Archive for December, 2007

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?

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One of the most spectacular birds in Amazonia: Marvellous deep cobalt blue feathers on a one-meter long body, 1.5m wide wings.

Hyacinth Macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus, Ara hyacinthe). Brazil, 2007.

It was not trivial, but artificial networks trained to recognize surfaces have the same difficulties to recognize them in 3D optical illusions (as humans have).

Source: CNN International, “robots tricked by optical illusion“.