Archive for September, 2007

Tyler Nixon offers a marvellous world of images that floats slightly above the ground in a dream-like manner that will touch your heart.

MK design designed a vase that is very surprising, and has the many advantages of being nice, elegant, useful as a lamp and a good complement for interior decoration.

Via Baekdal.com.

The 2007 Portable Film Festival has now closed its doors and the winners are known for each category. It means that you can download each of these little gems of movies.

Science-Fiction produced both the worst and the best. Today, let’s look at the worst with the help of ForeverGeek that collected the Top 10 WORST Sci-Fi Shows EVER! w/Videos.

That is so bad that’s it’s admirable!

Sometimes, watches can be both good-looking and strange. I found recently a series of interesting ones where the designer went overboard with ideas to make the watch more unique.

Of course, we can start with Romain Jerome who designed his jewels from rusted steel and coal taken from the Titanic shipwreck. The result is actually a bit surprising but quite wearable:

Romain Jerome – Titanic DNA Tourbillon

Or you can just try to make a fashionable design like Starck with its Snake (from Fossil):

Starck – Snake

But I would still prefer the original: I feel that this is too much of a cheap copy of the great Rado Ceramica series:

Rado Ceramica

But what is better than asking a designer to use material that is not even from this Earth? Look at the meteorites, they are often made of a core of iron and nickel alloy. Use it to make the watch, take inspiration from the intricate designs created on their surface by the extreme conditions of outer-space void.

Then you get something quite unusual. It’s not merely rusted. It’s worked to a Widmanstätten Pattern that make them utterly recognizable.

Like the Calibre T21 Muonionalusta Meteorite Tourbillon from Antoine Preziuso:

Antoine Preziuso – Calibre T21 Muonionalusta Meteorite Tourbillon

From the bottom of the seas to the end of the galaxy, your watch is merely a matter of personal choice.

A wonderful photo location that every traveller woudl like to have collected as nicely in his/her memory cards.

link

The Open Source movement does not falter. It brought to the world an impressive number of software good things.

Datamation decided to offer us the 100 best Open Source downloads.

I cannot really test it from my trip in South America. However, I thought useful to inform you that there is a new web site providing free movies. You just have to accept some ads (not very different from what you have on most TV channels).

SpiralFrog

Did I speak about its legal status? It is legal. However, everything is protected by DRM, you need to use Windows and Windows Media Player 10+, and if you don’t watch the ads at least once in 30 days, the movie and the music is out…

All WordPress users should know that their prefered tool for creating a web site has just been upgraded. WordPress 2.3 is now ready and rolled into the public.

Maybe. But the dentists found by JustElite.net are doing their best…

link

Personal research: What are the web sites best ranked for a Google search on the first figures? The results are… interesting:

• 0 : en.Wikipedia.org (Google search)
• 1 : en.Wikipedia.org (Google search)
• 2 : w3.org (Google search)
• 3 : 3.co.uk UK telephone operator (Google search)
• 4 : channel4.org TV channel (Google search)
• 5 : five.tv TV channel (Google search)
• 6 : en.Wikipedia.org (Google search)
• 7 : au.tv.yahoo.com TV guide (Google search)
• 8 : en.Wikipedia.org (Google search)
• 9 : NineMsn.com.au Microsoft + TV channel (Google search)

Wikipedia collects it when nobody wants them, but TV channels are hoarding the numbers.

As you certainly know by now, the big hit in video games for the PC platform is expected to by Crysis which should be ready by November 16th according to the designer. However, the demo which was announced earlier is now postponed to October 26th. We hope that this is not created by a real problem to finish what should be one of the biggest First Person Shooter games of the decade.

In the mean time, I propose to give you a few useful elements. First, we had inside information about the minimal PC configuration to run this game. We all know that the bigger will be the better (and if you want to go multiplayer, Crytek wants you to have DirectX 10 and matching high-end graphics card) but it will start at a much more reasonable level. Minimal requirements:

• CPU: Intel P4 2.8Ghz or AMD equivalent (2800+)
• DRAM: 1GB
• Graphics card: 6800GT (256MB) or ATI/AMD Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB)
• HDD Space: 16GB
• OS: Microsoft Windows
• Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c Compatible

As we can see, the video card is still quite affordable (I even have two such cards at home). Nobody said nothing about the exact performance you’ll get then. Certainly, most of the effects will be denied to the low-end user, but it is nice to see that the CPU and RAM requirements seem quite reasonable.

If this was not sufficient to have your mouth watering, here is a tutorial (thanks to GameTrailers) that will prepare you for your deadly mission in Crysis.

I can’t hold my breath until November to go and buy my own copy (for those of you Crysis lovers who thought that being a web site designer would allow to have Crytek sending free copies to me, I am deeply sorry to say that the reality is grimmer in blog-land; But it’s still fun to write here).

But if you want to see nice pictures and high-quality graphics, do not forget to check (whatever your game style) BioShock, Team Fortress 2, World in Conflict, Call of Duty 4, and Unreal Tournament III.

Plenty of animals, a lot of landscapes, many nice photos from Monique Bogaerts.

Gold fishes are served with the fishbowls from Roger Arquer and their artsy approach to sending a message through glass an water.

Up to now, I have been able to identify a few reviews or previews of the new high-end digital SLR from Sony:

• DP review
• Photography blog
• PopPhoto (preview)
• PopPhoto (review)
• ThinkCamera
• PhotoReview
• QuestionsPhoto (prise en main)
• Imaging Resource (preview)
• LetsGoDigital
• MegaPixel

Some links jump to French articles. But not all, of course.

Feel free to send me other ones you found.

This month we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the agreement that led to the one-minute nag at the beginning of all DVD. We all have to watch at this no-fast-forward page of information about piracy.

As if this had any impact on pirates. As if it was good practice to annoy 100% of your customers.