10 Oct 2012
I upgraded my iPhone 4S to the new iOS6 the day it came out. As I expected, I had to reconfigure the cellular data settings (‘APN’). For some reason they always get lost during major OS updates. However, I have noticed the last weeks that, every now and then, my 3G connection stops working, and when I check the APN settings, they have disappeared. My colleagues, with iPhones and iPads on different cellular operators also have this problem. So for them, for me, and for anyone else who has this problem: here are the settings for the Belgian operators.
20 Apr 2012
Do you often find yourself in a situation where you are using some kind of word play in a written (chat or text message) conversation, but feel that you need to make this second level of comprehension clear? This is why emoticons exist: pictorial representations of a facial expression using punctuation marks and letters, written to express a person’s mood. Emoticons were already used in the 18th century and adopted with mucho gusto in electronic communication since 1982. These days, if you don’t know that a “:-)” means that the writer is happy, you’re missing a lot of the meaning of SMS or emails.
03 Apr 2012
January 2012 marks the beginning of a new calculation of the ‘Benefit in kind’ - the value an employee is calculated to get from a company car. It has a big effect on your taxes. Do you pay taxes in Belgium? Do you have a company car? Read on!
20 Jan 2012
14 Jul 2011
I store quite a lot of info in Google Spreadsheets, for the obvious reasons:
14 Jul 2011
I use Amazon S3 for cloud storage of big digital-cinema files (up to 3GB) for distribution. It works fine most of the time, but I kept getting the odd complaint: “I can’t download on my PC, I get an error”. Everytime I asked what browser they were using, it was Internet Explorer. I am a Google Chrome man, and I almost never do anything with IE, but still, customer is king, let’s see what could be wrong. So I tested it myself with IE and yes, most files can be downloaded, but some couldn’t. Sometimes one would get an empty page, sometimes the following: “XML 5619: Incorrect document syntax”
16 Apr 2011
When a friend of mine recently got his MacBook stolen, I quickly verified if I had installed Prey Project on each laptop/desktop PC I have. For those who do not know Prey:
28 Jan 2011
I got the DVDs of the 3 True Blood seasons for Christmas and when I started watching , I really got into it. Sookie is adorable, Jason is charming with a low IQ (and strongly resembles George W), there’s the interesting parts of how vampires and humans live together, with some comments on racism and homophobia. Season 1 was just great, and I was telling everyone around me to start watching it too.
13 Jan 2011
This was quite a discovery: Danny Santos has been shooting portraits of complete strangers on Orchard Road, Singapore. The story was featured on JPG Magazine with some beautiful examples and that post pointed to his Facebook album, which pointed to his blog post about it. This phrase he wrote made me think: “Suddenly, strangers were no longer unwitting victims subjects, they were now willing participants … and that gave different life to the photograph, and a new awareness and dimension to my idea of shooting in the streets.” Touches a weak point of mine: asking strangers for permission to photograph them.
