Archive for August, 2006

For various reasons, I have been looking for software tools able to magnify an image or a zone of the computer screen. Here are some of the links I collected this way:

• The Microsoft PowerToys include a Windows XP screen magnifier that can be installed in the taskbar.
• ZoomAView - The Computer Magnifier!: A powerful, easy to use computer desktop screen magnifier. Features magnify zoom levels up to 32x, moveable, sizeable lens window, locked or “mouse-region” view, selectable cursor style, reverse colors in view (photo negative), and more.
• The Magnifier (by Iconico): Simple and easy to use, the Magnifier is always handy for when you need to see all the details. Magnifier has the following features: - Totally 100% Free! - No popup adverts or spyware, it really is free - Easy to use with any other program - Resizable magnification area - Adjustable zoom factor - Overlay a grid for quick alignment

You learned a few days ago that I had some problems with random errors in my Compact Drive PD70x flash card portable hard disk reader. It seems (I’m not 100% sure) that it came from dirty contacts between the hard disk drive and the electronics. I actually cleaned quickly those (thanks to Compact Drive for providing a little screw driver and using traditional Philips screws) and it seems that it did not happen again.

Sigma launches a new lens with a nicely wide aperture: a medium/short tele, Macro 70mm F2.8 EX DG. Certainly a good lens needed to draw some of the macro photo enthusiasts (1:1 ratio) and whose quality should be high enough to keep the flag of the EX line quite high (gold ring at the front of the lens). Notice that this lens includes a small ‘Focus Limiter Switch’ button to improve focusing speed in extreme conditions.

Beware: It should not be used with full-frame sensors, 35mm analog cameras, and other sensors of larger size than the common APS-C format (risk of significant vignetting).

Immediately available for Sigma AF, Canon EOS and Nikon AF. Sony and Pentax AF will come later.

According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is “an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the use of shared lists of user-created Internet bookmark lists“.

Popular bookmarking services include del.icio.us, digg.com, and YahooMyWeb. If you have signed up for any of these services, you can bookmark articles on Roumazeilles.net for your own benefit and share them with other internet users who may have a similar interest.

To bookmark an article, simply click on the icon appearing at the bottom of each article: for Del.icio.us, for Digg, for Slashdot.

Thanks to TG daily (Tom’s Hardware) we have a clearer view of the performance/cost ratio of dual-core processors these days (after the arrival of the cost cuts both from AMD and Intel).

Click on the thumbnail
to open a larger graph.

Things get clearer now. It becomes quite obvious that the old Pentium EE is completely out of the game today.

In the entry market (less than 200$), it is clear that the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and Athlon 64 X2 4200+ are really alone in front of the ageing Pentium D offer. But, around 250$, the Core 2 Duo E6400 from Intel are nicely set to attack the Athlon 64 X2 4600+ from AMD.

Finally, when looking at 350$ or more, there are only the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme from Intel left with a good performance/price ratio (but the cost is so prohibitive for a mere CPU that I wonder who’s really buying at this price point - at least, I don’t know any real buyer here ; You can tell me).

The rest of the information is available from the original article at TG daily.

According to Engadget, the new Canon Digital SLR camera may have the name of 400D (instead of previously reported 370D) and it may include an ultrasonic sensor cleaning (the new fad these days).

After announcing its intention to leave the market of plasma screens, Sony would be about to do the same with the LCD monitors.

Being only the 10th world manufacturer of such screens on a world market terribly competitive (margins are plumetting) and whose growth is decreasing rapidly after two good years, Sony would be preparing a very predictable move starting with a withdrawal from North America and Japan.

Source: Digitimes.

After so many news from the competition (Digital SLR cameras from Sony, Nikon, Pentax), Canon could not leave the field open for them. Without waiting for the upcoming Photokina, Canon starts letting some information flow about its newest digital reflex camera (or the Internet news hunters got wind of some bits before the official announcement in 3 days).

The Canon 370D (in Europe) or Canon Rebel Xti (in the US) would be a 10 mega-pixel version of the well-known and very successful Canon 350D or Canon Rebel Xt.

Expect a cheaper plastic body (keep costs down!) to cover the new 10M-pixel sensor and a big 2.5″ LCD back screen. Not much before the final announcement… (source: Chasseur d’Images and DPReview).

And now, the full information is available. See my own news with pointers to detailed reviews.

Back from my Summer vacations, a little surprise was waiting for me with more than 20,000 messages stored in the verious mailboxes I use daily. First, I thought that I had been receiving a mere flood of SPAM (I get easily 300 SPAMs a day, so in a period of 10 days it could have been some surge of the common plague). But the reality appears to be even sicker: Some not-so-nice spammer decided to inform his victims that my domain (roumazeilles.net) was the origin of his ugly SPAM work.

So, I received thousands of error messages from all over the world. They told me about people having left for holidays (and their return date), overflowing mail boxes, ISP sentries able to recognize and reject the messages as SPAM (and returning them to me. Thanks a million!)

After a few more hours, I finally could read my email. Again, I congratulates myself for using two excellent email tools:

• Pegasus mail: A VERY powerful mail reader. It has been free for years and tends to favor security and efficiency rather than pure user confort (quite the opposite of the Microsoft Outlook family). There are extensions to have it speaking various other languages (French and German immediately come to my mind).
• K9: an automated statistical SPAM-detection filter that seats between the mail reader and the POP3 mail server. It merely marks the SPAM messages for the mail reader to delete or sort them out.

Out of 20,000 messages, K9 only missed 2 SPAMs I had to remove manually. It also misfired on a message I sent myself from my vacation location (but it was so abtruse and specific that the filter could not fail to think it was SPAM).

It seems to be well under Kenyan authorities control but, on 22th of August 2005, vans of a safari photo tourists has been attacked by Kenyan bandits while returning from a safari in the Masai Mara National Park. Two Japanese tourists were lightly wounded; The others (Japanese, Americans and South-Africans) returned directly to the safety of their lodge.

Nonetheless, authorities already arrested two of the bandits and are tracking the others.

This seems to be a follow-up to a previous similar attack in the Samburu National Park (in the beginning of August 2005).

Now, history seems to be the same again: I heard the news of tourists being robbed in their Maasai Mara camp by Kenyan thugs on the 22nd of August 2006. While it seems that the security level is still pretty re-assuring, I’ll keep you posted here when I have more information than the news flash I just heard from FIP (Radio France).

Source: World Travel Watch and Radio France.

This is the question I started asking myself after seeing the cover of the July-August 2006 issue of Chasseur d’Images (” HP révolutionnne le A3 “, “HP revolutions A3″) then reading the corresponding article.

(more…)

Now, if you want to fulfill the next step of this “creating a new web site” tutorial, you have to decide which software to use to write your web site. The choice is quite wide, but I will describe two main options:

• Doing it all by yourself
• Using WordPress

(more…)