Last January I found out that mixing Dutch Rap music with Club music is really hard. The rhythm, the beats per minute, the track build-up, the key, are all different! But I still took on the challenge to perform a one-of DJ act at an important family party.

The reason why I'm putting this online, is to share some of the advice that has helped me and to show off with the end result. You can play the recording of my 30 minutes of fame in the mp3 player at the bottom of this article.

Once every year I have a lucky shot. Maybe you recognise this?

I take pictures with my mobile to remember a family setting, a nice view, a holiday or special event. The pictures serve their purpose, when I see them I remember the event, the place, music, strange smell, or nice conversations. But once every year I discover a picture on my mobile that sticks out. The picture shows more than the initial purpose.

In a systems thinking exercise with colleagues I got a nice refresh of working with Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD). A nice holistic way to think about solving problems or reaching goals. The diagram explains your train of thought.

I was looking for software to edit a GoPro video, which had some audio problems in it. I needed special editing options, beyond those offered by either "VideoEditor" (Win10) or "iMovie" (MacOs). After some searching I found this gem: DaVinci Resolve 16. It has so many features it forces you to go through the tutorials, Those tutorials are great and get you to work with the software (not against).

Remember when video games were best played on an Arcade machine? I was triggered by a post on Arcade games to check if it was possible to play Ms Pac Man one more time. It turned out to be really easy. After looking at a couple of options, I downloaded MAMEUI64, which is a "Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator", meaning that it's software that can play original arcade games from multiple vendors.

I was looking for a text-to-speech solution for one of my projects to provide narrative to an educational animation video. The video’s are explaining how to perform certain Scrum sprint events. After trying a lot of sites and software, I ended up with Google's text-to-speech. It's really impressive how the sentences are so close to being natural speech.

In order to give this website some nice backgrounds in the banner session on the homepage, I had to fiddle around with some nice pictures from my photo archive. It had been a while, so I looked for the freeware I knew from years back called "pain.net". It is still there and it has all the features you need for small projects like these.

Have you ever used one of these? It's a 360 cam. I think it's the easiest way to make pictures without having to check your view or angle. The cam is small (fits into your hand) so it's light to carry around on a holiday trip. 

Below you find an example of a 360 picture taken in the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

A year ago I bought a second hand Native Instruments DJ set (Traktor S2 MK2 & F1) and started fiddling around with it. This summer a young friend of the family made a nice “tag” using FL Studio and Google’s text to speech engine. You can listen to my "DJ Oscar" tag, which is included in this six track 125 bpm "quick mixing practice" recording (at 1:08 / 3:14 / 4:10).

Mix includes:

Na het doorakkeren van allerlei sites over ZZP, heb ik de volgende mindmap gemaakt om overzicht te creeren over hoe het werkt met belastingen als je ZZP-er wordt.

ZZP en belastingdienst - mindmap (new window)