Put your thongs on: barbie time

kaartje

Before we head off to Brisbane, we’d like one last chance to say goodbye to everyone back here in the Netherlands. If you’d like to join us for this, you’re welcome at our place on the 12th of December 2015, any time of day after 14:00 – please let us know by mail that you’re coming (and whether you expect to be here around dinner time). If you need directions, check grismar.net/route.

We prefer you don’t bring gifts, since we won’t be able to bring them with us to Australia anyway. Instead, it would be appreciated if you bring something you’d like to be drinking and relieve us of left over drinks and stuff we’re throwing out otherwise when you go. If you borrowed our stuff, this would be an excellent time to return it – or to remind us to do so conversely.

We’d also like to ask everyone who has a Skype-account, to (re)connect with us on Skype. Jaap can be reached at grismar.net (Jaap van der Velde) and Simone at SimoneDeKleermaeker (Simone De Kleermaeker). Also, please let us know your current phone number, more so when you don’t have or use Skype.

We plan to leave the Netherlands on December 16, leaving our home in the care of a housing company that will take care of new tenants. We don’t know our final address in Brisbane yet, but we’ll publish it here. We’ll also post semi-regularly to our blog brisbane.grismar.net, but we’ll let you know about that on social media (Facebook, Google+).

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1,500x Pinterested

1,500 items pinned on Pinterest. And with Pinterest finally publishing an API, I’d love to show those images on a slide show somewhere on my wall… Or backup all those image, for that matter.

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QR codes rock, strictly personal tablets don’t

Although I am aware of (and use) wonderful services like Read It Later, Springpad, Evernote and the ability to send myself links through various means such as mail, Twitter, Facebook updates or the old “typing what I read”, I find that shooting a QR code beats all of the above for ease of use and speed. Here’s the situation: I like to read ezines (web magazines, whatever you like to call them) on a tablet. In my case, I read them using Pulse on the Xoom. Sometimes I find something worth sharing, but here’s the problem: my wife and I share the tablet, so it’s not configured to use either of our social network logins.
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Virtualbox running PostgreSQL

If like to keep the PC I use for development as clean as possible, to reduce the odds of “other installed stuff” influencing whatever I’m writing. Whenever I need to install some kind of server-type software on it, I prefer to use small virtual machines to install them in. Like a sandbox running the server, which I can just start and access from the host machine whenever I need it. Another big advantage of this approach is that it allows me to just copy the entire virtual machine to another machine and run the server there, for example on a colleague’s machine. Below are some tips on getting the open source database server PostgreSQL running on a virtual machine, accessible from the host (or any other machine on your network).
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Rant: welcome to 2011, not unlike 2001

Remember how mediaplayers were really primitive back in the day? How they always had trouble keeping your music properly sorted and display the right metadata for whatever format you preferred? I bet you do because nothing changed, really. (Yes, I know, “RAEG” right?)

When I drop my properly standardized ID3-ed MP3’s and FLACs into my player, I get all sorts of interesting effects. And before you start, we’re talking about my own CD’s here. Ripped to FLAC for playback on my media center and MP3-encoded for convenient use on my smartphone and other devices. Depending on where you live, that may be illegal or borderline illegal, but where I live, it’s legal – at least at the time of writing. At the worst, we could be having a discussion about the legality of mp3-encoding.
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Two admins and a security hole

If you’re like me and you trust your wife to be the other admin on your desktop PC running Windows, you may have a serious security hole. I didn’t realize until recently, but if you’re logged in to Windows 7, or Windows Vista for that matter, and you’re an administrator, you get to change all users passwords, including the passwords of other admins without exception.

Now, if you try to change the password for your own account, you have to enter the old password before you can change it into a new one. But here’s the thing: for other users, even admins, there’s no such requirement. Of course it makes sense that you don’t have to enter their old password, how would you even know? But it doesn’t require you to enter your own either.
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