Archive for December, 2008

If you are looking for the latest news and the next rumours about the Nikon D800, you can now join other visitors on my new web site dedicated to the digital SLR cameras and digital photography: YLovePhoto.com.

I want to be sure that 2009 will be a great year, on the web or elsewhere.

Bonne année 2009

Copyright (C) Peter Nowacki

Peter’s web site.

You should protect your computer when navigating on the Internet. However, Microsoft would have you thinking that the embedded firewall provided by Windows is good enough. Actually, there is much better software to replace it. And not everything is expensive:

• Comodo Firewall Pro (Freeware): Free and powerful, what do you want more? It’s also clean, simple, yet feature-loaded.
• ESET Smart Security (Shareware) is expensive at $60, but has a very small memory footprint.
• ZoneAlarm Free Firewall (Freeware) also checks your PC’s activity when you go to the Internet.
• Your router’s built-in firewall: If you have one, this is one of the best and cheapest solution. And it’s already working for you.
• Windows Firewall: It’s not that bad and it’s already included in Windows. But don’t try to get it doing exactly what you want, it has a mind of its own.

Recommended from LifeHacker [Hive Five].

For sure, YouTube has always been crouded with rip-offs of the Monty Python sketches. Unfortunately, these were both illegal and -in general- of poor quality. The guys from Monty Python decided that enough is enough, and there is now a Monty Python channel/group on YouTube where you can see excellent quality videos of their Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

This technique is used to demonstrate clearly the operation of a technical product by showing it as if parts were cut away to reveal the internals. This leads to quite a large choice of nice drawings. I collected some of them for your pleasure. They can be gorgeous when the graphic designer is a real artist:

Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera (Beau Daniels & Alan Daniels)

Cut-away dog (Beau Daniels)

American car (David Kimble)

Kodak DCT Canon EOS Digital SLR Camera (Kevin Husley)

Ear cutaway (Medecine net)

General Motors engine

Spitfire Mk I (Century Imaging)

How a theatre is air conditionned (Frank Soltesz, Saturday Evening Post, March 1951)

Great Wall of China (circa 1570)

Noah's Ark (David Deal)

Source: Google

It depends on the cook, but if you have real difficulties with your own cooking style, you may find an excuse. Next time you fail, just say “Oh! I was trying one of jamesoff.net random recipes“. JamesOff is a systems engineer in the South West of England who created a Random Recipe Generator. Merely reload the page to get another recipe.

You probably remember the impressive unloading of an excavator from a truck, without using a crane or even a ramp:

But here come some more, a lot more, fun with cars, trucks, excavators and other big chunks of mechanics.

Starting with a 15-ton Caterpillar playing along.

But should the Caterpillar stay on the ground? No, and this is what Dark Roasted Blend shows us:

But unloading an excavator seems much easier than unloading a car from a truck:

This means that you must be ready to repair your new car in all conditions. And some people really mean it. Here is the story of this rally race team. They had their car stopped by a broken throttle cable. So, in this case, what would you do? Abandon the race? Not these guys. One of them steps under the hood (!) and will handle the throttle from there to the end of the race.

So, this is the crisis, you are not ready to these extreme measures and you still need to buy a car, I advise all of us to chase a really carbon-emission-free truck (from a well-known battery provider):

Just in passing, here are a few ideas to help the users of OpenOffice.org, the best replacement for Microsoft Office:

• “Impress: Using Master Slides” explains how to use master slides in order to make a presentation look better and more homogeneous.
• “Mail merge in OpenOffice.org” : Doing mail merge from a desktop software suite like OpenOffice.org is not often easy on the first time. So, why not be guided by an expert?

I found this nice article of the same title (”10 things Linux does better than Windows“) on TechRepublic.com. I found it interesting because I could not really find all 10 of them. Will you be able to list all of them?

1. TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): Linux is less expensive in an enterprise because of the high cost of per-seat licenses.
2. Desktop: Nowadays, Linux is as easy as Windows for most entry-level users.
3. Server: So many servers are now running on Linux.
4. Security: Windows progressed a lot recently, but is still the target of a lot of malware, virus, Trojans, etc. that Linux has avoided by immunity through faster problem fixes.
5. Flexibility: Linux is amazingly able to adapt itself to various applications and environments.
6. Package management: Installation of new applications in Linux is years ahead of the dinosaur Install-Software solution of Microsoft.
7. Community: Not that the Linux community would be larger, but it is so much more active and willing to support all kinds of users.
8. Interoperability: Windows works well with Windows. For the rest, just go to Linux if you want to interoperate with Apple OS X, various Unix systems, various Linux distributions, OS/2, PlayStations, PDAs, and… Windows.
9. Command line: You may not need to use it, but when times come for it, Linux command line is worlds better than Microsoft mock-up.
10. Evolution: Do you remember the feel of going from XP to Vista? Do you remember how many times Microsoft forced you to upgrade machines? Linux is much more adaptable and provides a proven smooth path to newer, better versions.

Microsoft published today a large Security Update for Internet Explorer. This happens nearly every month, but this time, this is really important. Whatever your version of Internet Explorer, you should upgrade now, via Windows Update.

Microsoft is correcting a major bug in all versions of Internet Explorer and it is urgently important that you plug this security hole that could leave your computer totally open to external hackers.

Nota bene: generally speaking, you should try and keep your computer up-to-date for security issues. You may want tot check my previous post about Secunia PSI.

You wanted to go to Kenya for a safari or a photo safari (this will quickly become very fashionable, thanks to the latest Disney movie, “The crimson wings” whose location is Kenyan Tanzanian lake Natron)? You wanted to get your visa in the Nairobi airport after landing (this is much easier than queuing at the Kenyan embassy in London)?

Beware! There is a change: You no longer can pay your visa fees at the airport immigration counter in Euros, Kenyan shillings, Swiss francs and British Pounds (having a wide choice could be interesting in order to choose the best price according to the exchange rate at the time of entry in Kenya). So, you must have a 50 US dollar bill (US$ only). Don’t be surprized and change some bills before leaving your country of origin or… go queue at the embassy.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris (France). So, tomorrow, this important milestone for Human Rights will be 60-year old. Of course, many people are denied their rights for plenty of reasons.

But this is a fight of every day, this is our fight, a fight to make the world better, a place where every Human Being can live free.

Seth Brau decided to celebrate this 60th anniversary by creating a video where it injected more life in these words, with animated graphics (View in larger size/higher-def here: www.humanrightsactioncenter.org. Created by Seth Brau, Produced by Amy Poncher, Music by Rumspringa courtesy Cantora Records):

Stacey Whaley is a painter using the most modern tools available and depending heavily on the mathematical principles of fractals (those graphical figures that tend to repeat themselves at different scales when you zoom in or zoom out).

Apophysis - Copyright (C) Stacey Whaley

In most cases, when people follow this path, the result is quite predictable and there are a few compulsory forms (like the Mandelbrot set) that pop in the pictures. Please, check the admirable result of the example above. Stacey is able to create something that is clearly fractal and simultaneously bringing all the personal content that is the mark of the true artist.

Check all her work in http://intergalacticart.blogspot.com/, even if the updates are too few for our pleasure.

It is said that the new version of WordPress, the open-source website operating software will arrive tomorrow. It is currently in version beta/RC. It will bring a new greatly improved administration panel.

Download from WordPress.org.

Isn’t it somewhat difficult to continuously check the status of security updates for the many software programs we have installed on our PCs, sometimes not even knowing it? Here comes Secunia PSI to help in this daunting task. It permanently observes the version of the programs on your PC and verifies if there is an available update. Thus, it efficiently protects us against the computer security risks we too often are submitted to.

Secunia PSI

Certainly!

Here comes a photo camera with 1400 mega-pixels. This is the camera installed in Hawai in the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (PanSTARRS) telescope.

Pan-STARRS

I say that when Kirkland AFB builds a photo camera, Canon, Nikon, Sony and the others should bow and admire.

Source: Really Rocket Science.