Lost+Found: Ghostly Geometry

Lusine – “Two Dots” from Ghostly International on Vimeo.

Live Video Color Gamut

The other day—well, a year ago or so—I was invited to visit CBC’s digital TV studios in Montréal by the SMPTE Montréal. We were shown around, even in the somewhat small control rooms. Amongst all the displays, dials, monitors, and misc. blinkenlights, I noticed a small LCD display showing an hexagonal projection of the current show’s color gamut in (or maybe ?), probably for quality assessment purposes. I thought it was pretty cool, actually.

Let’s see how we can realize this projection with as little CPU time as possible.

Wallpaper: Believe… or don’t

Believe, or dont. 1920×1200

Wallpaper: Peace

Peace. 1920×1200

Sleepless Koala

A few days ago, I changed my machine and upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and everything went fine, except for the screen-saver that would activate properly but not switch the screen into sleep mode after a while. I found a couple of fixes because despite being a documented bug, there’s not definitive fixes yet.

Building a Personnal Library (part I)

Building a decent personal library is not very difficult but it can be really expensive. It doesn’t have to, you just have to know where to look for.

Cats, Pharaohs, and the Golden Ratio

Certain numbers keep showing up in nature. The Golden Ratio,

is one of them. It shows up in cats, sunflowers, and Egyptian pyramids.

Unresponsive Kitty

Suggested Readings:The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters

Christoph Niemann — The Pet Dragon: A story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters — Greenwillow Books, 2008, 40 pp. ISBN 978-006-157776-5

(Buy at Amazon.com)

I greatly appreciate Niemann’s graphic style. He’s original and kept his playful side. This short book—a kids’ book—is full of his odd poetry and graphic genius. The Pet Dragon is built around the analogies between what we can imagine chinese character represents and pictograms. A short à la Petit Prince story, just a lot less pretentious.

The book’s website
The author’s website.

Suggested Reading:Three Cups of Tea

Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin — Three Cups of Tea: One Man mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time — Penguin Books, 2007, 349 pp. ISBN 978-014-303825-2

(Buy at Amazon.com)

This book tells us about Greg Mortenson’s efforts to build schools in remote corners of Afghanistan and Pakistan, starting with how he fell in love with this country after having lost is way down the K2. Rescued by poor but generous villagers, Mortenson, deeply touched, set himself to help them in any way he could; finally to decide upon bringing education to these people, and especially to girls and women.

This book is a great lesson of humanity; an inspiring “fix the world” story.

The book’s.