Archive for April, 2007

Some assemble really big images. Some do it professionally, like NASA.

They took a huge number of satellite images and made a 0.5 giga-pixel photo of the Earth (up to 21600×21600), known as the Visible Earth.

Remember it: The Nikon D40 does not include the usual autofocus motor (for obvious cost reasons) and leaves this bruden onto the lens itself. Of course, it means that some lenses are not fully usable with the D40. Some others have no problem with the small Nikon digital camera because they include the needed motor. Sigma published its own list of lenses compatible with the D40.

Microsoft Live Maps is a satellite mapping application in direct competition with Google Maps and a few others. Microsoft just added a large amount of photo images taken from planes. It produces 3.8 tera-bytes of additional data. But this mostly means more details and some of the images are taken at a slightly slanted angle that helps you recognize the buildings, for example.

On a Friday afternoon like today, in the office, you said that you would kill yourself if you were invited in yet another meeting. Unfortunately, the boss invited you to another meeting in 5 minutes. To be true to our word, you have 5 minutes to kill yourself.

This is the task assigned to you in this tim-waster of a game. Isn’t it nice for a Friday 13th?

Favicon’s are those little icon files that you place at the root of your web site. They display in Internet Explorer along with your bookmarks, in Opera and Firefox on the address bar near to the address of the site you visit.

When you want to produce a favicon for your web site, you probably do not want to loose a lot of time. I selected a small free software that takes a few simple graphics and transforms them in a small icon (it tells you the best choice of size and colors for a true favicon):

Simple and to the point. Exactly what you need in such a case.

The Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw) is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a Gimp plug-in. It reads raw images using Dave Coffin’s excellent raw conversion utility – DCRaw. UFRaw supports basic color management using Little CMS, allowing the user to apply color profiles. For Nikon users UFRaw has the advantage that it can read the camera’s tone curves. Even if you don’t own a Nikon, you can still apply a Nikon curve to your images.

A Personal Data Assistant (PDA) like my Sony Clié (I did not update it lately, ain’t I), a Palm Tungsten E2 or a Palm Z22 includes a sensitive zone at the bottom of the screen where you can write with a stylus. But depending on your use (for example if you are an adept of Graffiti), you take the risk of simply wearing the zone. In some extreme case, it can go to tearing the surface of the glass that is actually made of a very thin plastic film.

If you get to that point, this is catastrophy and living nightmare: Damages will only increase with time and you may have to go and visit your prefered electronics store for a replacement. Practically, even going to that dramatic end, the normal everyday’s use will become more and more annoying.

Worst, this can happen faster than you’d expect if a small common incident happens depsite all your attention: If a hard micro-dust get stuck under the end of the stylus, it will scratch the glass surface in a split second.

Hre comes THE TIP to protect your PDA against nearly all the attacks and agressions: Scotch(R) Magic(MC) 811. You may not know this product from 3M. It appears like a traditonal scotch tape but it has three very interesting characteristics (very interesting for us, at least):

• The glue is of the same type as the one found on the back of Post-It(R) Notes and that made their success: You can glue and unglue it at will.
• The surfaceof the tape is translucent and slightly rough like paper (or tracing paper for those who know it).
• The width of the tape is nearly exactly identical to the height of the sensitive zone of the PDA.

Consequence: If you cut a small piece of this Scotch(R) Magic(MC) 811 and stick it onto the sensitive zone of your PDA, you will protect it. As the tape is very thin, you do not loose sensitivity at the stylus. As it is removable, you can VERY easily change it when ever you want to (if it is greasy, damaged, stained, etc.) Since its surface is very similar to paper, the stylus contact is less slippery/tacky and you get get the additional pleasure of feeling like you’re writing on paper when writing onto your Palm.

A very simple idea. And dirt cheap.

I’ve been telling often (too often?) that you should replace your Microsoft Office with the cheap (free!) and powerful OpenOffice desktop suite. But some of my readers wanted to know about other replacement solutions for PC applications running under MS-Windows.

Here are my “Open source alternatives to popular PC software“:

Don’t ask for an alternative to PhotoShop; For me, there is none. Adobe still has an impressively good product.

