreover, you can even define a transition from one image to another.

So I decided to create a simple script that generates an XML file for a given set of images and, optionally, sets that as the current wallpaper. It requires GNOME 3+ or Ubuntu (11.10 or later).

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Star Wars I + 3D + D-Box

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At last, yesterday I’ve tried rocking-moving-trembling D-Box chairs I posted about more than a year ago. I saw an advertisement in a local newspaper about Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace reissued in 3D and with D-BOX Motion Code™.

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Happy New Year!

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Happy New two thousand twelfth!

For me this year brought significant changes, and I hope they’re for the better.

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Google Music Integration into Ubuntu

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About a month ago I posted about Google Music cloud music storage service opening for public (which is still officially available in the US only).

Uploading 130 GB of music to the cloud has completed in about four days, so now I can enjoy the whole collection online from anywhere—although with some shortcomings (which are perhaps to be eliminated once the service goes out of the beta).

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Johannes Heesters

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Singer and actor Johannes Heesters, who was born in Amersfoort, is again in local news.

He turns 108 on the coming Monday, December 5, which he wanted to celebrate by singing operetta. However about a week ago he got fever and felt unwell, so he is in the hospital now. His 80 year old daughter Wiesje Herold commented: “In his 108 Jopie is no longer the youngest. But he is a jack.”

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