Category Archives: Paul

Writing and hobbies

One of the many perks of writing is that you get to incorporate things you fancy in your stories. After all, as a writer, you own the story! I regularly make use of that perk. Readers who know me will recognize these details, while others take them for regular book content.

One of the things that always has had my interest, apart from reading, are cars, motorcycles, and sailing. So I eagerly jump to every opportunity to put in my favorite cars or incorporate cars or sailing in my stories.

Nuremberg:
When I was working on my first book Nuremberg in 2021, I could not resist using a 2CV as a means of transport in the center of Amsterdam in the 80ies. Even if the make and model are never mentioned in my book, when reading the attached text snippets you’ll probably agree the car cannot be anything other than a 2CV. Continue reading →

Cultural dilemma – Country vs Religion

One would think it would be easy to describe or define a country. But its definition in Wikipedia leaves room for interpretation that attempts to describe it as ‘…a distinct part of the world, such as a state, nation, or other political entity…’. Notably, the definition of a country does not include ‘a group of people with a certain religion‘ or even ‘a group of people‘. On the other hand, the Wikipedia article does mention religion in any way but for the use of religious symbols, eg. in flags. Continue reading →

Ocean floor infrastructure vulnerability

Just about one year ago (although it seems longer than that), the Nordstream pipelines were sabotaged. Within a short period of time, all four pipelines appeared to have blown up, likely by explosive charges. As a result of this, central Europe had to find alternative sources to replace the gas delivered by the Nordstream1 pipeline, Nordstream 2 was not yet ready, albeit very close. Continue reading →

Paperback weekend!

This weekend I’ll be publishing all my four books on amazon in paperback format. Until now, I had my ebooks on amazon (Kindle) and my paperbacks on bravenewbooks.nl. This last webshop turned out to be quite expensive for readers outside of the Netherlands, myself included, that had to face excessive shipping costs up to €25. With amazon, I hope y’all at least get better shipping costs as the books can be printed on demand more locally. Continue reading →

TweetrX

Once upon a time, you had Twitter to distribute new, opinions and other stuff you wanted to share. I joined quite late, in 2016, and used the app mostly to share technical conferences I joined. Once I started writing books, I used the platform to announce my books. Later, after The Deep was published and the actual sabotage took place, I published links to the news articles combined with a comment and a link to my book.

Then Elon came along… Continue reading →

New site!

Indeed, you may have noticed we’re now at allegedfacts.eu rather than the trusty old plusservices.se. or my former company site pvdconsultancy.se.  Perhaps you were automatically redirected here when trying to get to the old site.

Whatever the case, welcome to our new home!

Why, you may ask? Fair question! There are actually several reasons for this change:

  • The .se did not match the international character of the site anymore
  • The plusservices URL  was actually an old company account (that was never used for my company)
  • The name of the site had no real relation to its content
  • The website of my old company PvD Consultancy AB was finally mothballed

Anyway, from wherever you came: welcome here! I hope you’ll like it as much here as you did the old site – or perhaps even better!

Continue reading →

Sweden, NATO and democracy

Let’s start with democracy:

According to Wikipedia, one of the key elements of democracy is ‘…day-to-day decision making of democracies is the majority rule…’. Another article, this time from an Oxford dictionary, mentions a democracy to be ‘…a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives…’. Continue reading →

The economy of cheap versus special needs

‘What is that?’ you might say. Fair question as I do not believe any courses under this title are given at any university. The reason for this is that I invented the term years ago to describe what seems to dictate our economy nowadays.

The phenomenon of the economy of cheap started long ago and seems to have developed in phases. First phase: the supermarket. Continue reading →

Audiobook – Follow-up

A short message this time. This is a follow-up to my previous post on creating an audiobook with an AI voice. You can read that post here.

While all the techy bits were sorted when I posted that article, there was still quite some administration and distribution going on after I posted. Today it was pointed out to me that my audiobook ‘The Big Day‘ is now available for listening on several websites specializing in Audiobooks. Here are a few of the webshops: Continue reading →

Translation, human or AI?

As the idea came up to translate one of my books from the English language it was written in, to what is supposed to be my native tongue: Dutch, I decided to have a go at this challenge. To be fair, it wasn’t really a formal challenge, more like a curiosity of mine if I could do it or not. After all, with all the AI presence online, why would one be as mad as to undertake such a laborious task manually Have I gone mad? Continue reading →

AI? For an audiobook? Are you mad?

Well, that remains to be seen. The question is if I can publish an audiobook using AI?

Good question, I’ve written a few books, and published them both in paperback and ebook format, but never given the idea of publishing them as audiobooks much thought. While I’ve always been an avid reader of printed books and more recently also of ebooks, audiobooks never really became my thing. I tried one of them once a long time ago but never managed to finish it. Mind you, that was in the age when CD’s had just become fashionable. Continue reading →

Police brutality – Unique to the USA?

It has been impossible to ignore the cases of severe police brutality from departments all over the USA. Any reasonable person would wonder, after reading about this for the second, third, or even fourth time in the same year, why US police departments do not learn from previous examples. After all, how hard can it be? Continue reading →

PrisonLAW

In de recente pers werd melding gemaakt van een gerechtelijke dwaling in de zaak Jaitsen Singh, de Nederlander die al tientallen jaren vastzit in de USA. En, zoals het er al lang naar uitziet, voor iets dat hij niet gedaan heeft. Een grove gerechtelijke dwaling derhalve!

Helaas is zijn geval niet uniek, hij is niet de enige nederlander die onschuldig vastzit of vast gezeten heeft. Bovendien geldt hetzelfde voor gevangenen in andere landen dan de USA, en met andere nationaliteiten dan de Nederlandse. Continue reading →