Photo by JillWellington.
It’s a known fact some common words in one language may sound pretty rude or even offensive in another. Furthermore, some words in the same language can be confusing.
Take Dutch and English.
If, for example, one typed “Buurvrouw, wat een mooie koolmezen, maar wat doet mijn haan op uw ezel?” into Google Translate, he’d be presented the following translation:
Good morning dear patient! Please tell me, what do you observe on this photo?
It’s a short how-to on inscribing your jo (wooden stick), tanto (wooden dagger), bokken (wooden sword)—or anything else made of wood—with an arbitrary text or image.
MySQL Workbench is a very handy administration tool for the MySQL database server. Unfortunately, it has been removed from mainline Ubuntu repositories as of Ubuntu 19.
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?
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!
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).
