My children wanted a place to display their Lego structures and crafts. Because we are already two Ikea Stuva cabinets and a Stuva box, I thought it would be good to keep that style. Incidentally, Ikea has now given the Stuva line a new look, personally I like the previous version better. For starters I have drawn a rack in Sketchup, with the same thickness as the cabinet doors (15 mm) and the dimensions that fit exactly between the cabinets and under the TV.

I hosted the previous version of this blog on Tumblr simply because it was useful. But the “side functions” of Tumblr started to irritate me more and more. I mainly wanted to post content, to follow content I have RSS feeds. When my account was also locked, because I switched phones (always migrating your 2-factor app before you switched) and the Tumblr service desk was unable to help me, I decided to look for another solution.

I have always been a fan of reading, but not necessarily books. With the arrival of e-readers, I was quick to buy a Kobo Touch. There I set up books to read through the Kobo store. When I discovered more books that I wanted to read, I created a GoodReads account to keep track of which books I had read and still wanted to read. The score is now 166 vs 341, so I am still busy.

To digitize VHS video tapes, there are a number of so-called digitizers on the market that allow you to connect a video recorder to your computer and thus digitize video tapes. But an alternative way to do the same is to use a hard disk recorder. Digitizing video tapes with a hard disc recorder has a number of advantages. First, you can get on for a few bucks, or even for free on Marktplaats buy a reasonable hard disc recorder.

Both for work and private life I read many articles from “the Internet”. Because I don’t always want to read from a fluorescent bar, I prefer to do that on my e-reader. Fortunately, it has an option to sync articles with Pocket, a service to easily save articles from your browser and read them back later. So if I come across an interesting article on the internet, I press the button Save in Pocket, so the article is automatically saved in Pocket for later reading.

Although we are certainly not the only, or even the first, to mount a camera on a toy train, I had a lot of fun with my son this weekend when we took an action cam on the electric Duplo train and drove it with it. Especially watching live on the iPad was very exciting.

My kids love to look at photos, especially themselves. As an extension of the screensaver with their drawings) I have now made a screensaver based on Dakboard. With this free service you can make a screen with a (birthday) calendar, the weather and the news (via RSS). In the background you can show photos or drawings from, for example, Google Photos or Dropbox. The interface is very inspired by MagicMirror.

Last Saturday we were at the Eindhoven Maker Faire. Although this was already the 3rd time we came here a lot had changed. The event is now a lot bigger and is therefore held in the Klokgebouw at Strijp S. I also noticed that there were many more (web) shops and that a lot of space had been created for model building. I don’t know if it was because of the height of the stands, but for me the emphasis this year was much less on getting children excited about technology.

Do you know that feeling that you are in the car home with the radio on and when you get home you have no idea what you have been listening to? After Koen & Sander and Gerard Ekdom leaving my default preset 3FM, I tried Radio 2 for a while, but finally decided to release the radio in the car. A podcast is an episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device for easy listening.

My 4 year old daughter loves colors and drawings. As a result, she makes about 30 drawings a week. We hang the special drawings, but we cannot keep everything. That’s why I have installed Camscanner on my iPhone so that all drawings I scan are automatically placed in a separate folder of Google Drive. I save them as JPG with the date and time as the filename. To top it off, I set the screen saver on my iMac to show all drawings the moment the Mac goes on screen saver.