Cristiano on Tech/Life

Czeers is a startup by a former house mate David Czap and a friend of his. What do they make? Solarboats! Based on the winning race boat of the 2005 Nuon solar boat challenge, these boats feature a unique design with zero emissions.

Oh, yeah, and they are fast (see video below)!

I have recently fallen in love with 1Password to solve loads of my password issues. The product has been out their for a while already, but some things recently changed that make this the perfect product for me. The goal of 1Password is to help you remember your logins for websites under 1 password, including helping you create new accounts on sites by letting you define certain identities (introduction video).

All of this feels a lot like what OpenID providers like to solve, and I honestly still love OpenID when possible, but for me the reason to use 1Password comes from a totally different direction: the iPhone. Entering login forms with your extra secure password on the iPhone can be an pain in the ass, so in comes 1Password that allows you to securely sync your login forms to a bookmarklet on your iPhone. Then, on the iPhone you simply go to a login form, run the bookmarklet, enter your PIN and login with the account you select.

1Password is only $34.95 and definitely worth the money for people who have either an iPhone, or any other reason why they can’t remember their passwords.

Melinda just did a “8 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” and tagged “anyone who read the article” to feel free to do their own version. Admittedly I do read her blog and so here I am writing my own list of 8 things you probably didn’t know about me.

1. I have had three consecutive Guinea Pigs who all died tragically before their time. The first one died because of the fumes that came from the new vinyl carpet that my parent’s got, the second because of the fumes coming from the new paint from our neighbour’s fence, and the third died because I gave it Guinea Pig food without vitamin C (Guinea Pigs have a natural vitamin C deficiency and therefore need to get extra vitamin C in their food. Any food that calls themselves “for Guinea Pigs” that doesn’t have this is clearly a scam!).
2. I have a case of Pectus Excavatum which is a harmless genetic deformity in the chest. It is nothing serious but it does lead to some cool facts like: my heart is actually on the left, not left of the middle.
3. Even though I am Dutch, the only drugs I ever used were some very weak hash brownies. I also tend to tell people that in contrary to believe, people in Amsterdam don’t do that much drugs, it is mainly the tourists that do.
4. I never had a true Dutch girlfriend until Melinda got her Dutch nationality last year. I leave it up to your imagination if this is because I had many foreign girlfriends or none before Melinda.
5. Although most of you know me with my glasses, I have only had them since I moved to the UK. I had been complaining about my eye sight for a while and Melinda kept saying “all was perfectly fine”. In the end I ended up having a cylindrical correction of -1.5 and -2.
6. I have flown an airplane when I was 18. This is because I used to study Aerospace Engineering before realizing I was a major geek. It was a Cessna 150 and it was the best flight I ever had. It was also the second flight I then ever had, which brings us to…
7. The first flight I ever made was a parabolic flight. For this who don’t know what this is, this is when an airplane makes a quick ascend and descend leading into a free fall, creating weightlessness for the passengers. It was done in a Fokker 50 and gave us a total of about 3×10 seconds of near-astronaut experience.
8. I once built a bedroom media centre in a desktop drawer cabinet by screwing the main board upside down against the top of the inside of the cabinet. The HDDs and dvd player were glued against the back of the cabinet, and fans were hanging from the side to keep things extra cool. It was a bliss to clean as almost no dust fell on any of the parts.

Now that I have given my list, I would like to tag Alper and Martijn to give us their list.