KLM Cityhopper, a division of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has a new aircraft in its fleet to replace the Fokker 100’s. KLM placed an order of 10 ERJ-190 jets at the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer.

The first one has been delivered last week and will be used for training purposes until it will make its first commercial flight on the 17th of November. The jet (registration PH-EZA) was flown from Brazil via Tenerife to Amsterdam Airport last weekend, where it was welcomed by the Airport Fire Department, KLM cabin crew and pilots, and obviously; the press. The tenth and last regional jet will be delivered in or around march 2010.

The ERJ-190 is equipped with some extra options for the KLM, the holds are equipped with an oxygen installation to make it possible to transport animals. The KLM also chose to implement “Electronic Flight Bags” in the cockpit. This is a portable computer to show important flight information. According to the crew this ERJ-190 doesn’t fly better than the Fokker 100, which was pretty modern for its time.

For photos of the arrival of the ERJ-190, click here.

Last weekend we celebrated the 12,5 years marriage of my father and stepmom. The whole family was invited to our favourite Dutch island, Ameland. My niece and I live in the same region, so we decided to travel to the island together. We met at Amsterdam Central station, and were right on time to board the train which should bring us to Leewarden, a 3 hour trip. And I say ’should’, because we weren’t even halfway when an announcement told us the train couldn’t continue due to an accident on the track.

After obtaining an alternative travel plan from a railroad employee, we got into the first train heading in the same direction. All seats were occupied, and because all trains were delayed, our 3 hour trip became a 5 hour trip. Luckily we were able to get on time for the last boat, and after hours of annoyance, we finally arrived in the cottage. We had a drink, gave 26 presents to my father and stepmom (one present for every letter in alphabet), and went to bed.. not even that late, as we had to wake up early saterday morning.

Saturday begun with an excursion at the beach, the guide told us about the local fish and oysters. It was pretty cold out there, as there was a strong wind. I was happy when we arrived at the guide’s house, were we enjoyed fishfood and beverages in a warm, cosy barn.

Later that day we went to a Mexican restaurant, were we got delicious tapas. Just as a couple of hours earlier, there was lots of fish. I usually don’t eat fish that much, but I love it. After some liquors at our cottage we all went to bed. I was pretty amazed about the almost 1 year old Kyan, my nephew’s son. He was with us all day, going to the beach and the restaurant, and he didn’t cry for a single minute.

When I woke up next morning, I was pretty tired. We went to the beach for the last time, and enjoyed a cup of coffee at a beach bar. Together with half of the family we got on the half past 12 boat, to leave the island. My niece and I traveled back home together. This time no delays…

The last couple of weeks I spent most of my time studying for my exams. Every eight weeks I have an exam week at college. I had 12 exams, most of them related to aviation in some way. In comparison to last year, this year will be a challenge for all of us. For most of the exams I already have my grades, and I must say that I’m pretty satisfied about the achieved results.

All grades are on a scale from one to ten

At the moment these are the highest grades of our class. I’ve heard rumours that people are cheating during the exams, I don’t know if it’s true, but I will never do it. I rather get a 6 for an exam without cheating than an 8 while cheating. Besides I like to play it fair, with cheating you won’t gain any knowledge.

When you fail for an exam, you’ll get a second chance. If you also fail for the second chance, you’ll get a third chance. If you’re not able to pass the third offer, you have to leave college and start another education. This means when you have to leave in your second school year, you’ve wasted two years of going to college, and ending up without a degree.

The fact that it’s more difficult than last year, is good, if you ask me. It might sound a bit odd, but the more challenging it is, the more motivated I’ll get.

Since last week I’m the proud owner of an iPod Touch 2nd Gen. I decided to replace my 2 year old iPod Nano, which could only store 2GB of songs. I can now watch movies, listen to music and go online with the build in WiFi everywhere. Apple has done a great job with this iPod, which actually is an iPhone without the call, text and GPS functions. After trying lots of free applications for this mobile device, I’ve compiled a list of my personal recommendations.

1. Blue Skies Lite - A top down helicopter game, which uses the accelerometer to control the helicopter. In this lite version you can play 7 levels. In the paid version, you can play 30 levels.

2. Wordpress - Useful application for those of us who blog. Publish and edit your blog posts on your iPod or iPhone. Available for Wordpress.com blogs and for self-hosted Wordpress blogs.

3. Last.fm - Listen to your Last.fm recommendations and radio. Unfortunately only available in a few countries, but it will be available in many more countries soon. You can also buy tracks from the iTunes store with this application.

