Maastricht Minutiae going semi-weekly

Just a quick update for those of you who have been listening to our Maastricht Minutiae podcast. Since we’ve gotten over the initial burst of activity, we just haven’t had as much to report back to you all in podcast form. So, for now, we’re going semi-weekly. Please subscribe to the podcast feed from Talkshoe and get an alert every time we upload a new one.

Wiki Loves Art Photography Contest

24 Oranges, a fun, English-language blog about Dutch culture, blogged today about a photo competition that has museums opening their doors to camera-wielding amateur photographers. The contest is called Wiki Loves Art (Dutch site), and the intention appears to be to create a collection of Creative Commons images from various Dutch museums to be used in Wikipedia. Contestants can enter photographs under a Creative Commons by-sa (attribution, share-alike) license for the chance to win 500 Euros to be spent on photographic equipment. The contest is running the entire month of June.

While I’m not a great photographer, I may enter the contest just for the chance to take some photos inside museums that normally do not permit that behavior. I respect that many art pieces can be damaged by too much photography (flash exposure, etc), but limited bursts of activity like this seem relatively harmless and provide a great way for individuals to increase access to their cultural histories.

Handy Cooking Conversion Websites

I love baking and brought American measuring cups & spoons along with a couple of cookbooks when we moved to Maastricht. Even so, I frequently need to make conversions from Fahrenheit to Celsius and from cups to grams. The follow sites are indispensable to me when baking.

Albireo.ch Temperature Converter: This simple site converts both ways between Fahrenheit and Celsius and allows you to chose whether to round the number or not.

Gourmet Sleuth Gram Converter: Grams are trickier. Most Dutch recipes and packaging use grams to indicate the amounts you need, but the number of grams is determined by weight rather than volume (like cups). This Gourmet Sleuth tool is useful because it provides the estimated grams per cup of several common foods. I rarely use the actual tool, but I’m always referencing the chart below and using my kitchen scale.

The kitchen scale is a new tool in my kitchen, but it is great to have. If you are looking for one in Maastricht, Media Markt has a nice selection of scales at a variety of price points.

Organizing my Private Library

It probably comes as no surprise that I am a real geek when it comes to books. Before we moved to Maastricht, I knew most of my collection would need to go into storage. So I could avoid buying duplicate titles (and so I can keep track of what I’m missing from my Elfquest collection), I decided to turn to my computer.

First, I used Delicious Library 2 to catalog all the books we have (a paltry 330), as well as all our video games and board games. The catalog was easy to build using DL’s software that turns my webcam into a barcode scanner. A little tough on my elbows maybe. The program also filled in most of the metadata I could want for each title. Its not perfect, some game books and graphic novels had to be filled in completely by hand and a few covers are just plain wrong, but it is certainly enough. Plus I can mark which books are with me and which are in storage. Ah, control.

Next I wanted to be able to share the titles in my library. I decided to buy a lifetime membership to LibraryThing and uploaded all my titles there. The transfer was easy. Delicious Library allows you to export a complete or partial list of titles in a variety of ways including XML. I simply uploaded this XML export to LibraryThing and it indexed them right away. If you’re curious what I have in my stable, you can see my LibraryThing catalog here.

Now of course I have an obligation to keep up with my library, but its nice to know at a glance what I have.

Evil Inc Artwork Framed

Nothing motivates a person to finish getting the little odds & ends tied up like having a dozen guests. One of my projects was to take this great original art from Brad Guigar of Evil Inc and get it framed. Since he has draws in black & white, but the comic displays on his website in color, I custom cut the mat to accommodate both the original and a printout from the website. It looks great hanging in the living room.

Evil Inc is a humorous webcomic about supervillains who have taken villainy to the corporate level. Even if you’re not typically interested in superheros (I’m not), its definately worth checking out.

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