It doesn’t stop there, there is also the :-p tongue-sticking-out, the %-) I’m-so-drunk and even *<|:-) Santa Claus. But there is one often-used ironical level that I find is not well covered by the ;-) I’m-only-joking emoticon, and that is the dangerous stylistical weapon called innuendo: an indirect remark about somebody or something, usually suggesting something bad, mean or rude. We need an emoticon that says if-you-know-what-I-mean-wink-wink-nudge-nudge in 3 characters. I hereby propose the …

&-)   = if-you-know-what-I-mean

• “My parents are coming over tomorrow and I still have to dust off the silverware &-)” = have to clean up dishes for the last 2 weeks and remove all clothes from the living room
• “Can’t talk right now, my girlfriend is here and we’re studying &-)” = no actual studying is done
• “Is your wife a goer? &-)” = say no more

What could be a proper response to a &-) ? Depending the recipient’s sense of humor:

• &-D oh-I-*know*-what-you-mean
• &-O OMG-you-didn’t-just-say-that-did-you
• &-? not-really-sure-what-you-mean
• &-/ I-get-it-but-am-not-that-amused
• &-( this-is-totally-inappropriate-and-I-am-disappointed-in-you

I think there is also one variation necessary for the most versatile joke on earth: that’s what she said! This is expressed with &-)! – as in “make sure it’s long enough” > “&-)!”

And to end, I leave you with this: Uncyclopedia’s definition for sexual innuendo. Just don’t read it aloud in the office.

TL;DR:

• &-) if-you-know-what-I-mean
• &-D oh-I-know-what-you-mean
• &-)! that’s-what-she-said!!

The actual formula can be found here: Arval: Benefit in kind (FR: Avantage de toute nature / NL: Voordeel van alle aard). I simulated this for my own car (Saab 9.3 Cabrio from 2005). It’s clear I need to sell it ASAP. Then I started calculating some other ‘common’ company cars to see what car to buy next. A hybrid? Diesel? Start-stop? So here are some numbers for the ‘cheap’ cars:

And because you’re right to worry about your company Range Rover:

Conclusions

• There is a minimum benefit: 1200€/year. Some cars would have been able to go lower than that, like some electric/hybrid ones, the Volvo V40, the Audi A3, the Smart, but no, you are still going to be taxed for those 1200. 1200, so the state considers you to make 100€/month more.
  Concretely: for an electric car, you are going to be taxed as if it costed 30.000€. For the most economic petrol/diesel car: as if it costs 21.818€. If your company has 22K to spend on a car, use it. You can’t save on your tax filing anyway.
• Accessories and options: they are also taken into account for the price of your car. The leather seats, the GPS pack, the xenon lights… They all count.
• CO2 coefficient is important, but don’t overdo it. The treshold for petrol (benzine) cars is 115 g/km, and for diesel it’s 95 g/km. You pay more if it’s worse, but you don’t pay less if it’s better.
  For diesel cars: stay under 115 g/km. For petrol cars, stay under 130.
• Electric cars: you would be surprised. Apart from the Renault Twizzy, which is more of a toy, there are not that many options, and you’re not even sure of the minimum benefit. If the car costs more than 30K, you’re screwed. Hybrid cars: if they cost more than 22K, you will feel it.
• SUVs: if you have a big SUV (BMW X5, Mercedes M, Porsche Cayenne) or a big jeep (Landcruiser, Pajero), you’re gonna feel the pain. Nissan Qashqai, Toyota RAV4, not so much.
• Second hand: there is a discount for the age of your car: 6% per year, with 5 years max. So if your car is 6 to 25 years old (after which it becomes an old-timer), the state will take into account 70% of the price it was bought for the first time. But if you bought it second hand? You might buy a 2 year old car for 50% of the price, but it will still be counting for 88% of the price-for-a-new-one. Concretely: if you buy a second hand Maserati, don’t buy it in the company.
• “Super cars“. I know you love to watch Top Gear and dream about that Lamborghini, but I’m guessing that has become something even more of the happy few. If you buy/lease it as a company car, you will bleed in your personal taxes. 20K for that Porsche Carrera (so you will pay +- 50% of that in taxes). 10K for that Range Rover.

