Author: rolfje

Mortgage Awareness

2012-04-01 rolfje 2 Comments

This weekend I tinkered around with Apple Keynote. I thought I’d make something useful. In this video I’m trying to show you how much money the bank makes on your mortgage. Banks like you to pay a low monthly fee on your mortgage because it keeps the loan higher for a longer period of time. This way the bank can cash in on the interest rate, and then cash in again at the end of the mortgage contract, when you are still hopelessly in debt.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EI6N583mBEw]

“Financial advisors” working for the bank will throw sand in your eyes, saying that keeping your debt high gives you all kinds of tax breaks. But in the end, it’s them who get better of that construction, not you. Don’t fall into this trap. Understand your mortgage contract, learn how the model works, and check your model against the bank’s model (without that financial advisor or the lady at the helpdesk talking to you). You have more room than you think. Use it.

Apple, Uncategorized

Join, don’t judge

2012-03-04 rolfje 3 Comments

Like many people, I like to dine in a good restaurant, where the mood is mellow, the waiter is a fine host, and the cook is passionate about good food and nice presentation. The courses are perfectly timed with your appetite, and each shiny polished plate of food contains the best looking, smelling and tasting food with the nicest textures. After desert, you get the best fresh mineral water coffee, and just sit there, satisfied, happy, in good company. The waiter discretely places the check on the table, and you happily pay whatever that check tells you to pay, and add a big tip for good measure, to show you had a great evening.

Distributed jMeter through VPN and SSL

2012-02-16 rolfje 19 Comments

This week I created a jMeter test setup for distributed testing. I thought it would be straight forward but I ran into some interesting things you might want to know if you are considering distributed testing using jMeter.

In my case, I had to test an application which was inside our corporate network, while working from home through a VPN and a firewall. Normally that is no problem, but jMeter has this funny construction where the slave (jMeter server) wants to connect back to the master (jMeter gui). It took some fiddling with iptables, the jMeter configuration and ssh tunneling to get it to work. Here’s my setup:

Software

Drobo FS Lion Time Machine Fix

2012-01-07 rolfje 10 Comments

Many Drobo FS owners out there who upgraded to Lion were unpleasantly surprised by the fact that their Drobo no longer behaved like they used to. After months, drobo released new firmware, but it didn’t improve things all that much. With the new firmware, the Drobo FS:

is slow or entirely unresponsive, Time Machine backups don’t finish at all or take days
doesn’t show up in the Finder of Lion Macbook owners connecting through wifi
has a transfer speed of 20MB/s, even when connecting through GB Ethernet, regardless of OSX version (tested with Snow Leopard, Lion)

If you have one or more of the problems listed above, you will be pleased to hear that there is a “fix”, although it may not be what you were hoping for.

Read More “Drobo FS Lion Time Machine Fix” »

Hardware

The Pan Rant

2011-12-26 rolfje 1 Comment

You may have seen recent tweets from me ranting about my frying pans. I’ve ruined a few (very expensive) pans and replaced them with dirt-cheap pans which are actually much better. I would like to share my experiences and solutions with you, so that you can buy the right (cheap) pan without having to go through the same thing. Links to all the pans are in the article below.

Review: Lamy Pico pen

2011-12-23 rolfje 6 Comments

A few weeks ago I saw this amazing pen design by Lamy, the Pico. I’m a heavy computer user so I don’t do much handwriting, but I do like nice tools so I thought I’d get this. Particularly the small form factor when retracted and the sleek design attracted me.

There are some things about the Pico that nobody is telling you, so I thought I’d write a little review.

Read More “Review: Lamy Pico pen” »

Hardware

The Useless Machine

2011-12-18 rolfje 4 Comments

The past year, you may have seen me tweeting some “#secretproject” tweets. Last week, the project was finally revealed, and here is the video, in case you’ve missed it:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nkebVQL5zc]

This is what is known on the internet as a “Useless Machine” or “Leave-me-alone Box”. In case you want to make one, there are plenty of instructions online. I think you can build a basic version of this in about a weekend, and it will cost you less than ten euros.

Catnip Watering System

2011-12-04 rolfje No Comments

Here’s a one minute how-to on growing catnip without having to water your plants every day.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jyqNzNeQeE]

Fun, Hardware, Workshop

Strange fix for SMB problems in Linux

2011-11-28 rolfje 4 Comments

Last week, the upgrade to Ubuntu 11 severely broke all carefully selected menu colors, graphics settings and icon sets. I gave up the fight after a few hours of effortless restoration work and switched to Linux Mint 11.

While setting up my machine and restoring the links to the company Windows file servers I could not connect. The password window would re-appear without any feedback. The fix was even stranger than the problem.

Software

Having fun at J-Fall 2011

2011-11-03 rolfje 3 Comments

This year’s Dutch Java Nerd event called J-Fall was held in Nijkerk, in a beautiful location called “Hart van Holland” . With plenty of sessions by speakers from all over the world it promised to be a great day for Java enthusiasts, at a great location for meeting friends and colleagues. I took a day off from work and it was well worth it.

Read More “Having fun at J-Fall 2011” »

Microsoft, Software