Archive for the 'Web sightings' category

…but I couldn’t fly.

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

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…

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.

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

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

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

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.

True Marbleâ„¢ 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 GLCDâ„¢ by Unearthed Outdoors, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

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:

• Download free Nero 8
• Sharks and other sea jaws
• Art Nouveau Design

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

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.

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…

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.

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!

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.

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?

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…

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…

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.