It’s summer! good excuse for a milkshake, but all the ones in the shop taste like nothing. So here’s a recipe for a wonderful fresh strawberry milkshake.
Mix about 300-400 grams of fresh strawberries with one tray of milkcubes(16 pieces), 3-4 spoons of granulated sugar (I use cane sugar) and about 100ml of milk in a blender.

Et Voila, you’re done. Should be about 1-2 servings depending on how much you like to drink.

Works with all kinds of fruits, just try them out, and try combinations. Healthiest en most yummie milkshakes possible :)

(for the vegans or milk-intolerant out there, use soy or rice milk, just as tasty :)

Took some pictures in this tiny little town in the south of france.

Ik ben geen voorstander van representatieve democratie, er is niemand behalve mijzelf die mij kan representeren (wat voor mij ook al een knap staaltje is ;). Ook geloof ik niet in single-issue-partijen binnen dit stelsel. En toch stem ik de piraten partij. Immers, alle van de overige partijen hebben minimaal 1 standpunt waar ik dermate sterk tegen ben, is het niet op heb gebied van Privacy of Eigendomsrecht dan is het wel op een groen, migratie of educatie gebied.

Entree single-issue-partijen.

Natuurlijk gaat regeren om meer dan alleen een paar issues, en heb je bij een single-issue-partij compleet geen idee hoe deze daar mee om gaan. Echter bij de andere partijen weet je dat ze fout gaat op minimaal een aantal punten, en dan weet je niet welke punten ze laten varen bij de coalitie-vorming. Zoals ik al aangaf, niemand dus zeker niet iemand uit een partij kan mij representeren, dus kies je voor issues, en de piraten-partij (danwel evt nog partij voor de dieren) is de partij met de minst aantel issues waar ik op tegen ben.

Waarom uberhaubt stemmen?

Goed punt, als je niet gelooft in een democratie, danwel een representatieve democratie, waarom zou je er dan aan mee doen? waarom niet blanco stemmen als stem tegen de democatie?

Blanco stemmen valt amper op, het is alsof je een demonstratie loopt met tientallen en niemand die er om geeft. Daarnaast is het een simpele actie om te stemmen, en ik geloof wel in multi-vector-machtsgebruik, hoe minimaal de macht ook is. Zolang de moeite maar in proportie staat met het effect. In het geval van stemmen is het effect laag, maar de hoeveelheid moeite ook.

Onze democratie is wellicht rot, bad-by-design, oneerlijk en zat meer, en je zou kunnen beargumenteren dat men politiek-actiever zou zijn als je in een politiestaat zit. Maar dit is waar nu mee te maken hebben, en stemmen en het beinvloeden van de partijen zijn wel degelijk nog machtsmiddelen die enig impact kunnen hebben. En dan is het gewoon afwegen hoeveel moeite het kost tenopzichte van de resultaat en of je die moeite er dan in wil steken.

En stemmen is simpel, zeker met potlood en papier. Daarom stem dit keer de PiratenPartij (of misschien wel de PVDD)

Spent this morning taking pictures of flowers in the garden, and tonight I made a few wallpapers of them.

Pictures can be found here: u2m.nl/photos/

And the wallpapers here:

A short story by Ursula Le Guin, publisched in 1974.

A short story, fairly easy to read, set in a similar universe as The Dispossed and many other  books from the Hainish cycle.

The story is about a conflict. On one side the old, military, very colonist-styled earth colonists, who rape, enslave and abuse the native population while taking their land and trees. And on the other side an native race of peaceful dreamers who knew no hate before the humans came. The book goes into detail on how both cultures operate, the natives having a mixture of females ruling and males informing, the humans being a pure male oriented race where women are little less then tools/o bjects and not to be understood. It then goes on, how some of the natives learn hate by their abuse, the murder and rapes of their partners and how they plan to solve their problem.

It’s an intresting analis how an off-world conflict could go wrong. Considering aspects as no long term contact with the home-world and major cultural-misunderstanding and the racism following from it.

It’s a nice short story, well written. The only major problem I have with the book is the one time mention of use of tabaco by the natives (besides the extreme drug-abuse by the humans of halucigens and weed), and a few pages later a full-color advertisement of a sigaret brand. But I supose that could be blamed on the 70’s.

Two books from Ursula k. Le Guin.

The Dispossed

Published in 1974, A marvelous work about 2 planets, about anarchy, it’s workings and it’s contrast and conflict with an older capitalistic world.

The story is cut in half, devided even and uneven chapters. On following a man who leaves the anarchistic homeworld founded almost 200 years ago after a revolution to visit the old capitalistic world where his people came from, and the other describing the world it’s workings and it’s faults and how the man came to the choice of traveling.

The book describes quite well how a anarchistic world could work, and what one of it’s major pitfalls could  be. It also sets a situation where a world like this could come to exist, a revolution, a conflict and a compromise. And showing how anarchy although ideal, is and can be in conflict with many other structures.

A great work, very well written and capturing, I could hardly put it down.

