The Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin is a museum presenting a large mount of technology history. Quite naturally, they are biased toward presenting a lot of German achievements and this country is known for hosting some of the very best optical engineers and being rightfully proud of brands like Carl Zeiss, Leitz/Leica.
Charlie Sorrel wrote a piece of article for Wired.com, titled “Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras” that I intensely recommend reading.
Simply the best video player for Windows, VLC, just quit its long beta phase. This is official now, VLC v1.0.0 is available with a list of small improvements brought to an already impressive product that I can only recommend if you are using video (to read DVD, BluRay, HD-DVD discs; to stream videos from your computer; to convert your videos; and I sure forget some).
Steve Jobs is rejoicing: It seems that Apple already sold more than 1 million iPhone 3G-S (the new Apple mobile phone) in the first 5 days after its launch.
And now, you and me can fly, really fly. Breath-taking! Boarding a plane became so down-to-Earth. I now want to have wings, I want to fly like an eagle…
I’ve been using and recommending the Opera web browser for many years. It’s a kind of a Firefox where everything you need would be directly included rather than having to download extensions. And it’s fast too. For mobile applications (PDAs, mobile phones, etc.) Opera Mini is probably the best possible option and it is in a tight competition for the market leader position.
Now, Opera is launching a beta test version 10 of the browser. And it has amazingly interesting new features.
Fast browsing on slow connections
Tab browsing enhanced and flexible
Speed dial from the empty new page
Web mail integration
Re-sizable search field
Much faster web engine and impressively standards-compliant
In-line spell checker (I use it a lot to support my blogging habits)
Auto-update (better than merely asking you to check for updates)
Mouse control
Even better, after testing it in alpha, I can tell you that it is quite stable. The beta version should stay that way and that is a good thing too.
The International Space Station is the product of a complex assembly process out of elements brought upt here by rockets and the space shuttle. Here is a video animation from USA today showing the sequence of events in this build-up.
You can browse, but you can’t hide… from your browser.
Actually, your browser knows a lot about you. Some scientists believe that from your browsing habits they can recognize fairly precisely if you’re a man or a woman.
Some of you may know that I work in the electronics industry (for automotive applications) with Johnson Controls. This is the reason why I am in daily contact with industrial means of manufacturing of complex electronic boards. For a long time now, I wanted to share some of the knowledge I acquired, some of the continuously renewed amazement I share in front of these industrial tools. But I could not really go and shoot photos in the manufacturing plants of my company.
Everything changes as I found some freely available information available on the Internet. For example, AMD-ATI (designer and manufacturer or graphics cards for personal computers) published a small presentation video.
While I had a long love affair with BitComet as my prefered BitTorrent client, it happens that I currently prefer to use the lean and clean uTorrent software. It is a bit smaller (but it has a tendency to eat up memory if left serving files for a long time -it’s ok if you stick to downloading) and it has a nice little interface that is clean and easily understandable.
As with many a BitTorrent client, µTorrent or uTorrent tends to have a relatively complex configuration. Many options, some of them utterly cryptic, a lot of them with a possible impact on performance. After months of tweaking, I think that I have obtained a configuration that is clearly optimized to download several giga-byte-sized packages (videos/movies, Linux distributions, full databases, etc.) on a fast ADSL connection (20Mbit/s, here).
So I was suggested to share it with all the ones who want to try and get quickly a BitTorrent connection working as fast as possible.
All the options
I don’t need to explain the choice of language (µTorrent has one great advantage of having such a large choice for localization).
I did not install IPv6 support (my ISP does not support it), but it is a very critical item to check because -as soon as it becomes readily available- it will bring a significant layer of compression and obfuscation to avoid your ISP throttling down your P2P traffic (as some US and Canada ISPs currently do; Shame on them!).
I don’t care receiving the beta upgrades (I’m all for the stability of software) and I favor browsing as anonymously as reasonably possible.
Since I am working at home, there is no need for the anti-boss key.
Download: I prefer to immediately pre-allocate file size (rather than seeing the software program stop later because it has been eating up all disk space), and I don’t want to the PC to shut itslef down while downloading. While it is generally good to reduce electricity consumption, stopping in mid-transfer is not good for the efficiency of the whole process. (more…)
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