raymondpoort.com

This one is for geeks;

Am in a hotel in NL and guess what? No WiFi in the room…again! Forntunately this room has a fixed internet connection in the room, which works ok from my laptop (it’s not too fast, but hey, you can’t have it all 😉 ).

Now, I’d like to access the internet also from my iPhone, which ‘only’ has WiFi.

Hmm, I figured I can use my laptop as a Wireless Access Point by enabling ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) and set up a Computer-to-Computer (ad hoc) network…easy peasy! Well, not really. 🙁

The iPhone does connect to the ad hoc Windows network, it even gets an IP-address, but I can’t browse nor ping the internet from my iPhone…even disabling the Windows Firewall didn’t help. Friggin’ Winblows…damn, wish I had a MacBook (Pro), am pretty sure I’d connect seamless!

Anyone any tips?

I’m planning to buy myself an electric guitar and amp to rock this house, seeing this YouTube video is inspirational, wow!

We’ve got visitors again! This time our ‘ex’-neighbors from dutchland flew in (‘ex’ since we still own the house in NL, so technically we’re still neighbors! ;)).

Evelien, Ramon and their lovely son Michiel came over for some relaxing in the beautiful environment we live in. They brought some sun with them too, so temperatures will be mild…looking forward to another great weekend!

The tech-dudes at Twitter planned a special Valentines Day surprise. It caused so much traction that I saw the server breakin’ every now and then.

So, what did they do? Ha! They made it fun to send some love around! A great idea, I love ‘m for that, one can never send around too much love these days!

How did they pull that off? Well, whenever you send a reply (via @username ) with the message <3 (the IM-shortcut for love). This text shortcut then turns into a heart in your Twitter timeline!

Nice one dudes! Let’s spread those hearts!

PS: it was nice to receive some love from iJustine:

…she’s still not following me on Twitter though. 🙁

Last week Thursday 1/4 of the world population (the Chinese ;)) celebrated the start of their New Year.

2008 is the the year of the Rat, as you might know Chinese name their years after animals.

Coincidentally, I am born in the year of the Rat…a different kind of rat though. 1972 was the year of the Water Rat, 2008 is the year of the Earth Rat…oops, am afraid it’s gonna be muddy for me this year! 😉

Am manually redirecting (301 permanent redirect) older posts from the Pivot blog in the .nl domain to the WordPress blog in the .com domain…I use John Godleys redirection plugin for WordPress which makes things a bit easier, but it’s still a shitload of work, am at 1/3.

It’s the last phase before I will say byebye to the old blog and point the .nl domain directly to the .com domain.

Oh, I also updated the header graphic…it’s back to the norwegian state of mind I’m still in! 🙂

Hehe, is it obvious I’m home alone or what? 😉

Have been working on the layout of the .com site.

It’s not as catchy as I want it to be, need to find a better template (and customize it) . At least the Twitter updates are there again, but there are still some thing to go through…I’ll be putting a domain forward on the .nl site when I’m done with the design.

I have to say that WordPress is helping me a lot with the great template support; changing layout is really easy. In that respect the score WordPress – Pivot is 1 – 0.

Yay! I just SIM unlocked my iPhone (myPhone ;)) and am able to use *all* it’s features!!

Sorry Apple, I have to admit that doing this makes me feel sad in a way, since it’s not how I normally like to do business with you, but, your product is just TOO cool and it’s taking you too friggin’ long to release it in Norway! (according to me that is THE major reason why so many iPhones get unlocked on unauthorized carriers!)

Anyway, I made the right judgement call last week, to wait for a software based SIM unlock instead of paying EUR 100,- for a hardware SIM trick (StealthSIM, TurboSIM, etc.)…last Thursday the software based method was released. It’s a major break-through in the cat and mouse game between Apple and developers (a term Apple will judge I guess ;)).

A tip for other people wanting to unlock their iPhone;

Check the following sites before actually going through the process of unlocking your iPhone, it helps you to understand the process and they provide a great source of information incase something unexpected occurs or completely screws up:

• iClarified – Apple News and Tutorials
• ModMyiFone.com – iPhone Forums and News
• iPhone Atlas – iPhone guides, help, applications, news and more, updated daily.
• Unlock the iPhone – the simple tutorial!

Both iClarified.com (which I used) and unlock.no automated the entire process…it really was easy as 1, 2, 3!!

