English

Sorry people. The Onion made me realize what I’ve subjected you guys to all this time:

I did a small survey with James of publicly available government data to see what the obvious targets would be for an interesting mashup. It’s an interesting but very limited landscape.

Previous efforts of privatizing Dutch rail failed miserably. In 1999 Lovers Rail ran competing trains along a couple of Dutch tracks 1. I was just starting my studies in Delft and did a daily commute from Amsterdam where I was living back then 2, so I remember their service, though I never actually used it.

Here’s a list of some of my favorite things from SxSW:

Een redelijk zachte review van de nieuwe NS-applicatie op Marketingfacts (ook Tweakers).

It’s good to see not all newspapers are caught in a stupor the Japanese ones seem to actually be seeing their common interest and making something sort of useful to their readers.

Monday I’ll be attending This Happened Utrecht #2 1. This Happened is organized by Ianus, Alex and Kars as part of the This Happened franchise and the best description I’ve heard is that “it’s like Pecha Kucha with actual content.”

I started the week out nicely with a lunch lecture from Kie Ellens about art in the public space. It took me some time to properly code it, but it is online finally (and mostly in English):

I’d promised the guys over at the fixie hyve some decent quality pictures of my bike. Shooting pictures of a fixie is something of a thing. So yesterday I went out and shot some:

Biked to the Hague yesterday and spent part of the day coworking at my friends over at Nomadz. Just when I had to leave for our appointment at the notary Peter dropped by and demoed some very cool applications on the Android G1 phone he’d just gotten from T-Mobile.

Beirut announced European tour dates of which 5th of May they will be playing in Paradiso, Amsterdam. Yesterday, I got myself two tickets for that gig, which should be fantastic.

Today I got the idea and I think I’ve seen spectrum plots like these before but I couldn’t quite figure out where. So I dumped all my blogposts and got into Processing to plot it out. It should look something like this but less ugly:

I talked with Max Whitney at 25C3 for a bit to learn about how NYC Resistor came to be. The story seems to go something like this 1:

I am currently busy doing a project together with Tam Tam where we are tasked with developing a set of five widgets for Dutch government (assigned by the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations) as a proof of concept of how government data can be used. We’re developing widgets mostly because they are seen as modern, easy to develop and they can be deployed very near to users.

As per Kottke fished out of my iCal and my Dopplr, hat tip Mark:

Occasionally some very beautiful things here in Berlin between the grey and cold 1:

Picture by Zarko Drincic (CC by-nd license)

Shot a guerilla Christmas vid of the gang after last Thursday’s training:

In this podcast Adam Greenfield talks about everyware and contactless transit payment systems. At time index 15:33 the following question is asked: “But as a New Yorker would you want that to happen?”

These last couple of months we’ve been having regular music lessons. It’s a lot of fun and we are making crazy progress.

The Guardian shows a clip of the recent armed confrontations in Hebron due to the riots by Jewish settlers. I had read earlier about B’Tselem handing out small camera’s to Palestinians so they could record settler aggression and this is a clip that came out of that program.

I recently bought the full version of RJDJ and it is a very fun way to create a dynamic soundgarden based on your environment. I also started using last.fm again even though they don’t have an iPhone player available yet in the Netherlands 1.

So I get bored on a Friday night and I want a decent way to watch music videos. Rather than look for a service which provides this 1, I decided to revive our own toy of a couple years ago, so it’s alive (again!): LastTV.

Last Tuesday I attended the Service Design Network’s conference in the Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. I’ve been interested in Service Design for a while but I didn’t really know what it was all about. This conference was the ideal way to learn more about this field.

As can be read in this thread we are holding the next Open Beer Delft at our coworking office next to the Delft Central train station: Studio 4 Stagioni.

In some of Adam Greenfield’s backpages “Whatever happened to serendipity?” he recounts how he used to scrounge for punk rock records and how the difficulty and uncertainty of the experience was part of what made it worthwhile:

I called with the taxman yesterday to clarify some stuff. I had surmised that profesionally relevant books could be deducted as expenses. Now it seems there is a very fine distinction.