You can also check the external web site I presented here some weeks ago: The Linux Equivalent project that provides alternatives running under GNU/Linux (about the same list as for Windows, but not always).

This week, I observed a weird tendency (random concentration?) on the information channels I check on the Internet: I saw an increasing number of news about ways to optimize parts of your trips and travels.

• Trippish: Take weather into account to plan your trips.
• Farecast: Choose the best time to buy an airplane ticket in order to get it at the best possible price (using statistical methods, and with a refund-the-difference commitment)
• BizMile: Compute your business miles (for IRS appreciation and with valid IRS report output)

Everybody is moving around more than ever, or is it merely that you are all thinking about your next vacations?

Per Lothe is a photography artist that really knows how to put colour in landscapes. What is best than waiting for the right light to make his model greater.

http://www.lothen.com/

…as is shown on this map:

The Roumazeilles.net visitors come from every corner of the world.

Imaging Resource is a web site with a low rate of publication, but its reviews are of the highest quality. Today, they publish a review of the Pentax K10D D-SLR (including anti-shake, dust reduction, 10MP, weather-proof body).

A leopard I shot last year in Kenya

In the coming 15 days, I will be travelling in South Africa. The updates to the web site will not stop (it’s marvellous what a little bit of software automation can do!) but don’t count on my active participation (I will not be on line from the African bush of Natural Parks and I will be certainly more interested in leopards than in the Internet).

See you soon.

When you start fighting for the highest possible resolution in digital cameras, you usually count in mega-pixels. METIS Systems goes further: 4 giga-pixels in a single camera. The Digital Macro Camera 1015/C [PDF] is able to photograph 12 square meters at non-interpolated 254 ppi. (100 pixel per square millimeter).

This is a tool to make photographic reproductions of the highest possible quality and, contrary to what has been done by others, this is not a technique to stitch hundreds of images but a dynamic scanning directly included in the camera.

Italy seems to be the right place to do high-definition images these days.

Popular torrent client µTorrent released a new public beta earlier today. The beta is an early build of µTorrent version 1.7 and the most significant new feature is full support for Windows Vista.

Source: Wired.com.

After all, most CCD cameras are naturally very sensitive to infrared and you only have to remove the filter that protects them against this part of the light spectrum.

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl is clearly a game long awaited (since 2003). It brings significant game items (part role playing game with a lot of liberty for action, part a First Person Shooter with a lot of guns for action). It has been several hours now that I’v been playing I thought that it would be time to give some information and thoughts.

Clearly, my opinion is very favorable. The game is very pleasant to play with and very addicting. Sometimes, it happens to feel a little longer than needed, but it stays very distracting and the Artificial Intelligence provides a powerful life to all the environment you play into (non playing characters have a very wide autonomy: Even in your absence, some IA-controlled characters will not miss an opportunity to fight between themselves and you may stumble upon the corpses left after a fight you only heard from afar).

I did not yet install the 1.0001 patch that is now available for all versions (US, non-US or Russian) from the web or from the game itself. Be cautious, your saved games will all be lost when you do this upgrade.

I have to admit that I have used several times some of the small bugs in the graphics engine like when you sometimes can see the shadow of an opponent through a thick wall. It goes well with my stealthy and calm approach to fights (you will find me often hiding and preparing an ambush behind a corner where I can wait to pin down somebody with a couple of short-distance gun shots).

I also found an interesting little optimization guide (tweak guide) for the game: “STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl Tweak Guide” that even gave me the solution to the bug of the blocked quick-save issue when you registered with a name containing a space character (like “Jean Dupond“).

Quicksave Problems: Some people are having problems getting the Quicksave (F6) and Quickload (F7) commands to work. This happens if your Windows account name has a space in it. You can try creating a new user account without a space in the username and use that to play STALKER. You can also try rebinding the Save and Load functionality to a new set of keys and use them like a quicksave/quickload: start the game, open the console and type the command bind_console save Save1 kF8. This will make the F8 key act to save the game to a save slot named ‘Save1′ each time you press it. You can then also add bind_console load Save1 kF9 to turn the F9 key into a button that loads the Save1 game each time it’s pressed. See the Advanced Tweaking section for more details.

This is simple and efficient. Nothing can hold me now to keep gunning mutants, Stalkers and Russian military personnel.