This Saturday 15 July marks the 400th birthday of Leiden native son and master painter Rembrandt van Rijn. The Leiden city museum, the Lakenhal (cloth guild hall), is inviting all residents of Leiden to celebrate the birthday with coffee and cake. More »

We like to camp over weekends in the summer, but the hassle of setting up a small tent for a short getaway can make a short camping trip less enjoyable. When we first saw the 2-Second tent by Quechua at Decathlon, a sporting-goods store, we had to try it. Now we have the 3-Second Air tent and we love it. Here is a short review of both. More »

Just five years after its first known public reference as a verb in a New York Post article, the word “google” earned an entry among the 165,000 terms in the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. The definition: to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web More »

Now that Space Shuttle Discovery has safely entered orbit it is a lot of fun to watch NASA TV online and watch live feeds of the many cameras on and inside the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle. There are also nice animations, voice-over explaining what is happening and you can listen in on the conversations between Mission Control Houston, Discovery and the ISS. In the coming 10 days there will be a lot of live broadcasts from space; check out the STS-121 Television Schedule for all the times and details. The streaming video is of very good quality. More »

The Monkey Island adventure games were some of my favorite games ever. I loved to play the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood in the original Secret of Monkey Island back in 1990. Now Disney comes out with Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man’s Chest this summer, and the designer of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, is struck at the resemblance of his Monkey Island’s LeChuck and the bad guy Davy Jones in Dead Man’s Chest. More »

The Almere-Buiten branch of the Dutch supermarket “Plus” has introduced special shopping baskets for single customers. Shoppers who use a purple shopping basket are indicating to other shoppers that they are available. More »

One of the headlines in today’s paper read “Exodus na WK-Verlies” (Exodus after World Cup Loss). Since Holland’s loss to Portugal Sunday night, Dutch soccer fans (almost everyone) can forget about following the World Cup and finally move on to more important things: VACATION! More »

The new version of my favorite news source digg was just released. The extremely popular site that allows users to digg for stories so that the most popular ones appear on the homepage, was always focused at technology news only, but today new topics have been added for science, world & business, videos, entertainment and gaming!

In the last months we have been having a lot of fun going to bird hides and nature reserves here in the Netherlands. It turns out that this country is great for bird watching, and we have suddenly turned into serious birders! It’s incredible how many easy-to-spot birds there are that I had never even noticed before; just this morning we saw four spoonbill from the car along the A4 highway! More »

The news headlines on page 101 of CNN International teletext here in the Netherlands sometimes don’t make any sense. It seems that they are just grabbed from cnn.com and stop whenever the space on the page runs out. Have a look at this strange and unclear story that was one of their leading teletext stories this week. More »