Export your contacts

The Dutch were not the only ones to loose during last year's World Cup finale. I was one among many others who had received some tech-loving visitors in my house while I was watching Spanish history being written on one of the many outdoors screens. It was a memorable day, indeed!

Iniesta FTW!

In spite of hustling down all the main black markets in Lima (in case you were wondering - La Cachina and Polvos Azules), looking for my little black MacBook, I didn't get closer than finding someone who had been offered the little black magic the very same day it had been stolen.

Apple-users among you will know that it was more out of personal affection that I wanted my MacBook back (and the small fortune that it had cost), rather than for the data lost. Thanks to Time Machine my new MacBook (not so new, but shht!) looked exactly the same as my old one, and this includes Safari's bookmarks, history and whatever else you may have forgotten to back up otherwise. Except for… Address Book.

As I came to learn, Time Machine does not automatically back up your contacts, you have export your contact database [file > export > address book archive] for you to have a file that can be back-uped. That is, if you don't want to manually input all the contacts you previously had stored in your Address Book.

Unfortunately, there is no option to export your archive to another format other than .abbu (only readable by Address Book). There had to be a solution, I reckoned, and one was found: Address Book Exporter. It allows you to export your whole archive, or parts of it, to a .txt file, which can then be easily copy-pasted into Numbers/Excel, turning your contacts' info into more manageable data. You're welcome!

(Ctrl/Cmd+F)reedom!

This fascinating piece in The Atlantic came to my attention via the wonderful world of interlinkage between blogs. As it has the statistical potential of benefiting nine out of ten of this blog's readers (if there were so many, that is), here's your recipe for freeing up your internet searches.

90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all. "90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell [someone at Google who gets paid to look at people - I believe they call that 'anthropology'] said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"

While I'm at it, I might as well share xkcd's golden security tip: stop inventing ludicrous passwords, just go for something long and keep it simple!

Europe's gone bananas (ctd)

The saga continues! Turns out, Belgium is not the only anomaly on the European continent when it comes to bananas… The BBC, always running the extra mile to inform us about the latest edge-cutting news, has a new scoop for this blog: Iceland is Europe's biggest banana producing country! Yes, you got that right - Iceland. Apparently the volcanic fumes coming out of the ground can be converted into energy and heat for the bananas to grow in greenhouses…

Ok, maybe Iceland is not Europe's biggest banana producing country. Certainly not if we're to believe the FAO - zero production. Now, that's not entirely true, they do grow bananas there. Just search for it on YouTube and you'll find a dozen or so informational videos on the topic. Yes, in Icelandic.

Is it such an odd idea, for people in Iceland to grow bananas? If you think of it, actually it is not. It might even be more sustainable than importing them from Ecuador or Costa Rica. You're using thermal energy, which would have gone lost otherwise. You don't have to exploit the local farmers for your products to stay competitive on the global markets. You don't have to ship them all across the globe.

So, if you live in Iceland, my advice would be: go for it! You might even want to export some to the rest of Europe, and beat Belgium as Europe's biggest banana exporter.

Belgium, where bananas thrive and monkeys go crazy

However tempting, this post is not about the political Spielerei in Belgium that, by now, cannot interest no one any longer but the odd political scientist [in Dutch] or rating agent. (For those of you who have just tuned in, Belgium has been without a newly elected government for over 400 days now…) Instead, I want to share with you the most surprising discovery I made today: ranked by value, Belgium is the world's second largest exporter of bananas. Wohow, slow down, say that again? Belgium? Exporting bananas?



Seriously, I'm not making this up. The FAO does. Ok, admittedly, by export quantity, Belgium only comes in sixth, after Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Colombia and Guatemala. But still… Belgium? July has just been named the 'saddest' month of July in the past thirty years because the sun had taken so much time off for holidays.


A quick search on the wonderful world of the web revealed that a Belgian company called Leon Van Parijs is the European distribution hub for Alvaro Noboa, a 'great bad man' from Ecuador. And where else would they be headquartered but in Antwerp [in Dutch]? This family business has been importing and redistributing (tropical) fruits since the early 20th century and is currently the sole centre to spread the Bonita love all over Europe.


All of a sudden, I remembered that the WTO has a plethora of rules of origin to determine where a product comes from. The EU will most certainly also have its own set of regulations to top that. So, no doubt Leon Van Parijs mastered the art of ripening the Ecuadorian bananas in Belgium before redistributing them, therefore turning them 'Belgian'. Selling them ten times more expensive than their original export price, then, squares the circle [in Dutch].


Lest we would start worrying about the implications on the farmers in Ecuador of these profit driven multinational enterprises, I'll leave you with another fun fact of the day to make you go bananas. India tops by far and large the rankings of banana producing countries with over 27% of total world production, yet manages to export only 30,402 of the 26,996,600 tons it produces. Watch your step, then, next time you're in India: that makes for 224,380,316,312 peels to slip on!

Five at a time

Here's to starting anew - a new look, a new profile picture, heck, even a new photo album. Why? There have been hundreds of topics crossing my mind, of which I said: this would make for a good blog entry. None of them made it here, as you can see. Enough of thinking about it, time to write some of those random thoughts down and try to make sense out of them.

The past few months have been quite eventful, filled with unexpected surprises and life-changing encounters. All this time, I have been looking for a meaningful job - alas, unsuccessful. Yet all these surprises and encounters have helped me to realise what it is I want to do with my life: to share. To share the little I know, the stories I picked up along the road, the joy of a smile and the passion to change lives for the better.

Asking myself if there would have been as many trees when this temple was actually in use

If that's what I want to do with my life, I might as well start here, right now. Wherever my professional wanderings will take me, writing will be intricately intertwined with whatever I'll be doing. No excuse, then, not to practise a bit more. I hope to manage translating my thoughts into concise blog entries, because, let's face it, no one has time (or the concentration skills?) any more to read a substantial piece of information passing their computer screens.

However, judging from the wanderings of my mind, this could turn problematic. Hence, a self-imposed limit of five paragraphs per entry. If I can't tell it in five, that means I'm on the wrong track, not being able to single out the essence of my thoughts or simply rambling and therefore wasting your time. After all, creativity starts when you cut a zero or two from your budget; it should work here, too.

I won't delimit the scope of this blog as I previously tried to do. It plainly didn't work, as you may have noticed. This should be a free space for whatever I feel like sharing with you, whether it is an inspiring TED talk I saw, a new MacOS trick I just discovered (but that I should have known ages ago) or the sheer randomness of being hit by a Korean old lady while waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. With such a gamut of topics, it's impossible to please all, I am aware of that. So, dear reader, if you don't like one entry, suck it up and come back later for the next journey into Tom's mind, five paragraphs at a time!