The wallpaper is available in various screen sizes:

• 1920 x 1200 pixels
• 1280 x 1024 pixels
• 1024 x 768 pixels

The creator of the fractal concept, Benoît Mandelbrot, just died. Born in Poland, the great mathematician had both French and American citizenship and inspired millions of mathematicians and artists.

Rechercher des fractales sur Google.

Don’t stop at these first images, and keep reading the article down to the comparison with printed paper:

Kindle at 26x	iPad at 26x

You find them anywhere and everywhere, but it’s not always worth the visit. To find a beautiful wallpaper for your computer (even more if it has seevral screens), you need to find reliable sources of nice wallpapers. I wrote down a few of the best ones here:

• The wallpaper section of National Geographic
• Digital Blasphemy (an age-old good source)
• Vlad Studio
• Adolescent Eyes whose work is shown below
• Mandolux, a photographer very attentive to the use of his pictures as dual screen wallpapers
• InterfaceLift has an excellent search engine
• dualscreenwallpaper.com and dualmonitorbackgrounds.com for dual screen personal computers
• MintyWhite
• Social Wallpapering

A simple reminder, if you have multiple screens, your PC will appreciate your using DisplayFusion, the perfect software to handle corectly those large picture files. Like I do it with this photo of a rbown snake eagle taken in Kenya (backlit by the setting sun).

Your screen may not thank Xtian for this idea!

So, here are 10 minutes of total fractal travel:

The zoom is so intense that the original fractal is larger than the known universe, but the last image gives details smaller than the smaller of nuclear physics particle.

Astonishing mathematics via Boing Boing.

Most of it comes from the use of masterful algorithms of cleaning, cropping, re-cropping, aligniment, correction, optimisation that are usually included in some very complex and very expensive pro software scanning tools. Thanks to Scan Tailor, this is no longer the cas. It is open source and it does it all like the pros.

You can notice that these images being free of copyright will allow to produce impressive posters if you agree not to make it a commercial venture. Idea?

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.

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.

you merely change the size of the Windows desktop and all your desktop icons are forcefully moved around against your will. After one or two of these, you’d be ready to cry, while backing up the position of the icons would be enough, before connecting a new screen, or attaching your laptop to a video-projector, etc.

Up to now, you could only cry and reposition the icons. But here comes DesktopOK. What can I say? It does exactly what you want and what you need: a mere backup, a simple restore and your icons come back where you wanted them.

Simple et necessary.

• dozens of nature-oriented images (including some cartoons) on UsingMac.com;
• ligthning and storms (15 images).

Downright spectacular.

This should be the reason to go through a last minute list of all the recent screenshots and videos displaying the best images of this FPS game coming from Russia.

• Interview videos (from VE3D)
• Screenshots (from VE3D)
• Trailer (from GameTrailers)
• Trailer in HD (from GameTrailers)

Last but not least, the official game web site essentially confirmed the specs of the game that we provided a few weeks ago already.

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky will be shown by GSC Game World in Los Angeles for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (with probable availability in the stores around the end of August)
• Image gallery 1 on IGN
• Image gallery 2 on IGN
• Analyse/preview du jeu en français sur JeuxvideoPC.
• Analyse/preview du jeu en français sur ImpactVirtuel.
• And still the required PC configuration to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Sapphire announced that its Radeon HD4870 would be available in France in the coming days at 249€.

3Dguru has a nice review of the upcoming Radeon HD4870 graphics card. It’s supposed to be the fastest offering from AMD and it is stacked against the GTX260 from nVidia, cheaper Radeon HD4850 and older nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX.

The conclusion is that the HD4870 is going to be a tough competitor for the much more expensive nVidia GTX260 (expect nVidia to cut down prices quite quickly to compensate).

The first one was available for a measly 150€, what makes it a nice little entry point for the powerful 3D graphics cards (understand: “for video games“). The Radeon HD4870 has been spotted in France at 250€, with the first available boxes showing the Sapphire brand and logo. Your usual reseller should already have them.

Crytek was a little imprecise on this, but there is one major advantage to it: It will bring enormous performance increases. It is ssaid to be able to run Crysis at high-quality settings on a $600 or 400€ budget PC. Probably nearly any PC a gamer could buy will be able to get max quality.

Unfortunately, all photos I could find are just plain bad.