As far as I understand it, this is for new ànd second-hand cars, bought or leased by a company for a manager or employee. Let’s wait until some accountants come up with new schemes for expensive cars.

In the mean time: what individual wants to buy a Saab Cabrio?

First of all it’s fully wireless: the Soundlink works on long-lasting batteries and gets its music over Bluetooth easily up to 10 meters away. It’s really light, so you really carry it with you without thinking too much. Any time I get back to my room, I just press the icon on the speaker and it reconnects to my iPhone. I take it to the kitchen, the terrace on the rooftop, and it just keeps playing, even when I leave the iPhone in my room.

Most importantly: the sound is impressive. Everyone who heard my Soundlink was really impressed and started asking me for technical -and financial- details. Now, at 300€, it’s not exactly cheap, but it’s worth all that.

For all the ‘gadgets’ I use, I ask myself: does it make my life more enjoyable (for a reasonable price)? For the Bose Soundlink, that’s a definite ‘Yes’.

There is a big selection of camera bags at LoveCases for Canon and other SLR Camera Cases!

Dear Peter Forret,
First of all, we would like to thank you for using Backify. We hope you really liked our service and enjoyed using it. We regret to inform you that we can not provide free backup services anymore. All free Backify accounts will be closed on November 22, 2011. In order to prevent your account from deletion, please login into your account and update your Billing Details.

Message from LiveDrive:

We would also like to advise you that we have received a number of complaints about BACKIFY.COM from their customers and from industry organizations. We would like to advise you not to provide any credit card information to BACKIFY.COM. If you have provided credit card information to BACKIFY.COM then we would suggest contacting your card provider and informing them that your card may be used fraudulently. If BACKIFY.COM have charged your card for services not provided you should contact your card provider and ask them to initiate a chargeback procedure.

——————-

I just read the announcement today of a very strong data backup offer: backify.com lets you use 512GB of backup space for free. If you compare that to the competition: Dropbox and Mozy give you 2GB for free, OpenDrive, SugarSync and Box.net have a 5GB free account, although the latter has upped this to 50GB recently, when Apple also announced its 5GB free iCloud offering. Microsoft Live SkyDrive used to be the biggest free offer: 25GB (but no way to upgrade). So how can one company offer more than 20 times that space, and still not charge?

There are a couple of things that made me doubtful.

• Too good to be true: a previously unknown company (Google will try to correct a search on their name to Backupify, because the first mentioning of the company was yesterday) comes and offers you something HUGE for FREE. Hmmm. Where’s the catch?
• Business model doesn’t make sense: if you offer any John Doe 512 GB, you can count on a lot of data coming in. There will always be some guys that will try to use all of it. You need thousands of terabytes, and those don’t come for free. You could use Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure, but they will charge you $0.10 to $0.15 per month/GB. There is a freemium model for storage, but the sweet spot seems to be: anything above 5 – 25 GB should be paid for.
• No believable team: maybe this company has developed a new, revolutionary technology to make storage 10 times cheaper, but then they would show off their exceptional team. There would be a CTO or Chief Scientist with 30+ experience in data storage and some exotic patents in ‘redundant sub-particle holographic storage‘ or so. Here: nothing.
• Look and feel: their page looks like it was made with a standard template and cheap stock photography. Like they couldn’t afford a decent web agency.
• Empty company blog: that was a big red flag: they point to an empty blogspot as their ‘company blog’. This definitely smells like a scam.

So I started to dig deeper: what company is mentioned in the Terms & Conditions and the Privacy Statement? They talk about ‘Backify Internet Ltd’, but who knows if that company really exists. The address is interesting: it’s a Canadian one “Surrey, BC, Canada V3T 5L2″, that is shared with 2 other companies: AptiQuant and atCheap. AptiQuant has come in the news some months ago with the article “Is Internet Explorer For The Dumb?“. It was a hoax study (which was admitted afterwards), and the official explanation was that it was an effort “to create awareness about the incompatibilities of IE versions 6.0 to 8.0“. My thoughts: it was meant to drive traffic to the atCheap site, a comparison shopping site. Who is behind both companies? One person, Tarandeep Gill. And what was just added to that AptiQuant site? A link to Backify, free online backup. I checked the registration of the Backify domain: it’s the same guy. He registered the site in Feb 2009

