Uncategorized – Roumazeilles.net

Vulturine guineafowl

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 14:24:56 +0000

Sure! We do know the guineafowl of our European countries. Looking a bit weird, sounding a bit weird, but common. What about a wilder, weirder beast?

A few savannah elephants

Yves Roumazeilles — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 07:24:26 +0000

Africa’s symbol, the savannah elephant, is always impressive. Meeting it gives you a personal experience of power, calm, and being out of time.

But where is their future? Will we be able to protect them? They live as long as we do, they communicate in ways that we only start to recognize (not even understand yet,) and we are still to cull, kill and eradicate them, really?

Make noise with AI

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 19:24:33 +0000

Artificial intelligence (AI) succeeded at generating a lot of (marketing and media) noise about itself. We all heard about its ability to produce credible/readable text and realistic (or not) pictures. But there is less publicity to the fact that it can produce… noise or sound.

Of course, it can generate music and musical tracks. I notice several website offering free services of this kind with good results:

AISong.ai (with or without lyrics)
Udio gives you musical tracks quite immediately usable.
Melobytes
Binaural Beats Factory (rather background sound beats)
Soundful AI Music Studio for musical tracks

But you can also find sites specialized into – for example – SoundEffects like this one from ElevenLab.

Happy New Year 2022!

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 18:36:55 +0000

Covid-19 – Your face mask is really unique!

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 23 May 2020 10:35:47 +0000

Leaving home now requires a protective face mask. All those white (or light blue) masks are a pity. You should have the one mask you really deserve to be out of the faceless crowd. Just click on the one you prefer to purchase it for a few dollars in a few seconds.

All Covid-19 masks from Yves Roumazeilles

Cleaner presentation for Roumazeilles.net

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 18:25:31 +0000

A cleaner template was long overdue for Roumazeilles.net. I also wanted the site to be easier to navigate with a smartphone. And why not get a lighter tone?

Just tell me what you think about it.

Quantum computing, let’s reduce weirdness

Yves Roumazeilles — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 19:20:14 +0000

This is true. When we hear about Quantum Computing, we hear a lot of noise and so few useful information. But, after the all-too-usual “This revolution is going to blow everything”, you’ll find very little understandable talk.

So, I was left collecting a few knowledge bits about this, that I would like to share with you here. It won’t blow your mind (with one exception identified below), but I think it could help us all.

Note: The articles listed below with an [en] mark, are written in English; Those listings starting with [fr] are in French.

[en] First, the definitions of Quantum Computing, thanks to Wikipedia.
[en] John Horgan, staff writer at Scientific American, interview of Peter Shor, of Shor’s Algorithm fame (“Quantum Computing for English Majors“) is trying to separate the hype from reality.
[en] There are people in the QC community who are afraid of the consequences of over-hyping the whole QC field. They fear that it could bring some kind of “winter” when the field would become frozen when people and organizations start to think that the whole hype was no more than blown air, stopping the real underlying scientific effort (like it happened during the “Winter of AI” for 20 years after the initial efforts in the ’80s.
ComputerWorld talks about the QC bullshit-sniffers at @BullshitQuantum (on Twitter).
[en] Finally, here comes the real hardcore: Quantum Computing for the very curious. This paper does not try to make things easy; It makes sure that you learn the fundamentals. One consequence: this is a long paper and you’d better take your time to read it.
[fr] Enfin, voici une introduction en bon français mais dense. Pas très récent (2006) mais “Introduction à l’information quantique” (PDF, Bellac Le. Introduction à l’information quantique. 2006. cel-00092955) est d’actualité.
[fr] Encore un peu plus ancien (2002), un article du même titre (“Introduction à l’information quantique“), peut-être légèrement plus simple.

Cute little bunnies in Bruges

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 12:17:20 +0000

A recent trip to Brugge (Belgium) was the opportunity to stop in chocolate shops (I believe half the shops in central Bruges are selling chocolate!).

This was the reason to buy those (so cute) little chocolate bunnies from Pierre Marcolini (a Brussels manufacturer, but still Belgian).

Happy New Year 2019!

Yves Roumazeilles — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 22:00:52 +0000

My best wishes for the upcoming new year.

Merry Christmas

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 10:50:29 +0000

Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year for 2019!

Polar bears – Prints

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 16:47:16 +0000

If you loved the polar bears of the previous post, you may purchase some prints, greeting cards or smartphone protection. Jump to the gallery, click on the following picture:RedBubble gallery

Replacement for Amazon Cloud Drive?