4. Twitterific - Post tweets and read your friend’s tweets with this free application. A must have for every twitter adicted iPod owner.

5. Facebook - Keep in touch with your friends with the Facebook application. It’s user interface is clean, and similar to their website.

6. MySpace - Not only Facebook, but also MySpace has an iPod application.

7. eBay Mobile - Access your eBay account on your iPod Touch or iPhone. Search, bid and track any activity within your account with this easy to use application.

8. Digg - Read the top, popular and hot stories from the Digg website.

9. WebMessenger - Chat with your IM contacts on MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Google Talk and Jabber.

10. Google Mobile -  Search the web with Google. While searching, the application gives you recommendations based on the text you enter.

While searching for some aviation videos on the Internet, I recently discovered this video of a Boeing 747 landing on St.Maarten (Princess Juliana International) Airport (PJIA). Its runway has a total lenght of 7000 feet (2180 meter), which is pretty short for aircraft of this size. As a result these large aircraft have to make an extremely low approach, sometimes just 30 metres above the sun tanning people at the beach.

Here some photos of St.Maarten Airport:

1 - Create an image
With Photoshop or any other graphics software, you start by creating an image with a size of exactly 16×16 pixels, this is the size of a favicon. Because it’s a pretty small size, it’s difficult to design complex graphics for your favicon. Focus on simple letters or images.

2 - Convert your image to a .ico file
Now you have an image, you should convert it to the file extension for a favicon, this is .ico. There are several websites offering a free conversion tool. I always use the one on Dynamic Drive. Upload your image and click the ‘create icon’ button. You’ll see a preview of your favicon, and if you’re satisfied with the result you can download it instantly.

3 - Change your header
After downloading the favicon to your computer, now upload it to your server. Then add this line of code between the <head></head> tags of your website. Make sure the code points to the location where you’ve uploaded your favicon.

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

4 - Test the result
Now open your website, and check if the icon shows up. If you did every step in this post, you should now see your very own favicon in front of your website’s address.

Other Favicon resources:

• Favicon.cc - Favicon Generator
• How to create a Favicon
• Create a favicon from an online image

When it comes to downloading music and video from the Internet, there are lots of free solutions to do so. Today I tried Orbit Downloader, a download manager with lots of features to get the best out of the web. Sometimes we don’t realize how rich we are, with websites like YouTube and Wikipedia. In the past we had to go to the library, to do a time consuming search in books, now we just search for it on the Internet.

Orbit Downloader is an all-in-one software package for downloading videos, streaming videos (online TV shows, YouTube videos and Myspace videos. You can easily integrate Orbit with your favourite browser, whether it’s Firefox, IE, or Opera.

Download a YouTube video

With Orbit as an add-on for Firefox, you can also use the Grab++ feature to view a list of all objects on the page available for download. You can sort the results by video, music, and flash objects. Simply click the desired file, select a location on your hard drive to save it, and it automatically starts downloading the file. I’ve tried it to download an episode from the RTL Gemist website, which offers recently broadcasted episodes of one of the most popular Dutch TV channels.

You don’t need a high-speed computer, as you’ll only need 3 MB of memory and 3% of CPU when you are downloading. The installation package is about 2 MB in size, so we can conclude that Orbit Downloader is pretty lightweight.

The list of sites where you can download from is immense. From E-snips to Hi5 to Myspace, and it probably works with almost any other site. To try Orbit Downloader, click here to go to the official website.

Vintage movie poster effect

Old collage effect poster

Retro grunge poster

Sin City style poster

Artistic poster with hand drawn elements

Blended photo poster

The Bourne blurr poster

Scarface movie poster (and more)

War movie poster effect

60’s Psychedelic Style Concert Poster

Hotlinking, also known as remote linking and direct linking, is a technique used to show your images and documents on someone else’s website. This means they use your bandwidth to show these images. They do a simple right click on the image, select properties and copy the URL of the file. Especially when your images rank high in Google image search, people start hotlinking them without permission. It’s easy to prevent hotlinking on your website, it can be done by uploading one simple file.

Create an .htaccess file, with the following code in it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(.*\.)?campodiez.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png)$ http://example.org/bad.jpg [NC,R,L]

As you see in the third line of the code, I’ve added a domain. Replace this domain with one you’d like to allow hotlinking. If want to allow more domains, simply copy this line of code and paste it above the last line. You can change the filetypes you want to affect in the last line. You can also add extensions like .mp3 or .zip.