So what does the Backify site actually offer? I downloaded the client, and here is the thing: it is not a ‘Backify’ client, it is a LiveDrive client (for Windows). LifeDrive is a UK company, started by ex-FastHosts people, notably founder Andrew Michael, who cashed £46mio or 72 mio $ when he sold his company. Also in the team (although non-executive) : Nicholas Cowell, brother of Simon ‘Idol’ Cowell, and a very rich UK real-estate entrepreneur. So these people do have cash, and, so it seems, a working product at pretty much the same prices as Backify is offering, except: they don’t have a 512GB for free offering, they only have a backup trial for 2 weeks! The Windows client works, you can upload files with it, and the files are actually stored at LiveDrive (I checked). The web interface doesn’t mention that I’m on a temporary plan. So LiveDrive seems to deliver.

So what is my hunch: Backify (or Tarandeep) is just a reseller for LiveDrive, he pays 60$/month to get a Backify rebranded white-label online backup service, and LiveDrive runs the actual service. Noteworthy: neither the Terms of Use or the Privacy Statement mention the Livedrive company or product. Is the ’512GB for free’ Backify offer actually the LiveDrive ‘Unlimited backup trial, free for 14 days‘, and so will it stop after 2 weeks? It’s either that, or Tarandeep has cut a better deal (“let me offer a crazy amount of storage for free forever“), which would be quite an accomplishment. Is it another stunt to drive traffic to atCheap (there are no links on the Backify site yet)? Is he branching out to a new niche? Time will tell. One thing is for sure: his press release has gotten huge coverage. And everyone seems to think Backify is a legit company.

TL;DR: Is “512GB for free forever” also for real? My gut feeling says: no. Don’t put all your eggs in that basket.

• anyone can edit from any place, even at the same time
• the servers are more reliable than a server at the office
• I can use the info (with CSV/Excel export) in other programs through a web link

But there is a problem popping up at random moments with that last export or ‘publish’ functionality. Sometimes when you download the published link of a CSV export (through curl), you get an error ‘Moved Temporarily - The document has moved‘ with a redirect to a www.google.com address. And if you don’t follow HTTP 302 redirects, you can’t get to the actual content. In the past I’ve always worked around it or waited until the error went away, but today I searched a bit further. So for those who have the same question: read and learn!

The redirect is actually for authentication. Although I publish without requiring signing in, so one would expect no authentication process, there actually is one. See what it does (I used wget in verbose mode to get the HTTP headers):

>>>:~$ wget -v “https://spreadsheets.google.com/(…)&output=csv”
-- https://spreadsheets.google.com/(...)&output=csv

(...)

Location: https://www.google.com/... (first redirect)

-- https://www.google.com/(...)/ServiceLogin?=...

(…)

Location: https://spreadsheets.google.com/... (second redirect)

-- https://spreadsheets.google.com/(...)&output=csv&ndplr=1

(...)

Saving to: ...

So what is the solution: just add “&ndplr=1” to your URL and you will skip the authentication redirect. I’m not sure what the NDPLR parameter name stands for, let’s just call it: “Never Do Published Link Redirection“.

So I fire up  Fiddler2 – an invaluable tool to see what’s going on under the hood of the communication between your web browser and the web server. I look at the client and server HTTP headers and see something interesting:

1) Download via Chrome

CLIENT:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.122 Safari/534.30
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch

SERVER:

Content-Type: binary/octet-stream
Content-Length: 26176425
Server: AmazonS3

2) Download via IE for a file that can be downloaded:

CLIENT:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

SERVER:

Content-Type: binary/octet-stream
Content-Length: 26176425
Server: AmazonS3

3) Download via IE for a file that can NOT be downloaded:

CLIENT:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

SERVER:

Content-Type: application/x-zip-compressed
Content-Length: 687411306
Server: AmazonS3


It was a consistent pattern: every time the Content-Type of a file was x-zip-compressed, I couldn’t download . It might have something to do with MS KB 841120: the server that recompresses .zip files with gzip, and the browser mis-interpreting.

Anyway, I used CloudBerry S3 Explorer to go and explicitly change  every file’s HTTP headers and now I can download all files with IE. If I ever forget about this IE quirk, now I’ve written down the solution!

