Archive for December, 2007

I found an old post on PhotoGraphyBay that is trying to describe the upcoming Canon EOS 450D (the supposed replacement for the current EOS 400D / Rebel XTi). I would say that this is pure speculation, but so many people are now expecting it to appear on the 24th of January, that I could not let if pass without mention.

Thanks to LifeHacker, and if you have the following, you will be able to use your iPhone to access Internet from your laptop.

• A computer with Wi-Fi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer-to-computer connection (yours is)
• A jailbroken iPhone (If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, the easiest way is to make sure you’re running 1.1.1 firmware and then start here.
• The OpenSSH iPhone application
• An SSH client on the computer you’re using. If you’re on a Mac or *nix machine, you should be fine. Windows users should check out how to install OpenSHH with Cygwin.

Source: LifeHacker “Use Your iPhone’s Internet Connection On Your Laptop [Feature]“.

 

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In my eyes, this is one of the nicest great herons, despite being very common in Brazil.

Cocoi heron (Ardea cocoi, héron cocoï).

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Whistling Heron (Syrigma sibilatrix, Héron flûte-du-soleil). Shot in Brazil, 2007.

LifeHacker published a series of articles about the basics of a Digital SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera. It’s worth reading if you are not pro-photographer.

• Part 1 : Program mode
• Part 2 : Manual mode

It could be useful to quickly master your latest Christmas gift.

Wrong perspective, optical illusion, mistake of the drawing hand?

Along similar lines, more brillant, here is a cool graphical work from Daniel Martinez Lara and Kike Oliva.

And, finally, the engraving from Escher that inspired one optical illusion and draws from the other’s principles.

We all knew that the whale was actually a terrestrial mammal gone back to the sea a few million years ago (this is most visible in the presence of vestigial leg bones that are not associated to externally apparent legs or fins), but it was a bit difficult to say exactly what the ancestor looked like. It seems that this was more a kind of small deer than big dog (as previously thought). Now, we have the missing link:

Indohyus by Carl Buell

Sources:

• Greg Laden’s blog: A Whale of a Missing Link : Indohyus
• the loom: Whales: From So Humble A Beginning…
• Futura-Science : Le premier ancêtre nageur des cétacés était-il un daim miniature ?

A backup, this is nearly nothing. But it can help you, it can save you, when disaster will strike. Since when didn’t you backup?

Some ideas:

• Remember to copy the contents of your Flash memory card (even more if you store a lot of JPEG images on your big Flash card)
• Copy the data files from your PC onto an external drive
• Send yourself your important data on a separate email account (and let them there)
• Use WP-Database-Backup to backup your WordPress web site database
• Use free DriveImage XML to backup a full-drive image of a disk drive

It’s time to prepare yourself for a better-backed-up year.

Watch what a good level editor can do to Crysis if you really want to push the limits of the physics engine.

For the happy owners of the Sony Alpha 700 Digital SLR camera, I want to tell that there is a new firmware (version 3) available. The improvements are:

• Bug correction: Resolves an issue where the Access Lamp remains lit and the camera stops responding when several pictures are taken in rapid succession.
• Bug correction: Resolves an issue where powering the camera off while in “MR” mode may cause some registered settings to carry over to other shooting modes.

All this comes on top of the previously detailed improvements to image quality and noise management in version 2.

Everything is available on the Sony support site.

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Rufescent Tiger-heron, (Tigrisoma lineatum, Héron tigre).

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Green-backed heron, (Butorides striatus, Héron strié).

Tired of storing your Windows applications as icons in the icon bar? Here comes ThumbWin, a small free application that allows to keep thumbnails (small images) of the reduced application. It’s bigger than the icon, but it’s still readable and you have a big screen, don’t you?

Merry Christmas to you all!

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Forest fires are not only happening around the most populated areas (Greece, South of France and California). Sometimes, for reasons still to be clarified (criminal or not), wild fires willl start in the bush or the forest. Like this one in the Pantanal (Brazil, 2007).

Specially for graphics designers, for those who cannot stop seeing the word in Pantone colors, W2 Products designed coffee mugs branded by Pantone.

Out of stock already.

GameInformer revealed in a world exclusive coverage that Electronic Arts really started the development of an FPS video game in the universe of Command-and-Conquer (a very successful real-time strategy game). Will it work? Will it produce a good game? Or simply a C&C-ploitation?