An article on the BBC website last Friday revealed that British households waste over 3 million tons of food per year. That amounts to just under a third of all food bought, although half of that is inedible matter such as packaging. Wasting food has been a pet peeve of mine for some time, so it’s nice to hear that someone is taking notice. More »

Last weekend we went to Flevoland for a day to hike and watch birds at Oostvaardersplassen. The weather was beautiful and there were many people out and about walking and bicycling. We saw Red Deer, Konik wild horses and several new birds. More »

Amateur filmmaker Patrick de Wolf won the second prize yesterday at the TAS theme festival in Tilburg, with his film “Haunted House”. The genre of this year’s Dutch short film contest in Noord Brabant was ‘spanning’ (‘thriller’). More »

Birdorable.com has been updated this week with 17 new cute birds, including African Grey Parrot, Peach-faced Lovebird, Brown Pelican, Keel-billed Toucan, Osprey, Egyptian Plover and Bald Eagle. There are also some nice free graphics for use in MySpace comments. More »

There was a total lunar eclipse tonight. From 10:30pm the shadow of the earth slowly moved over the Moon and from 11:44pm to 12:58am the eclipse was complete and the moon was a beautiful bright red from the Sun’s rays going through the Earth’s atmosphere. Actually, at 11:43pm, just one minute before the total eclipse, a huge cloud came in front of the moon here in Leiden and it started raining and hailing. It didn’t move until just ten minutes before the end of the eclipse, so we were really lucky to see it at all. I had a chance to try out my new Canon 400D. I know these photos are not really great, but it’s the first time I took pictures of the moon, so I’m pretty happy with it. More »

A year ago I wrote about the security tag I found in my Old Navy Jeans that was setting off alarms in other stores. The square tag with the text “remove before washing or wearing” was hidden in an unusual place inside the jeans and sewn into fabric where I hadn’t noticed it before. I argued that Old Navy should tell customers about these RFID tags or simply move them to a place where you can see them. The post has brought forward some interesting comments of angry customers versus angry Old Navy employees. More »

Another shameless plug, this week we’ve launched a new Cafepress store: Leftique – The Boutique for Democrats . The store features dozens of democrat designs, and we are busy adding many more. A lot of the designs are for 2008 presidential candidates, like senators Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York. When we move to the United States we want Bush to be replaced by a new democratic president, so we do have a stake in this and are helping supporters with t-shirts, stickers and other products of their favorite candidate. Our best-selling candidate so far is Obama! More »

Tonight I have been adding travel photos of ourselves to Flickr and ‘geotagging’ them. The result: a great interactive map of the world with dots of where we’ve been. It’s the online equivalent of having a map on the wall with thumbtacks. The Flickr website used to be very slow for us here in the Netherlands, but since last year it has been much faster (maybe because they moved from beta to gamma?). In fact, I can’t believe how fast it is to upload photos with the handy Flickr Uploadr, and I’ve never geotagged photos as easy as I have on Flickr. The maps that Flickr uses are from Yahoo! Maps (Flickr is owned by Yahoo), and that I find a bit of a downside; it’s much slower and the areal photos much less detailed than those of Google Maps. Still, I love this site and I’ll keep putting up our travel photos until you can’t see the map anymore from all the pink dots. More »

First, thank you very much for leaving the severed chain lock on the rack where I parked my bike yesterday afternoon at the metro station. Seeing the lock this morning surely saved me at least a half hour of paranoid searching and re-searching, mumbling to myself and figuring I had gone mad, not remembering just where I had parked my bike. But I know that I did indeed park my bike where I thought I did, it just wasn’t there this morning. But my shiny red lock was. So thank you. More »

Later this year Google will built a huge server farm in Eemshaven, near Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. The new ‘Telehouse’ will have room for 100,000 servers that Google uses for storing its search data. Google is estimated to have some 450,000 servers around the world, in places like Mountain View (California), Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia and Dublin (Ireland). The cluster of computers will require an amount of energy enough to sustain 80,000 households. More »