After reading some reviews on QNAP and Synology, I decided on the Synology DS410. I ordered it at Memoryshop for a decent price and some days later it was shipped to me together with 4 Samsung 2TB drives. Installation is swift and uneventful. I configured it as one big 6TB RAID-5 volume and started copying all my pictures, music and movies. The device comes with the shares /music, /video and /pictures preconfigured, and copying to these folders makes sense, because then the music appears in the handy iTunes server, and all media shows up in the DLNA Media Server.

The advantage of a Linux-powered NAS is that it comes with a number of easy-to-install applications (Torrent Client, MySQL, LAMP stack web server) and you can even install, through ipkg, lots of standard Linux packages. On the QNAP server at the office, I have file sync tasks running at regular intervals and it works flawlessly.

If you’re serious about your storage (because you need it for your work), don’t be content with just an external USB drive. Invest a bit more to have a NAS you can trust. And also: never trust it 100%. I now have +- 16TB of storage at home so that I have multiple copies of everything and I also use Mozy cloud storage for my exported pictures (‘only’ 12 GB for the moment).

Why I ‘needed’ a new TV

When digital TVs came out, the price for full HD (1080 lines instead of 720) was very high. I remember seeing all those 2000€+ beasts and it just didn’t make sense to switch yet, also there was almost no source of Full HD video. Blueray was launched around 2008 and seemed more like a ploy to make you buy all your old films again in a slightly better format. However, the prices of Full HD has dropped a lot, and I had more and more devices at home that had HDMI outputs and 1080p output that I could not show in full glory. So I started shopping around beginning of this year.

I knew I wanted an A-brand, which boiled down to Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Philips, LG or Toshiba. Shopping for digital TV is exhausting. Each brand  seems to have 150 different models which are sometimes hard to tell apart. I know I was thinking during the shopping: I wish Apple made TV screens: they would have a 32, a 44 and a 56″ model: just pick one. I wish I was able to say that I made a huge spreadsheet with all models, features and prices, created a N-variable price model and chose based on that, but honestly, I just picked one that looked nice in the shop (Vandenborre) and seemed like a good bargain. So I now have the Panasonic 42″ Viera TV. Vandenborre offered to come bring and install it, but I opted for picking it up in the shop.

My new TV

In fact, the experience with the TV has been a sequence of pleasant surprises. Most importantly, the image quality is impeccable, visible from all angles, sharp and light. But it’s when I discovered the ‘Viera Tools’ button that the surprises started. I can watch Youtube on the big screen (one of the applications in the Viera Connect menu). For long videos like Bernstein explaining music theory, it’s more convenient. The TV can also do slide shows or play movies from an SD card or USB stick.

But the function I use most of all: the TV connects to my NAS (storage server) to show me all the music, photos and movies. (Technical: DLNA connection, to an 8 TB Synology). The TV reads most video formats (AVI, Quicktime, MKV, MP4, although I sometimes have problems with XVID) and now allows me to watch any movie or TV series straight on the TV. I no longer have a DVD player linked to the TV, all my DVDs are ripped on my desktop PC to .M4V (with Handbrake, in 720p ‘Apple TV’ format) and I view them from my sofa.

VIDEO FINGERPRINTING
Since I work (and play) a lot with video, I was thinking about how to extend the ideas Neal proposes to video. Video material consists of audio (which I will ignore for now) and a sequence of images (typically between 24 and 30 per second). I’ve taken a video clip from Youtube as inspiration, but I won’t tell you yet which one, let’s discover it while I create the fingerprint of 1 of the frames, using the method described by Neal:

	first we reduce the frame to a small format, e.g. 16×8 pixels
	then we desaturate: make the picture grayscale
	then we normalize it: we maximize the contrast, the darkest pixel become the new black, the lightest becomes the new white
	we calculate the average darkness and any pixel that is darker we make black, and the others become white -this is what is proposed in the article. Total size of fingerprint: 16 pix * 8 pix * 1 bit = 96 bits = 16 bytes
	I found the details in the above fingerprint too coarse, so I used 4 color levels instead of 2. Total size of fingerprint = 16 pix * 8 pix * 2 bits = 32 bytes

Do you recognize the scene? I think not. Let’s try with more pixels: 32 x 16 or 128 bytes per fingerprint (which is probably already too big for a fingerprint)

Surely you see it when we use 64 x 32 pixels: 512 bytes per 4-level B/W fingerprint. This is not really a fingerprint anymore, it’s more like a low res version.

