Category: Science & Geeks

  • Free movie: Rashomon

    Free movie: Rashomon

    Download from Internet Archive Download from Google video Movie information from IMDB.org Today, I want to present a major movie, one of the world best films, a diamond from 1950. Rashômon is one of the most important movies of its time, and it stays as a golden nugget for both its form and its contents.…

  • Ridiculed scammers

    For once, a scammer let us smile (though against his will). Let’s smile. Today, it is the 419 scammers that have been baited by an Internet user who decided to have fun with them and convinced them that he would give a lot of money to people who would recreate famous scenes from movies or…

  • Software RAID: a question of light

    Today, I am asking a simple question to solve a little problem I have : Since I installed a RAID array in an OpenSUSE machine, I can observe that the little red LED light of disk access flashes once every seoncd -even when I do not try to use the array. Would somebody be able…

  • 1.5 giga-pixel for the Machu Pichu

    A nice image of an marvellous archeological site (the Machu Pichu in Peru) still full of the echoes of a glorious past, Inca history. Thanks to Scott Howard, you can visit this billion and a half pixels assembled from 400 individual images.

  • AMD-ATI R600 first to full HDMI

    AMD-ATI R600 first to full HDMI

    Reminder R600 = X2800 boardsR630 = X2600 boardsR610 = X2300 boards We were wondering why the R6x0 family of graphics chipsets from AMD-ATI was so late compared to the 8800 family of boards from nVidia. Part of the answer may come from the fact that AMD-ATI made a move toward full integration of HDMI (High…

  • Visit a virtual lens plant

    Thanks to Canon, it is possible and easy to discover how a photo optical lens is created. And it is a much more convoluted process than you may think. If you ever wondered why a lens cost so much money to make (and some of the nicest lenses are digging holes in our wallets), take…

  • A great box for an external USB hard drive

    We, geeks, are always on the look for a designer box for our PC in the obvious objective to seaprate ourselves from the ugly standard grey box. Our desire has now also extended to the boxes protecting our external hard drives. After a generation of grey, metal or black boxes, we start seeing nice packages.…

  • Robert Adler, dies at 93

    This man should be better known. He died at 93 after receiving a Grammy Award in 1997. He created a world of couch potatoes. He favored petty fights in front of the TV set. He fathered the TV remote. Source: BBC.

  • The Y2K7 bug

    On the 1st of January 2000, some people were expecting to see the world crumble because old software applications had been written using dates coded on 2 digits. At the turn of the century (or rather at the change from 99 to 00), there was a need for upgrading/patching applications to support 4-digit years in…