Voices

A more recent work by Le Guin, published in 2006.

Voices describes a fictional world, set on the coastline somewhere on a planet, in a country where books are valued greatly, a culture with many gods which are loved closely, but feared by none. A common and free society where knowledge is held in high regard.

Until the Alds, They come in fear of demons, obeying their single god from a world where books are evil and demonic, women are little more then slaves, worse off then their horses. They destroy all the books, forbid reading, rape the women on the streats and are after something in the city.

The describes the horrible conflict about 17 years later, that still goes on. The oppression of the Alds on the Ansul. About how a young girl lives in it, as a daughter and servant of the oldest house of Ansul. How things finally change.

It’s a story about religion, about politics, about knowledge and about freedom.  LeGuin seems clearly inspired by east and middle asian conflicts in this book, both cultures have a clear resemblance to existing cultures, and perhaps so does the conflict. She describes the conflict, and provides a possible solution, but as in the book. The interpretation is still up to the reader.

Another great work I think, very easy to read, read it in 3 days. I found the value added to commerce orriented society a bit downputting, but it’s not the Dispossed. And as a descriptive story, it’s certainly more realistic that way.

Both books I recommend to anyone, go read! :)

Perhaps not a very new feature, but Firefox 3.5 prefetches de DNS results of all links on a page.

What does this mean? That firefox does a lot of DNS requests in cleartext(no encryption)  for all links in a website, even if the page itself is encrypted, on a local network or is a local file. When viewing secure pages it then leaks information on what page you are looking at (e.a. if you do a lot of .indymedia.org dns requests, you’re probably looking at the indymedia.nl frontpage), same for pages on an intranet.

For people using webmail, this also means someone(for instance a spammer) can implement a callback/phonehome method by putting a domainname in the mail and whith a 0 cache value.

I’d consider this a bad policy, luckily you can turn it off, but not too easy.
A short howto:

go to the page “about:config”, it might give you a warning about voiding your waranty, I don’t think you have any anyway, so go ahead.

1. Rightclick on something white in the page and select new->boolean
2. Name the boolean: network.dns.disablePrefetch
3. Set the value to True
4. Rightclick again on something white and select again new->boolean
5. Name the boolean: network.dns.disablePrefetchFromHTTPS
6. set the value to True

If you now type network.dns in the filter you should see 2 entries in bold with the names you’ve given them (network.dns.disablePrefetch and network.dns.disablePrefetchFromHTTPS) of the type ‘boolean’ with the values set to ‘true’. Your firefox should now no longer try to fetch lots dns results and it’ll improve your privacy a little bit.

For those running apache webservers, you can control it from the server-side by doing the following:

1. Enable mod_headers (a2enmod headers)
2. Add this line to your apache or virtual host configuration: Header add x-dns-prefetch-control “off”
3. Restart your webserver

For those only having control over the HTML you can add the following to your <head></head> section:

<meta http-equiv="x-dns-prefetch-control" content="off">

Just created a small page for packages I build: Packages
Main reason for this is the making and publishing of my wiipresenter packages, Wiipresenter is nice tool for doing presentations with the WiiMote, it’s not finished yet, but works quite well already. Sadly though, the original makers don’t do much about them, but Dag Wiers made some patches to get them to work on recent systems, and packaged them in RPM. Since I don’t use any RPM based systems I build some debian packages for it.
So Wiipresent runs in a terminal still, but intelligently guesses the application in current focus to adapt it’s functionality to it. In openoffice presenter you navigate through the slides, in firefox you can switch your tabs and scroll through the pages. When pressing A+B in any application it toggles the mouse control with the motion sensor. It can also resize text, switch between applications(like alt-tab) and much more.

Great application, and now also as a debian package, i386 and amd64.

In the Last week most south-east-asian countries on the pasific coasts have been battered by the typhoons Ketsana and Parma. Next to that Indonesia has been hit by 2 major eartquakes (7.6 and 6.8) and Samoa by a tsunami.

The Philippines first got hit by typhoon Ketsana. Resulting in by 295 death and 39 still missing. And leaving over 400.000 people homeless.
Ketsana was shortly followed by typhoon Parma, resulting in: 17 deaths, 61,600 metric tons of rice destroyed, 74,373 hectares of rice-growing areas and 6,000 tons of corn, fruits and vegetables. With windspeeds of 195kph to 230kph.
Total financial damages up to 96 milion USD.

Pictures

After the Philippines, Ketsana struck Vietnam. This resulted in 159 deaths, 112 milion USD in crop losses, 180.000 destroyed homes and 50.000 hectares of agricultural land destroyed. There also where miles of railroad tracks washed away or destroyed.

(on average, vietnam gets 6.4 typhoons a year, this is the 9th and there some more months in the season).

Following Vietnam, Ketsana hit Cambodia and Laos.

In Cambodia the death-toll topped 17 and 1519 people lost their homes. Cambodia lost 50.000 of rice paddies, 40km of road was destroyed and 160 irrigation systems.

