Archive for March, 2007

You wanted to know what this PC game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, is worth? After a few hours of gaming I tell you all about it.

• Minimum requirements: The informations given by THQ are mostly right. With an AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 1Go of RAM and an ATI 9800pro graphcis card, it is perfectly palayable in 800×600 and “Low” image quality. Some rare image stops and a reasonable image quality even if it is still pixelated and without any antialiasing, of course. As soon as I will have a much better setup, I’ll tell you more.
• Very good FPS playability. Moves are quite natural and fights are asking for your attention and intelligence; This is not always a game of shoot-them-first-and-think-later.
• The game is well internationalized right out of the box even if some of the Russian characters have a thick Russian accent that may be a problem for non-native speakers.
• I observed a small issue with the quick save (I did not find the option in the manula, but F6 is working): it is impossible to reload the quick-save if your name is contianing a white space. This would be solved by using a name without a space.

Information: Voodoo Extreme publishes a patch (v1.00001) for STALKER that should improve a number of the little issues found up to now.

Be cautious: This patch looses all previous saved games.

Security: This patch is not present on the official servers of THQ. Its origin is still a little uncertain.

This is the scientific finding reported in LiveScience. Go and eat more chocolate. It won’t be perfect for your waste line, but it will be good for your health!

The 27th of March should be launch day for the newest Adobe Photoshop graphics product line: Creative Suite 3 or CS3. Be prepared for more details from Adobe, but the products will not be shipping before the second trimester (and Q2 may mean just before Summer).

There will be new features and the important support of both Vista and PPC+Intel Apple Mac (Universal Binary). The news come with the information that CS2 (and quite a number of other Adobe products) will NOT be upgraded to support Vista. Either it seemed too complicated or not compelling enough for Adobe. You will have to pay full price to go to the new product.

Speaking of new, the official prices start to be known:

• Standard Design suite: 1269€ for InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat 8 pro
• Premium Design suite: 1999€ for InDesign, Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash professional and DreamWeaver
• Standard web suite: 999€ for Flash pro, DreamWeaver, FireWorks and Contribute
• Premium web suite: 1699€ for Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, FireWorks and Contribute
• Production Premium suite: 1999€ for Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, AfterEffects pro, Premiere Pro, SoundBooth and Encore
• Master Collection: 2799€ for ALL (InDesign, Photoshop-Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat 8 pro, Flash pro, DreamWeaver, AfterEffects pro, Premiere Pro, SoundBooth, Encore, FireWorks and Contribute

A little bit of information I collected from the uTorrent FAQ.

The default firmware for Linksys (and all replacement firmwares except for the latest DD-WRT and HyperWRT Thibor) have a severe problem where they track old connections for FIVE days, which causes the router to hang when using P2P apps, or any software that generates a lot of connections. DHT only aggravates the situation because of the number of connections it generates.

You should upgrade the firmware of your router, if it has this kind of problem, using one of these:

• HyperWRT Thibor (14+) (54G/GL/GS only, excluding hardware revision V5 of 54G/GS)
• DD-WRT (v23+)(54G/GL/GS excluding hardware revision V5 of 54G)

But be sure to follow the instructions:

• Do not modify the firmware over the WiFi link (it may stop in the middle killing your router)
• Check what version should be used
• Follow the additional steps for the HyperWRT upgrade
• Follow the additional steps for the DD-WRT upgrade

A recent study from Parks Associates indicates that 30% of Americans do not have Internet access and… don’t want one.

We could draw the easy conclusion that one third of all Americans are even much more antiquated than their worst popular image. Various anti-americanisms would be only marginally reinforced from that. But I feel it would be surprising if this America-based ratio was very different from another population. Europeans could well be in a similar situation.

After all, if we are so many to be unable to live without a live Internet connection around us, wouldn’t it become trendy (next year of next decenny?) to tell that you do not have Internet and do not want it. Who knows?

In the spotlight: Sony Alpha 900 Canon EOS 5D Mk II Nikon D700 FX Download Nero for free

Reality may be even simpler. Where you -my readers- and me are significantly immersed into the Internet, the web, the blogosphere and other connected worlds, some others for not really care about them. They did not taste it. Moreover, they may well have ways of life that do not require Internet (and there, I’m not describing cave men).

It puts an interesting light onto the expression of digital divide. It is important to remember that some do not have access to this powerful tool they are willing to use, but there are also people who do not want to jump over the line between the old economy and the new economy. We must keep in mind that they are not necessarily outdated and outsmarted. They just live slightly differently (or WE live slightly differently).

