Archive for January, 2009

I recently met a couple of fine underwater movies. One shows a dive to find a nautilus at great depths; The second shows a phosphorescent amalgam of abyss animals. Always a source of great surprises.

David Bergman created a large superb image of more than a billion pixels during Barack Obama’s inaugural address in Washington, on January 20th.

Barack Obama

Source: YLovePhoto.

Image NASA

Is it the crisis, the recession or what? People would like you to think that you can now get a private jet for nearly nothing.

• Jumpjet is trying to make it more affordable than many business trip tickets
• Aviation told us about microjets, like those from Eclipse Aviation intended to make it more affordable than any time before.
• Lunajets wants you to fly like a Very Rich Person (VRP is so much better than VIP) but for prices between €990 per seat and €12,500 for a full cabin. You get to search for the best flight for you.
• Same thing with Last Minute Jet Charters which offers a good search engine for your private jet.
• ElleJet Aviation Services is explictly selling seats available on what they call “empty legs” (trips returning the plane with no passenger, but where you could be booked; A little like those young student who cross the USA in rental cars that they bring back to base for a small fee).

Sure, GM sold all its 5 private jets after the December news fiasco. But did they depress the private jet market, too? Is it really so cheap?

After showing here several record images in terms of resolution, here is a picture (with its own incredibly large quantity of pixels) of a record length: 100 meters. Here, panorama takes it to such extremes…

It was taken over the course of 20 days and includes 178 different people.

Source: Simon Hoegsberg, via The Online Photographer.

In our short series of “How do you make…”, here is the industrial manuacturing of terrestrial globes How would you do it? The same way as described here?

Note: I said globe, not blog…

Thank you, Xtian.

It seems that there will be plenty of people to be present during the inauguration of Barrack Obama. Needless to say, most people will not even have a hint about what happens on stage, if they are located as suggested in the following map:

Kudos to Tom Toles.

According to the Guardian, change was long overdue. 8 years of Democrat presidency in Washington was much too much. Now that Al Gore is leaving the oval office, it’s time to go to more serious stuff.

You can appreciate it if you read the first paragraph:

No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds – all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we’ve gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.

Go to the Guardian for the rest…

You loved the Grand Canyon sky walk, and the previously available video of the El Camino del Rey Walkway. So, you proved that you aren’t susceptible to vertigo.

Will you love this old suspension bridge from Japan? It’s old, derelict. The wind is pushing it.

Using a Magnetic resonance imaging (RMI) technique, researchers have been able to represent graphically our human brain in a beautiful display.

Brain in MRI

Source: ScienceBlogs/Corpus Callosum & PLOS biology.

If you want to build a web site, or a better web site, I am starting a series of short small ideas about how to improve a web site or a blog with small tasks. One idea, one improvement per week. This is in the “easy idea” category of my other web site: Y Want Visits.

This is time to start your own blog in order to earn some revenue protecting you against the current recession.

I often advise downloading the free OpenOffice.org desktop suite to fully replace MS-Office (why should you pay for a Microsoft product that is leading you to spending more and more to get a suite that is more and more difficult and incompatible with time? Just dump Word and Excel for a better solution).

But, a found another option for free MS-Word: ABI Word is an open source word processor available for quite some time, but the latest version (v2.6.5) is now compatible with all the meaningful file formats like MS-Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org Writer. These XML-based file formats are usable in this freely downloadable word processor.

I do not use it by myself, but it looks good enough to check it if you want a pretty neat word processor solution to replace your MS-Word for free.

Dogs, like many other pets, are subject to much interest and present a lot of particular behaviours that can be formed by proper training. So, today, I want you to meet two of my Internet friends of very different behaviours:

• The dog who could not stop having fun with snow
• the product of the most sophisticated pet training: The perfectly obedient dog

Both in video.

This Hungarian short movie is in English. I recommend waiting for the end (after 11 minutes).

2009 starts with some new equipment in Roumazeilles.net home:

• An HP LaserJet 1005. The lowest B&W laser I could find at HP (I am faithful to this brand even if the last LaserJet 1022 failed suddenly far before the end of its normal useful life). It’s a Windows-based printer used on the local network, but it seems that printing over the LAN is nearly instantaneous. Magic!
• An Epson Stylus Photo R1900. Replacing an eon-old Stylus Photo 750, it should bring color photo printing in A3+. It’s amazingly silent.

Fantasy landscapes built by artist Inga Nielsen (with the help of TerraGen).

Copyright (C) Inga Nielsen

Source: Inga Nielsen.

Even more when you unload a tank rail car. If you let the hot gazes cool down into the tank, here what can happen. Always check the security valves, or be ready to pay the price: $22,000 to $80,000 used (but usable).