Replace ‘http://example.org/bad.jpg’ with the image you want to show when someone visits a hot linked image. Remember that this shouldn’t be on your own server, as you will create an endless loop.

After you’ve made your changes to the file, upload it to the directory where you store your images. It’s as simple as that!

Here are some resources:

• Stop image theft
• Wordpress Plugin to block hotlinking
• How to prevent and stop hotlinking

Thanks to Blamcast.net for the original .htaccess file.

Pretty often people ask me how to download movies and music using torrents. They complain about slow download speeds, while everybody around them seem to have no problems. For most of them, their router doesn’t forward the traffic to the correct computer.

When I set up my computer for downloading torrents for the first time, I was experiencing the same problem. Most of the time the highest speed I got was 20 to 80 kb/s, which is frustrating. I’ve done a little research back in the days, and found a simple but remarkable solution: Port Forwarding.

Let’s start at the beginning, assuming you don’t know how to download torrents at all.

1 - Bittorrent client software
In order to download using torrents you need some software. I can personally recommend you µTorrent, but you can also pick one from this list.

2 - Forward your ports
To accept incoming connections on your computer, you need to open a port (which port depends on the client) in your router. A good guide for doing this is Port Forward. They’ll explain which settings you’ll have to change with a step-by-step guide for all major brands. If you don’t do this, there’s a big chance that you’ll get very disappointing download speeds.

3 - Find a torrent file
To find the files you’d like to download, you can use a torrent search engine. There are both public and private search engines. You can have a look at The Pirate Bay, Mininova and Isohunt, all offering lots of free files. Once you’ve found the file you want, open it in your torrent software. It will take up to 10 minutes before the download gets some nice speed. The software will search the Internet for people to connect to.

The speed of your download depends on the number of peers and seeds. A seed is someone who has the complete file, and a peer is someone only having a part of the file. The more seeds you are connected to, the faster your download will go.

After your download is finished, leave it in your torrent software for a while, so you’ll share your file with other users.

4 - Plugins for playing movies
If you can’t play the movie you’ve just downloaded, you might be missing a codec. Lots of the movies offered via torrents are converted to Divx. This is a compression method, to reduce the file size. Download the Divx plugin here.

Last week I decided to become a dofollow blog. Not only to encourage comments, but also because I think that people should be rewarded for adding a valuable comment.

For those who don’t know (yet): By default your blog adds a “nofollow” tag to the website addresses of the people commenting at your blog. So if you comment on a nofollow blog, it doesn’t help you to gain a higher pagerank or get more backlinks. By removing this tag with a plugin like DoFollow, your readers receive a backlink when they comment.

The only problem with this technique is that some people only post useless comments in order to get a backlink. There probably are lots of solutions for this problem, like plugins which remove the nofollow tag after the second (or any number you set) comment of the reader, or you can moderate your comments manually (like I do) but that’s not what this post is about.

After I removed the nofollow tag, I added my website to some directories for dofollow blogs.

Here’s a list of the directories where signed up:

1 - DofollowBlogs.com

2 - Dofollow.us

3 - Dofollow list @ Nickoo Shore (Get listed here)

4 - Inline SEO

5 - WP-Blog.net

6 - Followlist.com

7 - Do Follow Directory

8 - Do Follow Blogs directory list

9 - Rise Above Directory

10 - Bigfoot Web Marketing Directory

Some social media websites are also dofollow (see the complete list):

1 - Digg

2 - Technorati

3 - MyBlogLog

4 - Blogging Zoom

Years ago Oscar Diös heard that there was an unused Boeing 747 built in 1976 at Arlanda Airport. This jumbo jet was used in the past by a Swedish airline called Transjet. He must have thought it was a wast not to use the airplane anymore, so he decided to turn it in a low-cost hotel. Building a hotel and getting cheap space is very difficult around an airport, but he managed to get permission from the authorities to ‘build’ his hotel close to the entrance of the airport.

The Boeing 747-200 with 450 seats gets a second life, but this time not at a 10 kilometers altitude. The aircraft was stripped, and has 25 rooms, the plumbing, sanitation and climate control had to be renewed, and also the whole plane got rewired.

Now, after more than 2 years of hard work, the Boeing 747 is ready be towed to it’s final destination. The bookings of the hotel start in December.

For more information about the Jumbo Hotel visit the official website: Jumbo Hostel.

