Too much Internet free time » Web sightings

An SLR camera + some software = three videos

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:32:40 +0000

Fabian Tischer is obviously gifted to create small videos from visual effects supposed to be simple (but actually quite tough to master) in order to offer us some cool movies:

Berlin TV tower – lift off from Fabian Tischer on Vimeo.

Insider footage showing NASA’s strange theft of famous Berlin landmark.

little airport from Fabian Tischer on Vimeo.

Miniature faking of Tegel Airport in Berlin.
( my first animation test to simulate a tilt shift miniature effect )

music: Mister Electric Demon – CHO7-31ko [CCL]

deadly encounter from Fabian Tischer on Vimeo.

3D-compositing of an accidental encounter with a robot…

3dsmax & after effects

Check his page often in the future. I believe that his future work will be worth it.

GANTT projects for free

Yves Roumazeilles — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:08:00 +0000

Microsoft Project is expensive, very expensive. But once you started using it, you can’t stand not having a nice clean GANTT project chart. Why not get a free Microsoft Project? Even better than downloading MS-Project for free, I am proposing you to use an on-line GANTT chart/project builder that is completely free and works on-line: Gantter.

Gantter

I have been really impressed by the quality of such a software program. It may need to get some interface polish for Opera users (I had a couple of little display bugs), but the operation is fully adequate for many projects.

Extraordinary Chinese health notice

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:03:40 +0000

20 foods you should not eat together

You can’t read Chinese? That’s a pity. You would learn from this official announcement that some foods should not be eaten together (it is not clear how the exact risk was identified, though).

According to Xinjiang, the list of terrible mixtures is:

Pork + water chestnuts = a stomach ache
Beef + chestnuts = vomiting
Lamb meat + watermelon = a decreased vigor for life
Dog meat + green beans = poisonous to the body
Rabbit meat + celery = loss of hair
Chicken + celery = a decreased vigor for life
Goose meat + chicken eggs = a decreased vigor for life
Turtle meat + amaranth (a nutritional herb) = poisonous to the body
Carp + liquorice (not the candy) = poisonous to the body
Crab + persimmon fruit = diarrhea
Chicken eggs + saccharin = poisonous to the body, potentially fatal
Brown sugar + preserved eggs = poisonous to the body
White wine (白酒) + persimmon = chest pains
Onions + honey = damaged vision
Radish + fungus = dermatitis (a skin disease)
Bean curd + honey = makes you deaf
Potatoes + bananas = (not translated)
Bananas + sweet potato = a bloated belly
Peanuts + cucumbers = harmful to the body
Sweet potatoes + persimmon = lithiasis (formation of stones, such as the kidney stone)

I knew that you wanted to know about it…

The map of my trips

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:46:47 +0000

Firefox: more than Internet Explorer

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:11:17 +0000

I am not sure that this is exact all over the Internet, but I just noticed that this is true for YLovePhoto, one of my web sites: There are more visitors using Firefox than Internet Explorer.

YLovePhoto.com

Then, I checked for Roumazeilles.net itself, and I noticed the same situation:

Roumazeilles.net

It appears that Firefox is moving very fast. Who would have thought -a few years ago- that Microsoft’s world domination would be toppled like that?

Ukiyo-e books by Kitagawa Utamaro

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:38:05 +0000

A friend of mine recently bought a copy of a Japanese wood engraving. While reading this article from BibliOdyssey, about the wood engravings of Kitagawa Utamaro, I thought I should share some of the pictures of this artist.

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

Planetary pictures and wallpapers

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:45:19 +0000

I consider that the most useful and often the most interesting wallpapers for your computer desktop are images that are relatively feature-less. A picture full of little details continuously grabbing your attention is a major nuisance. It’s much better to have either a very smooth image or a photo containing a lot of continuous tones.

Windows 7 official wallpapers

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

Fresh Impact Crater Formed between February 2005 and July 2005
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

800×600
1024×768
1152×864
1280×960
1440×1080
1600×1200
1920×1440
2048×1536
2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

The DTB saws cameras in half

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:51:13 +0000

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.

Water cutting machine

Now, if seeing them is not enough for you, I suggest that you cut a few of your lenses. The most difficult part is obviously to saw, cut and hack these fragile devices. You need a very powerful and precise saw. I found one at Mainly Metals, a company offering cutting equipment (I no longer can name them “saw”) providing water jet machining.

They cut metal, glass, stone, plastics, wood, with a high-power jet of water filled fine-grain garnet. And, this is environment-friendly!

100 public libraries on Internet

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:24:07 +0000

CollegeDegree.com lists 100 Extensive University Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access.

Knowledge is always free.

Fly like an eagle

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:37:10 +0000

…but I couldn’t fly.

Jose Luis Ortiz has changed it all. He installed a small video camera on one of his royal eagles.

