Thomas De Maesschalck's blog » Funny and weird stuff

If you build it.. they will not come

Thomas De Maesschalck — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:57:05 +0000

Ah the joys of central planning by a supposedly superhuman creature named government. Here’s a video of New Ordos, a brand new Chinese city designed for 1 million citizens, built in just five years. But nobody moved in, the city is completely empty…

Nice Spring weather

Thomas De Maesschalck — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:19:40 +0000

Today was another day with lovely Spring weather, very sunny but not too hot. Perfect weather to do some work outside on my laptop.

Nature is waking up again, as the following picture illustrates. When I went outside this afternoon I noticed a greenish blob next to our garage door. When taking a closer look, it turned out to be two frogs making little froggies.

Living in a palm tree

Thomas De Maesschalck — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:59:22 +0000

Today I came across the Palm Fiction concept from German treehouse builder Baumraum. This luxurious tree house has a very futuristic look and could be build somewhere just a couple of meters from the sea. You can enter it by stairs, and while it looks pretty small, the cabin seems roomy enough inside. Additionally, the luxurious palm treehouse also features a terrace for sunbathing.

The Palm Fiction is just a concept, but Baumrau has lots of experience in the planning and realisation of threehouses and other constructions in natural surroundings all over the world. You can check out a sample of their work over here, it looks pretty neat. Some of these luxurious tree houses are as big as a small house, and can be equipped with lots of modern facilities like a kitchen, floor heating, a jacuzzi, WiFi, a flatscreen TV and much more. It all depends on the tree and perhaps more importantly, how much money you’re willing to spend. The average price of one of Baumraum’s tree houses is around 50,000EUR, but some cost a lot more.

A peek inside Intel’s press sample cabinet

Thomas De Maesschalck — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:11:53 +0000

While browsing around a bit on Intel’s blogs to find out if there were any new juicy bits of information I found an funny post by Daniel Snyder, Intel’s press sample guy. He provides a very brief peek into his press sample cabinet and shows a couple of interesting things. First up is a photo of the new fast Intel X-25M SSDs but there’s also a photo of an ancient relic: a 10MB PCMCIA flash card next to some Intel bunny suit dolls. Snyder says that many years ago, the 10MB solid state disk was one of the most popular items in his sample cabinet. I’m not exactly sure how old this card is but I estimate it’s around 15 years old.

Snyder also recalls that HardOCP reviewer Steve once told him his iguana ate his Pentium 4 Northwood 2.40B review sample, and he even had the X-rays to prove it!