Last day in San Francisco we went up to Twin Peaks for this absolutely stunning view over the city:

Freshly one day back in from San Francisco some adjustments need to be made. The time difference has been reduced from 9 hours to 8 thanks to our splendidly European invention: DST. Along with the time difference there is also a slight difference in daylight and a large difference in temperature (15ź centigrade) and precipitation (nearly non-stop rain the past day).

My days in Berkeley/Oakland 1 used to be filled with:

Funny to hear from Cristiano that David Recordon just flashed Four Starters on stage (slide 37 of this presentation) on FOWA in London to demo the concept of hAvatar, a Wordpress plugin I developed about half a year ago. And a strange bit of anti-serendipity this stuff happening in London while I’m in SF.

I’ve always wanted to go there and tomorrow I’m finally going. Some vague plans, tads of serendipity and friends pushing me over the edge were enough to have me book the ticket, I think, only three weeks ago. Tomorrow Lufthansa will take me over an ocean for the first time of my life 1.

Tomorrow I’m going to attend Students for Free Culture. I may not be a student anymore, but I still regularly ride with that crowd and the conference has a great program and is for anybody with an interest in the topic. So, getting up early and taking the BART down into Berkeley. I’ll see if I can use my newly bought Kodak to record a couple of keynotes.

At our nice coworking spot Studio 4 Stagioni we have one or two desks available effective immediately. This poster has been hanging on some select locations around town:

Taplin writes about America having to buckle up and go to the simpler life, which I think might not be such a bad thing:

Last weekend the Camera Japan movie festival took place at the arthouse cinema Lantaren/Venster in Rotterdam and it was a lot of fun. The venue was packed and there was a great vibe (like always).

Register for the PICNIC social network, it might very well be your last.

Mr. Hammersley asks whether it’s possible to delay the delivery of e-mail in a way to receive stuff in bulk at a certain time. Other than some creative spooling on a mailserver more dynamic than most in existence today, the easiest solution would probably be to setup a different GMail account called “lists-XXX@”and POP everything from there once a day either manually or scripted 1.

This blog will remain to be mainly in English, but the occasional Dutch 1 post may creep in. Pascal told me that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to write about locally Dutch things for a Dutch audience in English 2.

As promised a while back after we got our fill playing with the data I would release it to the public to see if you could come up with something interesting. I’d leaked the JSON file to Kars and he applied his skills in visualizing things in processing 1 to the dataset.

I’ve been blogging in English for a while now and while the stats show a steady amount of readers, I haven’t really had any comments on anything really.

In the only month where I somewhat approach Matt Webb’s amount of reading, he just goes and ups his count to nearly double mine.

This video on BoingBoing is shocking in its absurdity but hardly unexpected given the current climate. If you pay any attention around you in metropolitan areas in the UK, it is rife with ostentatious surveillance.

A weekend with friends for me only reaches conclusion after the pictures have been edited and placed online. The process takes some time but also allows/forces me to relive it. This time the process has been further prolonged because I have to wait until somewhere next week to pick up my developed film.

It’s nice to have friends who are pushing their bounds photographically to try and improve their skill and to see them improve leaps and bounds as a result of that.

My friendly neighborhood night store will gladly give me a plastic bag for every item of shopping I buy from them 1. This is pretty thoughtful and at the same time also pretty short-sighted. Now there seem to be some places in the world that have banned plastic bags though I’m not sure which ones. It is a pretty contentious issue. It seems to be difficult or something but it’s not exactly clear why that is. We’re one of the technically most advanced societies in the world and we can’t live without plastic bags?

Barack’s visit to Europe again makes clear how important it is to people over here who exactly is the POTUS. A lot of people in Europe are interested and invested in American politics and for good reason if you see the effect the American’s actions can have on the rest of the world.

I got a link to this video from somewhere and it is priceless. It prompted me to do some research and I found an interview which confirms that that Aaron Draplin guy is awesome and does really cool work.

A while back we went to the World Press Photo 2008 exhibition in Utrecht with some capoeiras and looked at the pictures many of us had already seen after the first announcement.

A lot of raves for the new line of Apple Keyboards also from me. Cris has been so kind to import one for me from London 1.