Link to YouTube

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…

Safari 4, fast new browser

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:15:50 +0000

Apple is not only delivering sleek computer designs and nice little mobile phones. They are also producing a good web browser: Safari.

It’s new version, Safari 4, is just out. Faster, still as good and powerful, but Apple is now claiming the crown for the “fastest” web browser. It could well be possible when Snow Leopard OS-X becomes available later this year. Running natively as a 64-bit Mac application, it could gain 50% from today’s already powerful base of Safari 4.

Safari version 4

Safari 4 is available for Windows XP, Vista, or mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer.

Blind date, with a Dungeon Master

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:54:58 +0000

You could fully appreciate this video only if you have some experience of Role Playing, but I couldn’t help posting it here.

Dungeon Master

Atom.com link

Stan, this video is partly dedicated to you, the Dungeon Master.

Cooking in text, pictures and video

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 10 May 2009 10:32:22 +0000

Cooking recipes were the excuse for millions of Internet users (Ed: maybe not millions) to write down the advice of their grand-mothers, quite often with a desperating lack of inspiration. But I just found a couple of nice web sites that could be checked as much for their recipes as for the pictures [1] or the videos going along with them.

Habeas Brulée is superbly written with elegant recipes and generally great photos.
Rouxbe proposes recipes also very generous but presented in video.

Rhubarb Soup with Olive Cookie

PDF-to-Word for free (online tool)

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:39:45 +0000

You wanted to get the contents of this PDF file in a usable form. say! a Word document.

Here comes PDF-to-Word, touted as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter”, which may be quite right.

It’s online, it’s free, it’s only 3 steps away:

PDF-to-Word (free online converter)

The converted document will arrive directly in your email box.

Keen eyes like yours will have noticed the opportunity to produce not only Word documents but also RTF documents which can be read as easily in Word as in any other word processor on any kind of machine.

Big Earth

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:11:00 +0000

True Marble™ is a true color, photo-realistic, high resolution, 3 terabyte image of the earth. All data is provided at a base 15 meter resolution. Even if this was not shot in a single time (sattelite imagery is a bit more complex than Gigapan panoramas), this is really stupendous. But even more, you can download your own reduced subset for free. Keep cool, this is a lot of downloads of big files (they are even available on BitTorrent – much more practical than FTP downloads, and faster too). But it’s definitely there.

True Marble - Earth at high resolution

True Marble GLCD™ by Unearthed Outdoors, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Best shorts

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:32:56 +0000

Link love

Those are the best links I found recently. I could not write a full post about them, but they are worth visiting:

Box.net launches a web-based free word processor (via Download Squad)
Histoface: How to hide an image in the histogram of another image
Safer Code – Secure Coding In C \ C++ is a blog about such issues as writing clean C/C++ code.

Most-read articles

The news as you make it:

Most visited categories

Your attention does not stop to 1 post only:

Gorilla in Wildlife (digital photography)
Nikon D300 (SLR photo camera) that can be complemented with the YLovePhoto.com similar category about the Nikon SLR family

Free movies (many)

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:46:54 +0000

We all love when things come free to us. Here I found a treasure trove of movies that are free to download. Legally.

Thanks to the Canadians of the National Film Board of Canada. They give us feature-length movies, documentaries, animated short movies. Everything, of the best quality, at the best price: Free.

Ryan Air has new ideas to charge its customers

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:24:15 +0000

We knew that Ryan Air was an Irish airline able to bring air fares to a very low level. They use all tricks at their disposition to spend as little money as possible. But sometimes they go too far and their latest ideas give a bad press to the whole low-cost airline industry which were merely having you pay for your lunch in the plane (and, after all, why not pay your own soda like in any convenient pub on the ground?) Here are some of their latest brillant proposals (sometimes already in place):

They tried to tell that there should be no valuables (sunglasses in the trial case) in the checked-in luggage. A judge corrected this.
It appears that on several trips, buying a round-trip is more expensive that buying two one-way tickets. Always check!
Ryan Air want to fine passengers caught with a hand luggage over the weight limit (checked-in luggage has to be paid for).
Ryan Air proposes to charge passengers to use the in-plane toilets. Your flight would better be on-time if you don’t have small change, or will they accept credit cards…

Collisions

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:13:37 +0000

News reaches a British sub and a French sub regardnig the satellite collision last week.

UserFriendly.org

*Snort* American and Russian dorks.

I nearly rolled on the floor laughing with this one. But, generally speaking, UserFriendly.org is one hell of a good comics web site.

9 love messages from Planet Earth

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:22:31 +0000

You’d believe that our planet is in love. It can be read on its face (on its surface) merely under the form of pretty hearts nicely drawn.

Heart Reef, Australia

9 other cases. Superb!