Atheist, technopagan and vegan.

I found a very interesting piece about (Transcendental) Meditation: When adversity strikes, meditation can be our best friend. Not as an escape, but as a secret weapon to fortify our minds and bodies, to create resilience and perspective. In his new book, The Gift of Adversity, world-renowned researcher, psychiatrist and author Dr. Norman Rosenthal tells us, “If you are unhappy with your life, consider changing it first from within. Meditation is a powerful tool for…

The mistake of Monday is that it stopped being part of the weekend. Same thing with Friday. In other words: weekends are too short. You may not agree, but this is my blog and my opinion. People in the Netherlands are required to work until they're 65. Or 67. Or wherever it will end by the time it ends. No excuse that there are many unemployed people who can do a few days of work…

Allegedly, this is an actual letter sent to the DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) Immigration Minister. The Government tried desperately to censure the author, but got nowhere because every legal person who read it couldn't stop laughing! Dear Mr Minister, I'm in the process of renewing my passport, and still cannot believe this. How is it that K-Mart has my address and telephone number, and knows that I bought a television set and…

Yes, it's that time again. I was thinking of something, looked around and found a very beautiful celtic cat image, drawn by someone. I contacted her and asked if I could use her image for a tattoo. She allowed it, provided I send her an image when it's all done. Of course, that's no problem! This is the original image: The tattoo artist is going to make a few changes to it so it's better to…

ZDnet reported about a sort of successful Linux Trojan. It looks like a real threat, even Engadget mentioned it. It's not a trojan that needs you to go into immediate lock-down; before it works you will need to click a link so a malicious website can do its job, but still the Linux Desktop must be gaining popularity when someone goes through the trouble to actually do this. As ZDNet reports: Here the name of the…

IKR. I recently found out that this stands for "I Know, Right?". I think this is an odd expression, when the person claiming to know asks if s/he indeed knows in the same few words. Or does this signify the insecurity of the famed 'next generation'? Perhaps I'm too odd/old for modern acronyms and expressions, because I quite often run into several of those that hardly make sense unless they are based on insecurity. One of…

Via TM.ORG: The Beatles' visit to India in 1968 to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought the world’s attention to the Transcendental Meditation technique. This recent article in Great Britain’s newspaper, The Telegraph is a look at how the Fab Four were indeed ahead of their time. Below are excerpts from science correspondent, Richard Gray’s June 11th article in The Telegraph. ———————– It may have seemed simply a phase in pop history, but it seems the Beatles may have been…

Note: This page was updated on 2016-12-03. Truecrypt is no longer in use as it contained errors. If you want to find some alternatives for your system, have a look here. A while ago I posted about a cheap way to keep your data safe in "the cloud". Most people know Dropbox, Skydrive and Google drive, and that none of these systems are encrypted on your end. Because of that I installed Truecrypt and did…

This is horrible! More than 10,000 live exotic turtles have been found in the luggage of two passengers at an Indian airport. The two Indian nationals were arrested at the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International airport in Kolkata after customs officials discovered the reptiles packed in their suitcases. "10,043 numbers of exotic varieties of the turtles have been seized from two passengers, residents of Chennai, who were coming from China to Singapore, and landed at…

Via /. : "A Dutch newspaper has a digital version of the letter Mr. Opstelten, Secretary of Justice and Security, sent to Dutch Parliament (PDF in Dutch), in which he quietly admits to 56,825 phone taps (a 3% rise in one year) and to 16,676 internet taps in 2012, a 400% rise, or a fivefold increase, in one year. An older report already exposed the Netherlands as one of the biggest wiretappers in the western world. Slate also…