Or, here are some other resources:

• Flightstory
• Techomatic Blog
• Gizmodo

20 Insane Comic-book Style Photoshop effects

25 Beautiful fantasy Photoshop tutorials

33 Awesome body enhancement tutorials

Dreamy, magical and lighting effects

Create a spectacular grass text effect

Wallpaper tutorials

Stunning Text Effects

The second year of Aviation Operations college has begun this week. Next to some subjects we already had last year, we have a couple of new -very interesting- subjects this year; all related to aviation.

One of the things I noticed immediately is the level of the lessons this year, as it is much higher than last year. We’ll get more homework, and we have to pay more attention in class in order to get good grades on the exams. Were last year was almost effortless for most of us, this year will be a challenge!

Some of the new subjects for this year:

Aircraft Performance
One of the most interesting subjects this year will be Aircraft Performance. Today we had our first class, with one of my favorite teachers (a former flight engineer). He isn’t only very well informed about aviation, he’s also very strict. I like that.

Problem guided education
Separated into small groups, every group gets an assignment or problem to solve. In a limited time, the group has to work together to collect information on the Internet, books and by asking professionals. With this information, the group has to find a solution for the problem. By example: There’s an aircraft with an engine failure on an airport somewhere on the world. What has to be done before the plane can leave? What to do with the passengers? And so on. At the end of the education term of eight weeks, every group gets examined.

Navigation
The name explains itself; we have to learn how an aircraft navigates, and how to work with aviation maps.

In opposite what the teachers told us last year, we’ll continue the math and science classes this year, but now we’ll get assignments related to aviation, so it won’t be the boring formula stuff again.

We all have to put some effort in it this year, but it’s definitely worth it.

When I heard about the Airbus A380 for the first time, I was a bit sceptical. Are airlines willing to use a plane of this size, with an enormous fuel consumption, in these days of rising fuel prices? Isn’t it better to schedule two flights on a day, with smaller planes? Boeing, on the other side, is focusing on fuel efficient airplanes, like the Dreamliner, isn’t that a better strategy?

I was wrong..

According to the latest sales statistics, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, Qantas and a lot of other airlines seem to be interested in using the Airbus A380 on their routes. This airplane has so much space, that these airlines can set up the plane with all kind of luxury facilities, like showers, sofa lounges, self-service bars for economy class, and private suites. Obviously, the plane will be used on long haul flights, and that’s just were the passengers need facilities like that.

But what about the water for the showers, 1 litre of water weights 1 kilo, so even if the showers are only available for first class passengers, how many extra kilograms will it cost to carry all the water on board?

After all I think, that as long as the airline is able to fill up the A380 with passengers, it might be profitable. Flying with a half-full aircraft isn’t profitable anyway, but especially not with a plane of this size.

Singapore Airlines Economy Class

I’ve seen a lot of photos and videos of this airplane in the last couple of months. It’s amazing, I call it a revolution in flight history, like the Boeing 747 was back in the days. And I’m wondering, what’s the next step for the aviation industry? Even bigger planes, or small, fuel efficient planes?

1. Flat panel monitor

2. Function Icon set

3. Flat Icons

4. eCommerce Icons

5. Free RSS Icons

6. Bitcons

7. Vista like boxes

8. Mini pixel icons

Here are some of my resources:

• Pingable - 20+ Free sets of Royalty free icons
• Smashing Magazine

In the past I used to style everything on my website with simple HTML, tables and images… not very efficient, and it has a lot of troubles with different browsers. Nowadays I’m using CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, which bring a lot of advantages. One of the biggest advantages in my opinion is, that when you update the CSS file, the changes are carried through the whole website. You don’t have to open all the pages to edit it manually.

But it’s not only that, also the file size of the HTML files of your website are smaller, because all the styles are located at one single file: Style.css

I learned working with CSS on the internet, and I believe that most of us bloggers do. The only thing you need are some good tutorials, and time. I’ve written some useful CSS resources below, which I’ve used to understand how CSS works, and what you can do with it.

1. CSS tutorial on W3schools

2. EchoEcho

3. HTML Dog

4. Tips and Tricks at the Blogherald

5. Toolbox CSS @ CSS Tricks

6. Introduction to CSS - Tutorial Dog

And as a bonus, some websites offering free CSS codes:

• Dynamic Drive: CSS library
• CSS Creator (Template generator)
  

The amount of images and videos of aircraft, airports and cockpits on the Internet is amazing. As an Aviation student I’m visiting those websites pretty often. Here’s a list with my personal recommendations.