In Laos 24 people died and 135 people are still missing. 37.500 are homeless due to the storm. The water of the sekong river had risen 13-15 meters, arround 14 villages have been flooded.

In most affected areas in these countries the water levels haven’t dropped yet or are even still rising. Support organisations are working hard on saving and supporting people, but due to the damages to infrastructure this has turned out quite difficult.

In the mean time,  in Samoa and Tonga where hit my a big tsunami of about 7.5m in height which swept land inwards upto 1.5 km. In total arround 170 people died and thousands where turned homeless.

Next to all this, Sumatra (Indonesia) got hit by 2 earthquakes, one of a 7.6 and one of 6.8 magnitude. arround 1600 people did not survive the quake, but some hunderds more are still at risk due to famine. arround 38.000 homes where damaged, leaving thousands of people homeless.

This leaves the south-east-asian area quite battered and the typhoon season isn’t over yet for the comming months. Typhoons Parma and Super Typhoon Melor are still in the area. Threatening Japans and the Philipines.

So we’ve sailed across the ‘waddenzee’ to Terschelling, lovely sailing. I slept horrible but we had almost 7 hours of good sailing. Going on motor to the Lorentz lock to pass through to the open sea arround 8.30. We arrived arround 09.15 and had to wait in the lock for some other yachts to come in. At about 9.50 we left the lock to the open seas.

Good wind, a nice 4Bft, We’re also nice on time. We could only pass through at 10.15 thourgh the boontjes, so right on time. We had the tide in our favour here, both in hight as in the flow. We went fairly fast and arrived just past 11.00 near Harlingen, where we again, or still had the tide in our favor. At 12.15 was high-tide an the flow was already going outwards here, again the right direction. We had a south-west wind  all the way and passed through the slenk with a good 8.5-8.7knots, quit fun to do. :) We arrived in Terschelling at about 15.10.

On Terschelling it was for me definitly the end of a hot and long day. I only kinda woke-up after some afternoon sleep and a cool breeze at dinner. We found a nice restaurant at Terschelling next to the brandaris. We kind-off planned on meeting our cousin on Terschelling, but sadly that didn’t work out in the end. In the morning we again, sailed off early in the morning with the tide to Harlingen, We left at about 8.40, being only the 3rd out of the harbor it seemed.

This time I slept a whole lot better then the night before, which made me enjoy the trip a bi more. We still had a south western wind which made it a bit more work to get to Harlingen, but certainly no less fun. 3-4Bft was enough to get a decent ammount of speed, and we tried to stat as high on the wind as we could, keeping track of the depth almost constantly. At about 13.35 we arrived in Harlingen, 10 minutes pas high-tide. Right on time.

In Harlingen we still had most of the day left, and since it was blazing hot (it was cool on the water) we slacked most of the day. We walked about arround the city and I shot my last few pictures of kodachrome64 for the trip and mailed the film. We had some icecream, did some shopping, had lunch, dinner. A slow but nice day.

Our next trip to Stavoren would take us back through the ‘boontjes’ and this time we could only leave after 11.00 due to the tide. We left with a friend of my brother at 11.15. The wind changed to north-north-east, which was again nice in our favour. We arrived quite on time at the Lorentz-lock but this apeared to have some failure and we had to wait together with quite a load of other boats until it was fixed. At about 15.00 we finally made it through and we’re back at the ijselmeer again. Still the wind in our back and going well, good weather and about 3Bft. At about 17.30 we found a nice spot in the old harbor of Stavoren.

Stavoren is for me and my brother a bit bit special, about 23 years a go we lived there for a couple of years as young kids. Personally I’ve beed there only once since and then just for a short drive-through. It was rather sureal to walk through the small place, it’s small place and I recouldnised quite a lot of old places. Old memories started to make a bit more sense with the renewed memory of the layout. I was only 4 or 5 back then, now 28. The perspective was off ofcourse. I also re-read the story of ‘het vrouwtje van Stavoren‘, which now seems to have a more obvious link with St Lucia’s flood. I ended the day by sitting on the pier-light and enjoying the evening with wind and water. I’m glad we visited this place and I might cycle there one day (there’s a ferry going from Enkhuizen :).

Today (Thursday the 10th of September 2009), was our last day of sailing, tomorrow at 10.00 (am) we have to return the boat. We had a short bit of sailing from Stavoren to Andijk. The wind was still North-East and about 4-5Bft sometimes going up to 6 according to the KNMI. The waves grew a bit larger the more we got to the west side of the lake, but still nothing really bad. It was an uneventfull quiet trip where we enjoyed the sunny weather and watched a training-rescue-operation somewhere along the way. At 14.00 we got back in Andijk, where we lunched, slacked, had dinner and slacked some more.

Tomorrow morning we wake-up early and leave at arround 9.00, the end of a good week of sailing. We had good weather all week, Always some wind, nothing unsailable. We’ve had different sites, different crews, different places to visit.

I can only say I loved it.

ps.

ah yes, you might want to see some pictures, here’s some stuff I shot with my phone: