Archive for October, 2007

The excellent LifeHacker web site has a good list of top network utilities.

Las Cruces, New Mexico, will be the place to go in 2008 or 2009 when Virgin Galactic opens flights to space for business and tourism. In preparation, the SpacePort has to be built. URS Corporation and Foster + Partners have won the international competiton for soon-to-be-realized New Mexico Spaceport Authority Building.

Passengers to the Moon, please, board the next shuttle in gate 22!

This Mind Mapping technique is essentially simple to use, but it can be useful or necessary to be guided not to let yourself wander around aimlessly. That is why I appreciated to find this Beginner’s Guide to Mind Mapping Meetings at FileHacker.

Photographers are avid of more pixels per frame. Most of them are also fond of panoramic photos (they look so cool). Why not join forces and make a contraption able to shoot panoramas with billions of pixels (multi-giga-pixel panoramas)?

This is what Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University did when they developed the GigaPan robotic camera mount (Press release). Rather than stitching together hundreds of images painstakingly taken one-by-one, the tripod mount is able to pan through a landscape and capture the individual images needed by a computer program to build these wondrous images.

In the end, if you want to see more (and browse a lot of panoramic images), you should stop by one of the following web sites:

• GigaPan web site
• The Global Connection Project (at CMU)

Not all the images are perfect, but some of them are gorgeous.

GigaPan motorised mount on a tripod. It hold nearly any kind of digital SLR camera and pans slowly to capture a full panoramic image.

 

The GigaPan is not currently available yet but could be no more than a few hundreds of dolalrs, and work with open source software (so, free software).

Source: Futura-Sciences.

You should visit the web site of Dave Anastasi (East3rd): He is publishing quite regularly his own photos. They are mostly abstract and colourful like this one:

I even subscribed to his RSS feed to be sure to receive all of these photos as soon as they are available. A refreshing sight, a surprise per week (more or less).

The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) is a project that is being prepared to hunt for dangerous asteroids that may hit Earth (and possibly wipe out Humans like one did for the Dinosaurs).

Technically, the sensor is impressive. It’s no less than 40cm-wide and hosts 1.4billion pixels (can you say “1.4 giga-pixel camera”?) but there will be four of them installed in Hawai.

Source: NewScientist.

Today is Blog Action Day: The day that bloggers chose to try and help save the planet from the impact of Human activity. For my own part, I decided to collect a few ideas to save energy in your computer usage:

• Upgrade your gear
• Dim your screen
• Consolidate and virtualize computers
• Turn off peripherals
• Kill unnecessary processes
• Get a smart power switch
• Enable energy saver settings
• Unplug energy vampires
• Spin down your hard drive
• Shut down the computer

Another trick: Power saving remote computing.

The Linux kernel is trying to be the best contender in the race against electrical power use. In this context, a web site has been created to support this tendency and to help GNU/Linux users improve their power efficiency: LessWatts.org.

It even has some downloadable free applications to help you find the worst power hungry applications of your Linux box.

It is often quite difficult to know where a language idiom is coming from (it is less etymology than social history). For English, I foudn the ideal web site: phrases.org.uk.

In their own words:

The meanings and origins of over 1,200 English sayings, phrases and idioms.

Whether you want to resolve a friendly argument over how a saying or phrase originated or whether you just enjoy words, you’ll probably find something here to interest you.

Now, if you are more interested in the French language, you can get the corresponding information from the reference web site: expressio.fr. There, the phrase of today is:

A photo gallery only about nuclear explosions: nuclear.fatal.ru from Russia.

We knew already all about Darth Vador youth. But his private life was staying out of reach of even the most courageous paparazzis. This is no longer the case, thanks to Esteban Diacono.

The very first discs for BluRay+ (BluRay discs with BD+ newest DRM technology) arrived: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow. Unfortunately, these discs are nearly useless because of the DRM scheme used to protect them.

For the first time, they use a virtual machine technology that allows to load code at the same time as the video data. It is thought to be a way to run code that would check if the BluRay players has been hacked. However, the discs do not play on Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100, and most other players (including the PlayStation 3) have longer-than-usual load times (up to two minutes). Samsung’s BDP-1000 also has problems of stuttering and error messages.

Some of the manufacturers announced software updates, but remember that now that DRM is on us, we may have to upgrade the player firmware just to play a DVD…

Popular Photography & Imaging Magazine is a very nice photo magazine. I love their web site (PopPhoto Flash) because it regularly publishes photo tips of fairly good quality. Among the latest that attracted my attention, I’ll ist:

• Hungry for Food Photography – Cooking photos
• Beach Shots That Aren’t Boring – Beach photography
• Improve Your Landscapes – Landscape photography
• How to Not Ruin a Wedding – Wedding photography
• Car Shots
• Go Small or Go Large – Mini-cards and super-posters
• Blow Things Out of Proportion – Print large

A lot of reading ahead of you and link to keep for the future.

Maybe the deep space Mother Nature has been copying from the Star Wars movies when it created Mimas, one of Jupiter’s satellites.

Mimas in front of Jupiter’s rings

Via Neatorama.

Stare for a while. And appreciate the move.