1. Airliners.net -  Without any doubt the best website offering aircraft images and more. They also provide a comprehensive guide to aircraft data and history.

2. Flightlevel350 - This website offers tons of high quality aircraft and cockpit videos. You can search their database by filtering on aircraft model, airport, airlines, country and more.

3. Flyingcritic, A380 gallery -  A photo gallery with pictures of an Airbus A380 of Qantas. This weblog includes daily (air) travel photos and hundreds of links to photos all over the internet.

4. Flightstory.net -  Including photos and blog posts related to aviation.

5. Aviation Week - The photo gallery of Aviation Week, with high quality photos of civil and military aviation.

6. Patrick’s Aviation - Image and video sharing site dedicated to aircraft and airlines.

7. Jetvideos.net - Thousands of user uploaded aviation videos. This website works similar to Airliners.net.

8. SpottersVideo - A huge database of videos made by spotters. You can also upload your own videos to the site.

Last Friday we went to a cabin in Tulameen. This town is located in the mountains, about 3 and a half hours driving from Vancouver. Kelly’s parents own a cabin there, which is actually as big as a house, with all the facilities you need. During our trip to the cabin, we drove through the mountains. I was really impressed about the stunning views there.

We spent the days there with sun tanning, going out and sitting around the campfire. The day before we left, Kelly and Jessica took me on a quad drive. We drove up to the mountains, and after one hour of driving we made a campfire to make some hot-dogs. Some of the roads we drove were very rough, which made it pretty adventurous.

We came back in Vancouver yesterday, and went to the live concert of Feist. I only knew one of her songs, and didn’t know what to expect of the rest of her music, but it was great. The concert took place at the Deer Lake Park in Burnaby.

I’ve just got 3 days left here in Vancouver, It’s hard to imagine that it’s almost over now.

The last couple of days here in Vancouver mainly existed of taking some rest, communication with family and friends back home in the Netherlands, and some short trips in and around Vancouver.

Two days ago I went to White Rock, a village with its beaches at the strait of Georgia. The name of the village originates from a white rock which migrated to its current position during the last glaciation. The rock was kept white by shellfish-eating seabirds, whose guano covered the rock, so much so that sailors in the 19th century used it as a beacon. We walked up the pier, and once we arrived at the end, the view was beautiful. The water, the mountains, and it was so quiet there, totally different from the busy city Vancouver.

Something totally different was the Metrotown Shopping mall, which is with over 500 shops the biggest shopping complex in British Columbia. I’ve been walking around there for 3 hours -which is obviously way to short to see all the shops- and was amazed about the number of cell-phone shops located so close to each other.

Since today I’m halfway my stay here in Vancouver, and there is so much more to see.

I’m in Vancouver now for almost one week, and it’s great. The people are nice, the weather is good, and there’s a lot to see here. Yesterday I went to Stanley Park, a huge park close to downtown Vancouver. We walked around the park and sat in the grass. It’s a great place to relax, and a lot of civilians of Vancouver will probably go there to do so.

The day before yesterday, Kelly and I went to the Granville Island public market. We went to the Granville station by Skytrain, which is pretty similar to the London underground, except that it is above the streets and the trains are controlled by computers and not by human drivers. Then we took the Seabus to Granville Island. There were a lot of stands there, selling food, handmade jewelry and souvenirs. On our way back to the Seabus, there was a comedian giving a performance. He juggled with flaming torches and showed some other tricks.

What I’ve seen in Vancouver until now is really impressive. One thing that shows off is that everything is ‘big’ here. In the Netherlands everything is a lot smaller, like the trees, buildings, bridges and cars. It’s great to see something of other parts of the world.

I’ve uploaded some photos, which can be found by clicking here.

On Tuesday the 22th of July I went to Vancouver to visit my friend Kelly. After a 10 hour flight I finally arrived at Vancouver international airport. At the immigration department they asked me a lot of questions, about what I’m going to do in Canada, where I’m going to stay and they wanted me to show my ticket back to the Netherlands.

Kelly and her father picked me up at the airport and we drove to Delta, a suburb of Vancouver. One of the first things I saw was the Alex Fraser bridge, an huge bridge to Greater Vancouver. This bridge is about 930 meter long and the towers have a height of 154 meter.

Yesterday night Kelly, Jackie and I went to the drive-in cinema at Langley. We watched the new Batman movie, which was pretty good.

The first couple of days were full of great experiences, and I’m staying here in Vancouver for another 2 weeks.