Weblog Arjen Tienkamp » Other

Terschelling …ander land travel guide has been released

Arjen — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:49:02 +0000

On July the 1st, last year, my father and stepmother released their book ‘Ameland ander land’, a comprehensive travel guide about the Dutch island Ameland. It turned out to be successful and they decided to make a similar travel guide about one of the other islands: ‘Terschelling’. After months of work this book was released yesterday. My father and stepmother went to the island for one month to collect information, to interview local citizens and to write most of the texts. The design has been made by the same company as the first book, Fennart.

The book looks fresh and attractive and the cover shows some objects which are referring to the island. Apart from a few improvements, the layout of the inside is quite comparable to the first book. It also counts the same number of pages.

While browsing on the internet last week, I discovered that the first book is available on Google Books. If you want to get an impression of these books, visit the Google Book Preview.

Take a worldwide journey without leaving your desk

Arjen — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:46:31 +0000

Searching maps and retrieving driving directions at Google Maps, has been possible for a while now. But after asking some friends and family, it seems that Panoramio and street view aren’t very familiar with most people. It gives the whole Google Maps thing an extra dimension. You are able to travel the world without leaving your desk, with just a computer and a working Internet connection.. and we all have that, don’t we?

If you search for any location with Google Maps, you can select the ‘Photos’ option. After doing this, you’ll see lots of tiny images appearing on your map. Those photos are user contributed via the Panoramio webite, and can be viewed in full size by clicking on them. These photos are also included in Google Earth.

At first I was impressed by this, until I found out about the street view feature. Unfortunately this isn’t available for all cities and locations on the world, but Google is very busy to include more streets every day. At the left side of the map, you’ll see an orange icon, drag this to the desired street and you’ll get a nice result looking like this:

Mainly the big cities are fully accessable by street view, because it takes a lot of time to collect all the imagery. Google has drivers with cameras on their cars, to capture the images. Recently they hit a deer and the pictures were available on Google Maps. You can find the news article of the Guardian to read the full story here.

If you haven’t used street view before, you should really check it out. It’s fantastic!

Collection of Cool Avril Lavigne Wallpapers

Arjen — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:51:33 +0000

Once in a while I get bored of the wallpaper I’m looking at, so last week I decided to give my desktop a new look. Usually I have a nice nature wallpaper, or a music wallpaper of one of my favorite artists. This time I chose for an Avril Lavigne wallpaper, and during my search on the Internet, I came across a lot of nice images (mostly widescreen).

Here’s a list of the ones I liked the most:

Download

The best wallpaper collections on the Internet

Arjen — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:59:20 +0000

Whether you are looking for nature wallpapers, city skylines, or celebrities, there are tons of great wallpapers available to download on the Internet. Personally I really like nature wallpapers, and I change my desktop wallpaper about once a month. Here’s a list of websites offering free wallpapers which I use to pick a new wallpaper.

1. Jeffrey Munro – This website offers wallpapers of nature at its finest moments, a huge collection of high quality and stunning wallpapers. Sorted into categories, it’s very easy to navigate around all these beautiful photos and pick the one you want.

2. 50 remarkable nature wallpapers – This post at Smashing Magazine contains 50 really great wallpapers. Most of them are digitally edited, to make the result even more brilliant. I was really impressed of the wallpapers listed here.

3. Desktopography – Every year they release a collection of beautiful wallpapers. These wallpapers are perfect creations combining nature and fantasy. I absolutely recommend you to visit this website.

4. Vladstudio – Huge list of beautiful wallpapers. This website contains all kind of wallpapers from nature to fantasy.

5. Movie wallpapers – A frequently updated website with a huge collection of movie wallpapers.

6. Graffiti Wallpaper – This website contains mainly nature, flowers and animals wallpapers. There are some really good ones in there.

7. Wallpaperstock – One of my favourites. They offer some great wallpapers in every category or resolution you can imagine.

Ameland …ander land, travel guide

Arjen — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:09:58 +0000

Since last Tuesday there’s a new travel guide about Ameland. Written by my father and stepmom, who really like being at the island. The result is wonderful. Since the publication of this book, Ameland is the first of the Dutch islands with an official travel guide. The book counts 144 pages, filled with beautiful texts and illustrations.

The travel guide is not just a list of useful phone numbers and addresses of tourist attractions and restaurants. In a story-telling way the reader will be introduced to the island, it’s beautiful nature, it’s history and citizens.

For more information about Ameland …ander land: