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World Statues Festival Arnhem 2011

Tjeerd — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:52:16 +0000

Last month I visited the World Statues Festival in Arnhem. More than hundred people from all over the world presenting themselves as statues. The weather was great and it was very crowded. Ester and I took some pictures which you can find here.

Experimental footage of Castle De Haar, Haarzuilens

Tjeerd — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:45:19 +0000

Yesterday I went to castle De Haar in Haarzuilens to record some random locations with my camera and to test my monopod with my new wide-angle lens with polarisation filter. You will notice there is some shakey footage and even some moiree-effects on the castle walls. Actually it’s a relatively quick-and-dirty edited movie, but it’s a good way to learn and experiment with the camera. Remember: I have little to no knowledge about filming at all and that’s clearly visible, for now .

Pasture and nature between Haarzuilens and Vleuten

Tjeerd — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 19:29:27 +0000

Today I filmed in the grasslands between Vleuten and Haarzuilens with my Canon 550D-camera. It was nice weather with sun and clouds. This is actually the third or fourth time that I put some effort in filming and you can notice that in the experimental way it is done. Also I still need to find my tripod, because it is sometimes too shakey. But the image stabilizer of the Canon telelens does a good job to reduce the shaking.

Photographing grasslands in Vleuten and Haarzuilens

Tjeerd — Sat, 08 May 2010 20:09:45 +0000

This week I finally made some time to take photographs of the grasslands between Vleuten and Haarzuilens. I had luck with the weather and I was just in time because when I came home, they mowed all dandelions. This is my first walk here with my new camera and it all seems to work fine.

You can see the pictures here .

Busy in our new house

Tjeerd — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:04:32 +0000

Not that I’m not writing anything at all at the moment, but since we got the keys of our new house two weeks ago, we are constantly busy with our new house. You can read updates about the work we are doing in our new house at our special website. If you want access to that site, please let me know.

Victim Support

Tjeerd — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:59:14 +0000

This week my bike was stolen. I walked out the frontdoor and I only saw Nina’s bike, but not mine. I could make a hassle of it, but gone means gone. The first thing I did is look on Marktplaats for second hand Kronans and luckily I found a black one for sale and not that far away from where we are living. I called the seller and two hours later I had a ‘new’ bike to ride on.

In the evening I sent a complaint to the police online. I could specify all details of my stolen bike. I knew that in Utrecht it is quite useless with so many bikes, but perhaps my complaint could be used in the statistics.

Today I got an e-mail where they said my case was not detailed enough to go any further. Although they understood that it can be a thorough experience. They offered me victim support for emotional support. I liked my stolen bike a lot, but there were also quite some problems with it. My new bike compensates everything for the stolen one, so thanks for the victim support, but no.

Speaking piano and singing robot

Tjeerd — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:55:32 +0000

I saw this one last week somewhere on I think digg, it is about a piano that is mechanically engineered in such a way that it can reproduce speech.

And what about the following robot woman called HRP-4C (see her in movement action here) which uses an advanced Yamaha voice chip to sing. We are getting close and closer to the uncanny valley moment.

Our new house

Tjeerd — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:27:58 +0000

After several weeks of waiting for offers to renovate the duplex house we had an eye on, we could finally start negotiating with the seller about the asking price. We know that some renovation is really necessary in the house and because we now knew what roughly would be the costs of it, we used that argument to do a bid far below the asking price. After several counter offers from the seller, we bought the house for 15% below the asking price, which we have the feeling is quite a good deal.

We will do a construction check to inspect the house and to get to know the possible risks of the house. Furthermore we have to arrange our mortgage and setup some official documents, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem. Anyway, we are happy that we finally found a house on a very nice location. In every way compared to what we now have it is an improvement. We know that there is a lot of work to be done in the house, but we take the time for that and we like to renovate it to our taste.

House front

House front view

Hamtoren

House back view

Holiday in Confoederatio Helvetica (Switzerland)

Tjeerd — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:48:53 +0000

Switzerland

The last two weeks Nina and I were on holiday to Switzerland. We jumped on the train at Utrecht Centraal to Basel and from there on we took several other trains to visit places and locations. We started our holiday in Luzern, which – to our impression – was the most attractive city.

The overall weather was quite good, except for one hot day in Lugano where it was too warm to walk around, so we where sitting at and in the swimming pool the whole day. Now I understand those sun-adorers who take a hotel at the beach and do nothing the whole day. The day after Lugano we went to St. Moritz where the weather became the complete opposite. It was snowing and almost freezing, so we had to buy extra clothes. Even the people in the village themselves didn’t expect this snow/weather.

The final destination was Zermatt with its Matterhorn mountain nearby with a height of 4478 meters. The transport in Zermatt is mostly electric, so it is a quiet village and very clean. The village is even in the top five of greenest cities in the world.

We have seen a lot of beautiful landscapes on our trip and nice villages with old buildings. You can see the pictures we took at the travel gallery under the Switzerland flag.

Multimedia living room

Tjeerd — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:46:58 +0000

Two weeks ago we decided that we should look for a new television, besides looking for new houses. I did some research and found out that the Samsung UE32B7000 32″ LED LCD television seems to be what we needed. We didn’t want a 37 or 40 inch screen, because it’d be too much an eye-catcher in the living room. This television is only 3 cm. thin, not too power-hungry (I measured ~75 watts – see also this comparison of HD-TV’s) because it is illuminated by LED-lights instead of CCFL‘s (TL-like tubes) and last but not least it has quite some nice technological features. You can use widgets – and even develop them, somehow Yahoo is involved in this technology. Some default installed widgets are from Flickr (photos from internet) and a weather-channel. There is even a Twitter-widget which you can use and there also seems to be a Youtube-widget, which I haven’t found yet.

The television has many, many inputs. One useful input is the network connection which we now have connected to our router, which itself is connected to our network attached storage (NAS) device. This is just a little box with harddisks in it and some mini-operating system running. The television supports DLNA, which means that it can stream video/audio/photos from that little NAS, which works flawlessly.

So we now have an up to date multimedia living room.