Latest blog posts

By now, everybody and their grandmother seems to know about Bitcoin and the trouble at Mt. Gox (seriously, is there anybody who does not pronounce that "Mount Gox"?), even if they have no idea what a cryptocurrency is. Then there's other exchanges that have similar problems, Bitcoin's wildly fluctuating value and its association with criminal activity like on Silkroad. But still, cryptocurrency is an interesting concept. There are several alternatives to Bitcoin, sometimes collectively called Altcoins and one of those in particular, Dogecoin, caught my eye.

NVIDIA have just released their new GeForce GTX 750 Ti card, based on the Maxwell chipset. It seems like a great card at a pleasant price point and I downloaded NVIDIA's whitepaper. One thing that caught my eye is a graph comparing the GTX 750 Ti's performance to the GTX 480, the flagship card four years ago. It is terribly misleading. This is what it looks like:

When Tim Schafer, of Day of the Tentacle fame, announced his intention to create a new point and click adventure, the true fans who had been starved of good new content quickly made his Kickstarter campaign the most successful one to date. Despite (and in a way, because of) the project's overfunding, development has not been without problems, but Shafer and Double Fine persevered. Initially known by the working title of Double Fine Adventure, Broken Age is being created as 2 acts, with the game's first installment released to backers about two weeks ago and publicly available today, January 28th 2014. So what's it like?

Apparently, today, the Russian Foreign Ministry published a report on its website about human rights in the European Union, calling the EU's system "ineffective and flawed" and this 153 page document also devotes 9 pages to my home country of The Netherlands. Although 2013 was a year in which we supposedly celebrated 400 years of diplomatic relations between the Dutch and Russian peoples, that celebration had more than a few hiccups along the way. The timing of this report is convenient, as Russia is under a deluge of criticism about its human rights situation, particularly its recent anti-gay laws. With much of this criticism being directed towards Russia's hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, there is no doubt that this report being published now is not a coincidence. How should we react?

Spam accounts for the vast majority of e-mail traffic. Figures I've read range from 60% to 97% and something in between does not seem unreasonable. Unfortunately, there is no real penalty for spamming and many unwitting people's malware-infested PC's do it, so with the low risk of the real culprits getting caught, it is worth the tiny risk for them to try to scam you out of some cash. The typical spam message most people receive is stuff about drugs (especially Cialis, Viagra or Canadian pharmacies), Nigerian 419 scams, penile enlargement, fake degrees, stock hot market "tips" and stuff like that. When you have a website or at least own a domain name, you will likely receive some other insideous stuff too. Here's some examples.