Tag: opinion

Open letter to Keith Lang about Skitch

2013-01-03 rolfje No Comments

Dear Keith,

I read your letter about Skitch and would like to respond to all that has happened from my end-user perspective.

I am a long-time Evernote user and fan. Evernote changed note taking by being truly searchable. I can confidently drop all the websites, receipts, todos and ideas in there, and clear my mind of the “I must remember that” burden. The OCR of Evernote works beautifully on photos of whiteboards, making even my whiteboard notes searchable.

In 2010, I discovered Skitch. The simplicity and razor sharp focus on anotating a screencapture and share the anotated image by dragging it anywhere was sheer brilliance. My daily work includes making annotated screenhots and mailing them to team members to discuss improvements. Skitch changed this ugly capture-save-edit-save-attach-send cycle to pure poetry in motion. Dragging images into Evernote even made my screenshots searchable. It instantly became second nature and my go-to image tool.

Apple

Why you should not use SOAP Headers

2012-12-24 rolfje 3 Comments

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In the project I am working on right now we use apache XCF and Spring to provide a SOAP service to our customers. As part of the messages, there is a userid/password combo telling the application which user sent the request. I struggled with that today because I think that userid/password info should actually be in the SOAP Header, cleaning up my API, enable me to implement different authentication techniques in the future and generally be more “compliant” to the SOAP standard. Boy was I wrong.

Software

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.

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 €2800,- Roaming Gigabyte

2011-09-27 rolfje 8 Comments

We all know the stories about how vacationing smartphone users became the victim of high roaming charges, resulting in monthly bills sometimes exceeding €1000. To put an end to this, the EU has come up with a rule stating that carriers can no longer charge more than €50 per month for roaming, and are obliged to warn the user before reaching this limit. That all sounds nice and consumer friendly, but I recently tested this, and received an “interesting” monthly bill from T-Mobile.

Hardware

Open Letter to Tim Cook

2011-09-20 rolfje No Comments

Dear Tim,

I am certainly not the first, nor the last to congratulate you with your new position at Apple. I’m sure there will be many great things to come for Apple and it’s customers.

Apple has become the doctor that doesn’t fix the pain, but cures the illness and improves our daily digital lives. Please make sure Apple keeps it’s focus, perseverance and good taste in the endless search for true quality.

Tell Steve and Jony I said hi, and keep up the good work. If there’s anything I can help you with, you know how to reach me 😉

Cheers,
Rolf

Apple

Linked-In not really Opt-in?

2011-09-07 rolfje 1 Comment

Recently there was some kerfuffle about LinkedIn silently changing privacy settings. In fact, they didn’t do that “silently”, nor was it “recent”. Remember that large chunk of text nobody reads with the “Agree” button you clicked on? Those were the new terms, and deeply buried in them was this privacy settings stuff. LinkedIn’s Eric Heath blogged about that, bringing it as “more control over your LinkedIn information”. Sadly, the default setting for this new “control” is “rather open”. But you can change that.

Uncategorized

Why phone companies will fail

2010-11-23 rolfje 5 Comments

I recently had a very unpleasant experience with my mobile phone. Actually, it wasn’t so much my mobile phone itself, as it was the sharing of my private mobile phone number between colleagues. Seemingly harmless, but with great consequences.

One of my colleagues, in his innocence and with nothing but good intentions, shared my phone number with another colleague. As I was sitting in the hospital, the second colleague called me with questions about estimates I made for a project, which at that time intensely frustrated me.

Although I had the whole weekend to cool down, I was still pretty pissed the following monday. Some unpleasant conversations followed. I think everything is solved now but I can only hope somebody actually deletes my number when he says he does. Which got me to think about the old fashioned and spectacularly broken addressing model phone companies are still using.

Uncategorized

Why Growth is a bad thing. Bad.

2010-05-17 rolfje 10 Comments

Quite often I am amazed at people’s ability to miss what looks obvious to me. Not only the small things like cleaning up when you spill coffee over the floor, or washing your hands when you get off the toilet, but also bigger things. Like the silly “solutions” to the world’s pollution problem for example.

Looking to solve our pollution problem by changing people’s behavior is one of the things which to me is obvious to fail. Although some behavior may speed up pollution, in the end we all pollute, wether we like it or not.

At the risk of writing a very unpopular blogpost, I’d like to share some thoughts on the ongoing and ever increasing pollution problem. In my eyes, there are 2 real causes of pollution, and ultimately these causes are even self-repairing although you may not like how that works out for you.

Read More “Why Growth is a bad thing. Bad.” »

Uncategorized