Archive for October, 2006

A web service for those of you willing to check their DNS declaration: Pingability quick DNS check.

Getting a kill the hard way in Half Life 2: Using dominos.

In Windows Media video format.

These are the sounds of space collected by University of Iowa instruments on various spacecraft and observation instruments.

Who was not hurt by the weird colors of a digital print? Often, the solution is to use the right color profile from the printer manufacturer (depending on paper, ink, printer, etc.). But it is not always enough. If you have an old printer, you may not find the color profiles; If you use generic inks, there may be no adequate color profile. Worse, for some applications like Black & White printing, the slighest color change is perceived by even the less technical observer.

There is another solution. It can be applied by anybody, provided that you bring some patience: Black and white printer profiling (of a sort).

In the recent merger between ATI and AMD, one victim seems to be identified now: The whole All-In-Wonder card line is disappearing. No more of these cards using the latest 3D graphics technology, TV tuner and video grabbing capacity.

Source: The Inquirer.

You don’t always find nice little online video games that would appeal to all members of the family. Nonetheless, this is what I found on the nice little Orisinal web site (Morning Sunshine).

Recommended to the whole family (really from the youngest to the more mature).

A company named Genetic Savings & Clone, based in California, was created to sell expensive pet clones: Clone your cat for 32,000$ and more. Unfortunately, in the 6 years of its life, the company could sell only 2 animals. They went bankrupt.

Finally, not everybody is dumb enough to buy a cat of that price (you should forget about getting the same cat).

Spiral is a geometric form of spectacular elegance. Despite its apparent simplicity, it grows into an astounding variety of images. The Spiral Pictures web site is a vibrant hommage to this mathematical form with photographic pictures specially selected for this.

Mark James, a part-time web developper, produced more than a thousand slick little icons that are distributed freely on famfamfam.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, which means that if you want to use them, you only have to remember to state clearly that Mark James is the author and to include a link back to his web site.

I like the silk icon collection, but there is also a very useful collection of 239 small country flags.

SingleMalt.tv is really the TV for you if you are speaking English and in love with great whishky.

The TSA’s changes to the complete liquid ban may require persons with augmented breasts (or other body parts) to comply with further inspections at security checkpoints.

Really, can you imagine what it will be for a person having had surgical breast augmentation to suffer that kind of “search“? I’m not speaking about the young bimbo who was willing to impress the alpha males. But some women do have this kind of surgery just because they need it (breast cancer comes to mind quite easily) and I’m sure that they are not easily accepting to suffer this.

I’d rather think that this novel idea came out of the deranged mind of an old perverted fan of the comedy movie “Airplane!“.

Librivox is a web site where you will find audiobooks read and recorded by volunteers who give them freely to you and any visitor. It is mostly english books and works, but there starts to appear a few non-english literature (some French, some German, for example).

The selected works are part of the public domain and are no longer covered by copyright. The readers are volunteers and sometimes share the reading of a long book between several people (a novel may be split in chapters read by seevral different people). Download is completely free and there is also a podcast feature on the web site.

The catalog currently contains a bit more than 100 long books and some more short works. Some examples:

• Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Who does not know it?)
• Swift, Jonathan. A Modest Proposal where Gulliver’s travels author ironically proposes to solve starvation of poor catholic children by raising them to sell them to protestant families.
• Tagore, Rabindranath. Sadhana, the Realisation of Life
• Yeats, William Butler. The Song of Wandering Aengus (some poetry, too).

As the downloaded files are completely free of any DRM kind, they can be read on any MP3 or OGG Vorbis walkman.

This could be useful to people willing to listen to classical works from their car or while jogging, unable to read, or willing to learn a new language by listening to it.