DROA: now with a Belgian lawyer

It seems my contacts with the people from Domain Registry of America (DROA) have gone one legal step up. Last week I have received an official letter from a Brussels law office, representing the Domain Registry of America – DROA (Buffalo, NY, USA), Domain Registry of Canada – DROC (Markham, Ontario, Canada), Domain Renewal Group (London UK) and Mr Alan Benlolo. Apparently my claims about the “domain renewal scam”, as most legit domain registrars and thousands of fooled users call it, are “completely unfunded” and constitute “defamation and libel” (Article 443 – translated from Dutch by me).

Fix for error -15000 Remote speakers on iTunes / Windows 7

So, just to be clear: this is not about iTunes on MacOSX, it’s only about iTunes 10 on Windows 7. It might work on Windows Vista, but I have no PC with Vista to test. It might help on versions earlier than iTunes 10 (I read the version 8 already had the problem), but I haven’t tested that.

Idea: email as a platform

DROA: the saga continues

This post is about my dealing with the company DROA / Domain Registry of America.
I first wrote about them in Dec 2004: “Domain Registry of America scam“: they had sent me letters to urgently advise me to renew my domain names. When I researched a bit who they were, it became clear it was an shady initiative of some Canadian ‘businessmen’. They write scary letters in the hope that a non-tech-savvy person in the accounting department gets scared and quickly pays, thus transferring their domain management to DROA, who charge more than the average.

Idea: hosted classification service

Yesterday evening I was watching “How to replace yourself with very small shell script” by Hilary Mason.

Focal length for the common man: "portrait distance"

I remember that before I started photography on a serious level, I had some understanding of shutter speed, but none of aperture and focal length. Even when I read what they meant, I still couldn´t ‘picture’ it, had no feeling for the numbers. Let´s leave ‘aperture’ for another time and just concentrate for now on the concept of focal length.

“I will you in the night” – Idool 2003

At the Pixagogo reunion dinner the other evening, I was reminded by one of my ex-colleagues Steven (‘Beukie‘) that back in 2003 I was having some fun with remixes/mashups. More specifically, I took some vocals of the Belgian “Idool 2003” preselections, and added music to them. To make the exercise more fun, I took samples from the ones that were really musically challenged.

Fax 2.0: because fax won’t die in the internet age

In one corner of my apartment: my fixed telephone line. In another my printer/scanner/fax device. Challenge: run a wire from one to the other, every time you rearrange the furniture.

Newscorp is indeed dropping out of Google

The big disappearing act

iPhone bandwidth: orders of magnitude – 2009

I did a bandwidth test the other day with the iPhone SpeedTest tool. I wanted to compare the speed using (standard) GPRS, using 3G and my own Wi-Fi. The results were all a power of ten apart: