Archive for October, 2008

Before some big cats, here are some vultures again:

Vulture, in flight (Copyright 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles)

Lappet-faced vulture (Copyright 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles)

Giraffes, here is a weird animal. On of the real bizarre things in nature.

Giraffes - Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles

You can often see young males fighting:

Giraffes fighting - Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles

Giraffes fighting- Copyright 2008 Yves Roumazeilles

It seems that they are fighting in a very slow motion.
Despite that, it is a very aggressive behaviour and the males use that to decide hierarchies and access rights to the females.

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You can click on the thumbnail images to enlarge them.

All images are Copyright 2008 - Yves Roumazeilles (all rights reserved).

Link to YouTube

Stepper motors are nearly everywhere. this is marvellous for happy hobbyists. Even better, you can find them (and extract them from) a large number of devices that are easy to hack like old floppy disk drives, hard discs. For those of you who would ike to know more and keep an eye on the technology, I suggest that followiung reading:

• Control of Stepping Motors - A Tutorial by Douglas W. Jones
• How to use disk drive stepper-motors by Tomi Engdahl
• Stepper Motor Control by tigoe
• Arduino Stepper Library (software)

Source: Jason Striegel.

The Southern Eland is the largest savanah antelope (bulls may weigh 700-800kg). Very shy, it runs away at first sight of a human being or a car. Difficult snapshot, guaranteed.

Southern Eland

Southern Eland (Taurotragus oryx, Elan du Cap, antílope eland común). Masai Mara, Kenya, September 2008.

Presented by  Dutch architects NL in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 arrives and this is important. As a matter of fact, the free desktop suite (as interesting as the MS-Office suite) shift in high gear.

OpenOffice.org v3.0

The new features are quite noticeable:

• Support of MS-Office 2007 format for documents
• OOo 3.0 is now compatible with Mac OS X
• New multi-page mode in Writer
• Several users can now simultaneously edit and share a single spreadsheet
• Capacity to use MS Access databases from Writer

To freely download your MS-Word 2007, your MS-Excel 2007, you just have to run to the OpenOffice.org web site. This is free, this is legal!

If you have the heart of an adventurer, you may be interested to know that Ijust put in beta-test some new websites that I am working on.

• YLovePhoto.com (site specializing in digital photography)
• YLoveBigCats.com (about felines and other big cats)
• YLoveIllusions.com (optical illusions)
• YWantVisits.com (SEO, traffic optimisation and web site revenue maximization)

Your opinion will be welcome, but -remember- this is beta-test. So, it is full of bugs, problems, issues and don’t come back and complain if your significant other dumps you because of it.

Note: Most (if not all) of the photo-related news here will be applied to YLovePhoto.com as soon as I feel free with this new web site.

I published a few shots of lions. Portraits taken in the Masai Mara park (Kenya). My prefered is the following one:

Lionness - Copyright 2008, Yves Roumazeilles

If you click on the thumbnail image, you will enlarge it. And you may notice that the photographer (and its car) are appearing in the eye of the lion.

But there are several other images taken nearly at the same time on the original Big Cats web site. Yes! This is another of my web sites. Actually, YLoveBigCats.com is a separate location to publish information specifically about the big felines of the world (and some of the my photos of them).

You should think that most cattle birds never heard about this injunction. They use African Buffalos as landing strips and these big cows as as source of food while they remove the parasites from their skin.

African Buffalos (nearly) without birds

African Buffalo - Copyright 2008 Y.Roumazeilles

African Buffalo - Copyright 2008 Y.Roumazeilles

Buffalos and birds

Here, we see a fast airplane in final approach, or is it in attack phase?

African Buffal and birds: Tora! Tora! Tora! - Copyright 2008 Y.Roumazeilles

Finally, here the one I prefer (”the airport is not happy“) :

African Buffalo and birds - Copyright 2008 Y.Roumazeilles

African Buffalo (Syncerus caffer, Buffle d’Afrique, Búfalo negro). Kenya, Masai Mara, September 2008.