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 15:10:37 +0000

Amazon sent me an meail announcing that the sweet deal of unlimited storage for 59SUD is going to stop in less than a year now. So, my backup solution currently relying on ACD as a backup for my Synology RAID drive will have to be reviewed. Do you have ideas of what could be a good replacement?

hubiC (from OVH) seems to be fairly good interms of price. But I have to investigate. Right now, I started using the 25GB free acount to test it.

Let me know if you have ideas I can add here.

Fantastic narwhals!

Yves Roumazeilles — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 19:59:18 +0000

The Narwhal is a (small) toothed whale rather extraordinary because it holds a kind of long protruding spiral tusk (actually an overdevelopped toothwhich can reach up to 4 meters in adult males). Rather discreet (small blow, defintely timid), the narwhal is not easy to observe. But during our crossing of the Bellot Strait, we were lucky enough to observe a group (a pod, according to the specialists) at short range and they pleasantly presented their tusks for our observation.

A very intense emotion for a short encounter!

Narwhal (Monodon monoceros, Narval).
Bellot Strait, Nunavut, Canada.
August 2016.

The world’s coldest surf photographer

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 18:12:01 +0000

Chris Burkard is totally out of his mind, and he’s a surf photographer who decided to explore the world’s coldest waves. He brought back images, videos and a TEDtalk presentation which are really exceptionnal:

Back from Costa Rica

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 15:35:52 +0000

Did you know that Costa Rica probably has 5% of global biodiversity (if it is counted in quantity of local species)? Marion and I went and checked this on location, despite (Marion’s) worries that most of local animals may be mostly insects, but with the hope to bring nice shots of cute little frogs.

All in all, we can say that we found what we were looking for since we came back with many animal pictures. I will present here a small selection in the coming days. You can expect:

hummingbirds
monkeys
birds
reptiles and toads
sloths
flowers
tucans
paradise birds (or quetzal)
some more birds
and a lot more…

Furthermore, ticos (costa-rican people) were very nice and the country is quite marvelous. The hot temperature from the end of the dry season (but also mating and flowering season) is admittedly pleasant (if you have a hat).

Finally, the result was quite positive (we’ll speak later of the negative parts of this trip; But you’ll have to wait for the detail report coming later here).

Happy Birthday HAL-9000!

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 22:00:05 +0000

It’s on January 12th, 1992 that, according to Arthur C. Clarke, was born HAL-9000, the computer from “2001, A space Odyssey” (the book from Arthur C. Clarke and the movie from Stanley Kubrick). Actually, the first time it was powered on. So, it is exactly 23-year old today. Happy birthday HAL-9000!

HAL-9000 is an Artificial Intelligence computer (the AI word was common then) that takes its own destiny in its virtual hands while killing the human astronauts on board a futuristic spaceship.

I recommend specially both the novel and the movie.

#IAmCharlie

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 07 Jan 2015 18:14:03 +0000

In solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, the victims of 7 January 2015 and all defenders of freedom of expression.

The bastards can kill, but they will never be right.

Happy new year

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 23 Dec 2014 21:25:49 +0000

A caiman killed by an electric eel (video)

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:10:12 +0000

A jacaré (A Brazilian caiman) is a powerful hunter, but it may sometimes encounter a more fearful adversary. In the video clip below, a Brazilian fisherman caught an electric eel (a fresh water fish from the Amazon looking like our eels but with two important differences: It can reach more than 2m /6 feet and can produce more than 600V of electric voltage [W]). Gone collecting a knife, the fisherman left if on the river bank. When he comes back, he finds a caiman checking the eel and he immediately starts the camera.

As a matter of fact, after a short observation time, the caiman decides to eat some. But immediately after biting a bit, the caiman suffers intense convulsions and dies in only a few seconds while the fisherman cannot believe what he sees (he calls his friend to go and see something he never saw in his life).

Source: The Telegraph.

Major upgrade behind the scene at R.net

Yves Roumazeilles — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:44:39 +0000

For your information, I just went through the process of fully re-installing WordPress for www.roumazeilles.net

I tried my best to make sure that everything is correctly restored, but I may have failed. Feel free to contact me to point me to such failures if you witness them.

Thanks for your patience.

Actually, I re-installed the most recent WordPress version, copied back the original configuration, re-installed the minimal plugins, the basic theme and applied chmod to all the directories needing it…