If you still have no idea: it’s Julius from Pulp Fiction with the impressive ‘vengeance’ speech.

ANIMATED FINGERPRINT

Now to see what that gives for moving images: I extracted one frame per second, reduced each frame to its fingerprint and combined them back into an animated GIF:

16×8:
32×16:
64×32:
100 x 56	actually, at 100×56 pixels, the image is quite clear. If I would add the audio of that piece, the story would be easy to follow.

I think that this 1 frame/sec sampling is not the good way to go. For each snippet of 10 sec, you would have 160 bytes of data, and if the sampling of the original movie was 1/2 sec later, then the differences might be just too big.
Better would be to sync with events in the content by e.g. detecting strong scene changes (like from mainly dark to very light and vice versa, or panning movement). A static scene (the same horizon or face close-up for 10 seconds) would then just have 1 fingerprint and a duration. I find little details on Wikipedia about existing technologies.

Still, it’s interesting to see how few pixels a human needs to be able to follow what happens on the screen.

Prey lets you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. It’s lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. And it just works.

Yes, I had Prey running on each PC. And then I looked at my Synology NAS (DS410, 4 disks, 8TB raw storage). It could be stolen too. And it’s basically a Linux box. And Prey is available for Linux …

So I figured out how to install Prey on a Synology box:

1. login via ssh as root
2. install the ipkg/’Bootstrap’ module on your NAS server – (from forum.synology.com) and this is a list of the right bootstraps for the right Synology model.
3. install bash shell – “ipkg install bash” (from forum.synology.com)
4. install textutils – “ipkg install textutils” (from forum.synology.com)
5. goto /usr/share and download the latest Linux version of Prey (wget http://preyproject.com/releases/...linux.zip ) and unzip it
6. create an account on Prey and get your API key from your Account profile.
7. create a new device (e.g. ‘NAS8TB (Syn410)’), indicate OS as Debian (it’s close enough) and get the device key.
8. edit the /usr/share/prey/config file and fill in the API and device key
   # you can get both of these from Prey's web service
api_key='yyyyyyyyyy'
device_key='xxxxxx'
9. now run the “bash /usr/share/prey/prey.sh” a first time – you should get a “-- Got status code 200! -- Nothing to worry about. :) -- Cleaning up!” response.
10. now edit /etc/crontab and add a line
    5-55/20 * * * * root /opt/bin/bash /usr/share/prey/prey.sh >  /usr/share/prey/lastrun.log
11. Now restart crontab in the following (non-standard-Linux) way (from forum.synology.com):
    /usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d/S04crond.sh stop
/usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d/S04crond.sh start

12. And it’s running! When your Synology is stolen, you set its status in your Prey account to ‘Missing’ and you will start getting email reports every 20 minutes. Because it’s a NAS, there is no webcam and no screenshots can be taken, but the external IP address will let you see where the device turns up.
    Remote IP: 78.29.245.xxx
Private IP: 192.168.0.108
Gateway IP: 192.168.0.1
MAC Address: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

Would this work on a QNAP server? I’m guessing, yes.

Then, during Season 2, the quality seemed to drop. The dialogues seemed ridiculous at times, the script didn’t go anywhere, and then at the end, there were two really silly episodes. I’m currently watching Season 3, and still I am frequently disappointed by the acting, the lines, the plot. So I thought: wouldn’t it be nice that if you start watching a show that has been around for some time, several seasons for instance, that you could get some idea about what quality to expect. Is there data for this? Yes, my favourite TV show portal TV.com has collected scores for each episode from its users. All I needed was some way to summarize and visualize it. So that’s what I made.

http://tools.forret.com/tv.com/

Ha! So the wisdom of the crowds agrees: the end of Season 2 of True Blood was clearly not on the same level as the previous episodes. How about Dexter, another one of my favourite series?

Well, you can say that maybe Season 5 is a bit less, but they surely have a habit of having an excellent season finale every time. Oh! Californication?

Not bad! Season 4 starts promising. And when I started testing some other shows, I came across one that might have started slow, but really seems to deliver consistent quality now: Fringe!