Everyone who has been using chat in Skype knows the sound the program makes to get your attention when you’re having another application active (focused / on top) and a new chat message comes in the Skype chat window…’zuwob’.

I learned today that this sound is matching the plopping sound that you hear when you’re taking a shower, washing your face and moving your hands from your face over your ears to the back of your head…don’t ask, indeed, I learned it doing exactly that! 😉

Try it!

Am back in The Netherlands for a day and have been conveniently working from the dutch office. Spent the evening with my nephew, Tygo, what a beautiful baby boy!

Being a hotel junkie this week (will be in three different hotels in four days), so my internet presence has been depending on WiFi availability in the first two hotels (Geneva and Brussels). Both hotels were not elite, but certainly not cheap (EUR 200 and EUR 150 per night!). I can’t understand that even in 2008 these type of hotels still don’t include free WiFi as part of their standard service (hey, they provide a hot shower too, right? ;))…it’s not about the money (well, EUR 3,50 per 30 mins in the NH Hoteles in Geneva and EUR 10,- in the IBIS in Brussels ain’t all that cheap if you ask me), but it’s just inconvenient (leaving your room to buy these scratch-cards, etc.)…sjeez guys, wake up in the new era and fix it!!

Damn! That was my first reaction when I read this article on macnn/ipodnn today: Apple launches 16GB iPhone. Having my iPhone for just a week that felt badbadbad up to the moment I found out that the price for this model is up $100.-, pfewww!

8Gb is actually enough for me (I still have my 60Gb iPod ;))…so I wouldn’t have paid the premium for the new model anyway.

Being on the road the whole day, working my ass off and uhhmmm, actually loving it, leaves me without internet access for most of the day…still a bit of time to let y’all know I’m alive!

It’s time to build a team and have a good time though…the moment is NOW!

Wow…I’ve never seen anything like this before! This is truly Art…Sand Art by Ilana Yahav.

There are many more Sand Art videos available on YouTube, check ‘m out!

Big announcement in the tech industry yesterday (long anticipated though); Microsoft brought out a $44.6 Billion takeover bid on Yahoo!

I guess Microsoft has no other way to go, just watch the EPIC 2015 video!

Today our friends Axel & Beike came over…all the way from Indonesia!! Wow!

Great to catch up with them and it’s just perfect to see them, after we went visiting them in Libya last year…and after they got married in October 2006…hehe, maintaining a social life with friends ain’t all that easy for expats! 😉

Our best friends in Norway, Willy & Katka, got their second son yesterday, his name is Andre!

We went to see them in the hospital tonight, Andre was really sweet (as in not crying ;)) and truly a beautiful baby boy.

Hehe, it’s the second baby in a week time…2008 is becoming a real baby-year! 😉

Being in the hospital reminded me; The Netherlands seems to be one of the very few countries where children are born at home…it’s always interesting to hear the surprise in peoples voices when you tell them that most of the children in NL are born in the parents bed.

Guess what? I own an iPhone!! Yay, it’s a total geek fest out here!! 🙂

Of course it came with the latest and greatest software on it (v. 1.1.3), for which a jailbreak has been released last weekend, just in time dudes! 😉

I followed the instructions from iPhone Atlas…easy, complete and it did the trick for me!

So, step 1 is done!

Am now waiting for the software unlock (or other information related to a SIM unlock option).

Anyhow…the iPhone is myPhone, I *LOVE* IT!!!

Max Roeleveld checks in!

He wrote the Pivot-to-WordPress import script I used to migrate and thx to the useful information in his comment I was able to get the links to all my images up again using this script, yay!

I just started to change the image links manually (aaahhhh!) so, the comment came at the right time…thx dude, you saved me an hour or 2!

The .com-blog is up! It turned out to be very easy to set up WordPress (the 5 minute install indeed), however…importing my older (Pivot-based) posts turned out to be a bit harder…:(

The easiest method for importing is to use a RSS-file containing all posts. Unfortunately the server of my hosting provider didn’t allow me to get all my 800+ posts into one RSS-file (the server wasn’t able to allocate enough memory to do so?!?), so I ended up using a script I found while poking around the Net.

The script did most of the work, so far, so good…some things are still broken though; links to older posts, all images, and I can only embed YouTube videos when using the classic theme. The much nicer Kubrick theme breaks cause the width of the page is not wide enough to support the vids.

As you can see, I’ve got some work to do on the layout, so I’d call the site still in beta.

I will manually cross-post on the .nl and .com blogs until everything here is fixed.