garytouet

Both awesome and impressive, you have to watch this slo-mo video of a MotoGP cornering. Look at how the driver gets close to the ground. At any stage, I had the impression he was about to drift.

Brilliant.

The new version of Apple’s operating system is out and for the first time only available on download on the Mac App Store (€23.99 or $29.99).

I’ll probably wait a few days to be sure all the applications I use get updated and to let people face any bug that could come.

Lion is out, just so you know.

Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Mona Lisa' reduced & remixed down into 140 exact circles of colour. Makes no sense close up. Makes every sense from the other side of the room.

It does not make any sense close up. Correct, but looking at a small thumbnail on your screen does make total sense. If you follow the link, you will see some. So no need to print it and to stick on your wall to see the magic happen.

When I look at it, I see an optical illusion. As if there were lines between the dots. This is what makes the trick, I believe!

Sorry for the silence on the site. The past week has been both awesome and hectic. My days are separated between work and looking for a room to rent, so there is little time left to keep up with the tech news.

My RSS reader has been closed for almost a week now and the rare times I open my Twitter client are not enough to find something to write about.

Please be patient. Things should slow down a bit when I will have my room.

Meanwhile, here is a short video of the Sydney Opera House to make you wait. I shot it while taking the ferry for a ride by night.

Another quick note to tell you that after a day on transit I finally arrived yesterday in Sydney, Australia. The trip went well and I already had the chance to discover Sydney CBD and the Opera House.

I can’t wait to find out more about this city.

A really quick note, just to let you know that I’m flying tomorrow to Sydney. I’ll be in the Australian city on the 29th of June.

As I’ve already written when I got the visa, this is the biggest step I’ve taken in my life and I hope I won’t regret it.

All the habits and the familiar places I’ve known for a long time will now disappear. They will be replaced by new ones. However family and friends will be missed a lot. I already cried them even if I am still in France.

If you are in Sydney during the year to come and if you want to meet up with a French frog, please contact me. I’d be pleased to meet you.

See you soon!

It is most likely that the future will see this technology in every screen. Though it is hard to measure how good the colours are through my screen, Robert Scoble’s enthusiasm convinced me. It is a real breakthrough.

Nanosys has 400 patents on their technology called QDEF and have a bunch of really big clients ready to see it in their products, including Apple in my opinion.

This time Kirby does not speak about films, but about technologies which built them upon previous ones. Following Kirby’s series (Everything is a Remix Part 1 & Part 2) you understand that copying is the step before creation.

Make sure you don’t quit the video early. Watch it until the end.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com’s founder, plans on building a huge clock that is intended to last 10,000 years. He has already invested $42 million of his fortune.

The project comes from Danny Hills who proposed it in WIRED in 1995. That’s a great idea in my opinion. This should be our modern pyramids: a way for us to show to future generations the technology and the expertise we had.

We can’t imagine the events the clock will go through and that is fantastic: new political systems, changes in geography, climate and maybe a slow evolution of the human body.

Dylan Tweney helps us to figure out what it could mean if it was built 10,000 years ago and its sounds interesting:

Consider this: 10,000 years ago, our ancestors had barely begun making the transition from hunting and gathering to simple agriculture, and had just figured out how to cultivate gourds to use as bottles. What if those people had built a machine, set it in motion, and it was still running today? Would we understand how to use it? What would it tell us about them? And would it change the way we think about our own future?

Born into a world of numbers, an oppressed zero discovers that through determination, courage, and love, nothing can be truly something.

It’s after you’ve watched it that you’ll understand why it received so many awards.Great work!

Pointed out by John Gruber, this comparison extracted from the New York Times says it all:

Two of Color’s photo-sharing competitors, Instagram and PicPlz, exemplify the lean start-up ethos. They started with $500,000 and $350,000, respectively, and teams of just a few people. As they have introduced successful products and attracted users, they have slowly raised more money and hired engineers.Color, meanwhile, spent $350,000 to buy the Web address color.com, and an additional $75,000 to buy colour.com. It rents a cavernous office in downtown Palo Alto, where 38 employees work in a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp.

Color, remember that we are talking about an iPhone app, has raised $41 million from investors and I think its fair to say that the launch of the app has failed: few users and many complaints.

The idea is awesome in my opinion. No more followers and followings but geolocated access to others pictures and as-your-life-go list of friends. The problem is that it is way too much dependent on the network effect.

I’m sure there are quite a lot of people in your life. People from work, high-school, college, sport club, friends of friends, relatives, people you just met for one night or one talk.

We can draw two main circles around you regarding people you know. The first one consists of people you are the most familiar with. It often counts real friends and close relatives. The rest is composed by people you can qualify as acquaintances. You know them but you don’t feel close to them. They are customers, sometimes neighbours or work colleagues or friends of friends.

For the vast majority it is easy to tell whether someone belongs to the first or to the second circle. However sometimes it can be tricky. Would you say that Billy, your co-worker who sits every day next to you but who you never see outside work, is a friend or not?

I’ll give you one tip to easily draw the line. You’ll recognize a friend when a silence in a conversation does not feel awkward. Put in another way, if you feel forced to break any silence or to find new discussion topics when discussing with Billy, that means he is an acquaintance.

Trying to break silences is not being natural with someone and this is, in my opinion, the difference between friends and simple acquaintances.

A friend is obviously someone you are natural with.

Great HTML5 showcase presented to developers by Google engineers. As I am not a code expert, I have not felt amazed by the code snippets. However final demonstrations did have an impact on me. Curiously Safari is running very smooth animations whereas Chrome, Google’s web browser, isn’t.

If you ever wondered how the Wired’s offices were, that’s the webpage you want to visit.

This is to advise that you have been granted a Working Holiday Visa, Subclass 417, on 20 May 2011.

Do you see this?<p>This is a quote from an email I got today.</p><p>This is the most important sentence of this very long email.</p><p>This means that I am allowed by the Australian administration to live on its territory for a year.</p><p>This is undoubtedly the start of the biggest step I have taken in my life. It marks the beginning of a great adventure I hope.</p>

Shawn Blanc writes a good overview of the current cloud-based music services. According to him, Amazon and Google provide a poor experience. Uploading your library does not seem to be the best solution and the streaming quality is not acceptable. Buffering times between tracks are problematic.

Shawn then points out a patent granted to Apple to solve this streaming problem. I would like you to consider the smartness of this patent:

Due to a recent patent, it looks like there will be little to no buffering pauses due to combining snippets of songs stored locally with streaming of them. If you synced only the first 15 seconds of your music you could store 20 times more music on your iPod than if you were syncing entire songs.

15 seconds of each track would be stored on your device and would be played while buffering. The result is no silence between two tracks played from the cloud and that's brilliant.

Shawn's article is not only valuable for this little detail. It is worth reading to have an overview of the different services. I therefore recommend it to you.

If that’s really him, it seems he had figured it out pretty early.

When I had the idea of this site, it was one of those periods when I get addicted to specific websites. At that time, I was constantly visiting several blogs and I was fascinated by their authors (i.e., John Gruber, Merlin Mann, Shawn Blanc, Patrick Rhone, Ian Hines, etc). I really liked their great insights and especially their ability to make me further think. I wanted to do the same.

As I was seriously thinking about setting up and designing this site, I was sure I would be able to mimic those bloggers, which means to write stuff frequently and in English (not my mother-tongue, as you may have already noticed or read here). And the strong belief that I was capable of doing it made me feel really confident. I was already imagining my website full of content. It was accessible, for sure.

However once the design was all done and once the website was fully functional, one thing was missing: the content.

At that point it all began to be much more complicated than expected. Sitting and writing was hard and concentration was absent.

This is only when my illusion that I was capable of doing it started to fall that I kicked my ass, sat down and decided to just write.

It feels comfortable to be sure you are capable of doing something. But doing is actually much more complicated.

This is what I want to set up as the basic idea behind this website. It is the tool I use to actually do things instead of imagining them.