The only thing that I think will be a pity: The un-connected people will certainly not participate to this discussion (answers and comments below). By nature, they cannot. But others can give an opinion may be less authorized, but compensating by more documentation. What do you think?

Sources: Broadband Reports, Park Associates.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Explorer v4.5, is providing a tremendous amount of details with the stated 1m/pixel in the United States (but only 20m/pixel outside of the US).

Since the Earth surface is about 510,065,600,000,000 square meters (according to Wikipedia), this leads to a total of around 1,188 giga-pixel world image (plus some more details in the US which is 400 times more precise).

There is a race with competing Google Earth and others to get the most details, and this will ead to ever increasing sizes.

Software programs to do anything you want with your PC if you are a bit more geeky than most but do not want to pay much. Freeware & shareware.

One of the most important and still one of the most poorly applied tasks of computer calysthenics in the world is data backup. Usually, it’s only when you discover that you lost your important data that you remember that you should have been backing things up. A little too late…

Requirement

What are the qualities of a good backup?

• It’s done regularly
• It contains useful data (and only them)
• You can easily perform a restore operation

If you look at these qualities, it is easy to see why so often we do not have the right backup sets. Problems abund:

• I forgot to run the backup
• I did not have enough time, so I backed up only part of what was needed
• I can no longer read the backup set or I can’t find the restoration tool

The Roumazeilles solution

Advantages

We can’t over-stress the importance of being attentive to these problems. But it is sometimes difficult to find a good solution. I could explain how to backup with expensive and complex software tools (or even hardware solutions), but I decided to give you a tip about how to do fairly good PC backups, as I do it right now. My method has plenty of advantages:

• Free
• Works with all Windows versions
• Uses no complicated software (you don’t need to click on the advertisment messages appearing around this page)
• Works automatically, even if I forgot or I’m hard pressed by some kind of other emergency
• Backups only the important data, but all of them
• Restore uses NO special tool and needs even less competence (the most sensitive operation is the safest and simplest)

What are you waiting for?

Your answer: “Please, tell us what is this miracle solution?”

(more…)

NeoOffice is a OS X port of OppenOffice.org by a group of developers who have thought from the beginning that the Main OO.o team was taking the wrong tack in offering X-11 support on the Mac.

Aqua-native, includes both PPC and Intel binaries, allows Spotlight to index both content and metadata of OpenOffice and OpenDocument files.

Importantly, NeoOffice v2.1 arrives on March 27th, and it will immediately include support for Microsoft Office 2007 document formats.

As I reported previously PDF Creator, the free PDF producing tool, happens not to work for Vista. However, it has been published a possible workaround (unconfirmed officially) to this problem.

Install pdfcreator in ’server mode’ as ‘xp compatible’ and then tell it to ‘render output on client’ machine, and set the sharing to the default share name.

Worth trying at least. But your mileage may vary.

While we are talking about dust and cleaning the sensor of the Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras, I wanted to show a slightly different direction, some sort of think-different solution that can be used in some cases.

I intend to leave soon for a safari in South Africa. My Konica-Minolta Dynax/Maxxum 7D will come with long tele lenses (a Minolta APO 200mm/2.8 and a Minolta APO 300mm/4). As I intend to shoot wild animals that will probably be always a little too far, I also bought a 2x converter from Minolta specially adapted to these nice white lenses.

One free side-effect of using permanently a 2x converter on the 200mm lens is that when I will be willing to move to the 300mm (unfortunately, I will loose the AF coupling since I don’t have enough dough to have an APO 300mm/2.8), I will not even expose the sensor to the ambient dust.

Isn’t it nice to use the 2x or 1.4x converter as a kind of anti-dust cap? It works on all brands; With Konica Minolta as well as with digital cameras from Canon or Nikon.

Maybe not if you are shooting landscapes with a wide angle lens, of course… But with buffalos and cheetahs?

We previously had some fun with Japanese bras convertible into a small bag in 10 seconds. We were more or less assuming that weird ideas like that had to come from Japan. But the virus has spread much more than initially expected. Here is a company that sells bras that need electrical power because they use light to help attract the average Joe.

Sometimes just with light:

Sometimes with light and fur:

Sometimes a full scrolling text display:

Beware of (electrical) shocks!

Source: Enlighted bras.