Archive for February, 2010

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

“Nuit Blanche” by Arev Manoukian (Spy Films).

Really! It will be in strong need to admire this Z-scale model of an N-gauge train. It’s real small (it was used to recreate a small model train going in a shop window inside a Z-scale model train).

Admire the wonderful work of art!

When you are an industrial company intending to launch a new product for a consumer market, you’d better think about everything and make sure that it will sustain all the conditions absolutely improperly hard that customers will submit it to (everything indicates that you and me, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Consumer, are ugly brutes).

In the activities of their new mobile phone, Google and HTC unveiled several videos giving us a peek looking (somewhat simplified but still real) into what is done to produce a modern mobile phone. Admire it and remember what the phone was tested against before bringing back your broken phone to the warranty department and claiming that your younger son just ate the corner of the display when -actually- you drove over it with your car…

See also:

• Nexus One design
• Display and 3D framework
• Nexus One manufacturing (nice shooting of industrial equipment)
• Nexus One: Day One (advertisement)

No! green light does no reduce accident numbers. A generous light helps in improving security. But this uses a lot of electricity and it would be preferable to ensure that it comes from a sustainable source. This is the concept proposed by TAK Studio which uses the atmospheric turbulences produced by vehicles passing on the road to generate the electricity lighting the road.

This is green, this is ecology-oriented, this is beautiful.

We do so much typing that we tend to forget about it. But there are ways to improve the situation (ensuring that you type less to produce more text).one of the best ways is to identify the texts you keep typing on the keyboard. then, you just have to use a utility program to help you setup a shortcut to be used.

The program will recognize the shortcut, then automatically replace it with the correct text. Type “win“, see “Windows” appear. Type “HTML” and see a full block of selected HTML code appear (I use such shortcuts to create blocks of HTML code on this site, reducing typing time and avoiding typos).

For this, you need to be supported by a small program. I found two interesting ones :

• AutoHotkey (for Windows) allows to write very simple scripts (examples are provided); I use it everyday (it works perfectly on a Windows 7 installation, by the way).
• Some people would prefer to explore Texter and TextExpander, too.
• If you are on Linux, you will prefer to have a look at AutoKey which is freely inspired by AutoHokey (copying is a form of flattery)

The excellent office desktop suite, OpenOffice.org (Word, Excel and PowerPoint, in a free form, if you want) just moved to version 3.2 (still free).

New features:

• Faster start-up times
• Compatibility with MS-Office 2007 documents
• Better Compatibility with MS-Office 97, 2000, XP documents, encrypted with a password
• Importation of dynamic tables from Excel
• Comments are now possible in the Impress presentations
• Improvements to the Calc cells handling (cell merging, sorting, etc.)

For Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.

The TED Talk conferences are often a great moment of technologie accessible to the largest numbers and an opportunity for the démonstration of what could be our future if the great thinkers of our time work on it.

The following conference (from Pranav Mistry) wants to give us a rought idea of perspectives opened by a rather recent technologie named SixthSense willing to put computers in our world rather than forcing us to flow in the computers mould.

It gets real speed and starts getting exhilarating after 6 or 7 minutes. Be patient, it’s worth it.

Thanks Xtian.

By popular demand, I will group here all the posts I made previously about how to improve your Mafia Wars performance (Mafia Wars is the #1 Crime game on Facebook).

• Mafia Wars: Get a large mafia in no time
• Mafia Wars: Maximum loot
• Mafia Wars: How many points?
• Mafia Wars: Combat strategy
• Mafia Wars: Best weapons

All these are grouped under the “Mafia Wars” tag.

We have seen many, but today’s world record is a 26-gigapixel panoramic image of Dresden, Germany. I did not write 26-megapixel. It’s 1000 times what you’d expect from a better-than-high-end digital SLR photo camera.

This impressive photo is made of 1,665 individual shots captured with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II photo camera armed with a 400mm tele-lens, and combined together on a powerful computer.

Web site: http://www.dresden-26-gigapixels.com/

Following our previous post about the evolutions of web browsers, it is interesting to notice that Google just announced that their on-line applications (GMail, Calendar, GDoc, etc.) will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 starting next month. It is time to go to a more recent (and more secure) technology, as mentioned before.

Update: I just learned that Internet Explorer 8 is now becoming the web browser most used in the world. Even if there is a lot of other good competition, Microsoft is still holding its position (from DownloadSquad).

photo credit: Blyzz

When you love whisky, you have to include the Internet in the perimeter where you love is enacted. You need a whisky-coloured social web site to fully satisfy your love (maybe even find a soul mate – but this would probably be a marginal advantage). Connosr is the web site for you.

You will be able to share your taste and appreciation, exchange your knowledge, comment and review your preferred bottles.

And you can keep Connosr with you while bar-hopping by pointing your iPhone to connosr.com/iphone.