It has been half a year that Karamba and its kin ruled the KDE desktop with their eye candy. But now Gnome has its own desktop joy called GDesklets.
After playing a bit with GDesklets, I have to admit that they are far more user-friendly and professional looking than its KDE counterpart (sorry, SuperKaramba !)

Well, I got my edition of the Special DVD Edition of The Two Towers, and spent a lovely evening enjoying the second part of the LotR trilogy. One week after the release of this DVD edition (very clever), more details have been anounced of the Extended DVD editions. There will be, unlike with the FotR DVD editions, *two* Special Extended Editions :


1. The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers Platinum Series Special Extended DVD Edition.

• Discs 1-2: The Feature (208 mins)- A new version of the second installment in the epic trilogy! The film includes over 40 minutes of never-before-seen footage incorporated into the film, made especially for this video release. Four audio commentaries by director and writers, the design team, the production team and the cast featuring more than 30 participants including Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom and Academy Award winners Richard Taylor, Howard Shore, Randy Cook and many more.


• Discs 3-4: The Appendices
  
  Two discs with hours of original content including multiple documentaries and design/photo galleries with thousands of images to give viewers an in depth behind-the-scenes look at The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

2. The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers Collector's DVD Gift Set



The following contents will be presented in packaging illustrated by famed artist, Alan Lee :

• 4-disc Platinum Series Special Extended DVD Edition of The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers.


• Collectible Gollum polystone statue created by Sideshow Weta


• "The Evolution of Gollum" exclusive:
  Bonus DVD on the Weta Workshop and how the Gollum statue was created, featuring interviews with Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, the cast and more!


• A printed companion piece showing how Gollum evolved from pencil sketch to sculpted maquette to digital character.

A nova is an astronomical event where a star brightens suddenly and to an unprecedented degree, creating the impression that a new star has appeared where none was before. Hence the name, from nova for "new star". Hideo Nishimura, a Japanese astronomer, has found a nova in the constellation Scutum (the Shield). I was so lucky to locate the nova with my Newton 114 telescope. As the nova has a magnitude of 8.7 to my estimation, the star can be seen with smaller telescopes. Current observations indicate that the star is even getting brighter in the last days ! Information in Dutch and some star maps (overview and detail) can be found on AstroBlog.

In december, the long awaited third part of the trilogy Lord of the Rings, Return of the King (RotK), goes into premiere. But most theatres will do more than that : the final episode is an excellent opportunity to replay the first two -extended- episodes of the trilogy, followed by RotK in a dazzling marathon. As you know that the movies take 3 to 4 hours each, the full marathon will take up to 11h ! These marathons will be played worldwide, with the support of New Line Cinema. There are already some details available about marathons in Holland, and I hope to get more info about Belgian LOTR marathons shortly.

Last night I had a chance to see Raduga 33, my first Iridium flare : right on the predicted time and location, it lit up. Iridium flares are small communications satellites providing spectacular visible reflective flares/glints to observers on the ground. With only a normal brightness of +6 magnitude, occasionally some of the Iridium satellites provide reflective flares of magnitude -8. For comparison, Venus can be as bright as magnitude -4.9, thus reflections can be up to 30 times brighter than Venus. The flares can last anywhere from 5 to 20 seconds before the satellite once again becomes almost invisible to the naked eye.




Heavens Above is a true gold mine for satellite spotters. Its aim is to provide you with all the information you need to observe satellites such as the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle, spectacular events such as the dazzlingly bright flares from Iridium satellites by offering you detailled information and star charts.

Burning Man is a yearly happening in Black Rock desert, Nevada. Once a year, for one week in the desert (Aug 25 till Sep 1 2003), a community of living, breathing, participants join together to create Black Rock City. The people who attend Burning Man are no mere "attendees," but rather participants in every sense of the word: they create the city, the interaction, the art, the performance and ultimately the "experience."

There are many ways to participate. You can create a theme camp or build an art installation. You might put on a performance or build a stage for others to perform on. Check out examples of Playa Events which participants created.

The earth is over 5 billion years old. Life first originated in the oceans 3.4 billion years ago. The dinosaurs died out 65 million years in the past. Human recorded history stretches back 10,000 years in time.

These numbers are too large to visualize, and difficult to compare. That's why a timeline is interesting : an image sometimes says more than one thousand words. Hotu.org (HistoryOfTheUniverse.org) offers a nice timeline of the last 15 billion years of Earth. More impact on the climate of the last aeons can be found Climate Timeline Tool. Some others exagerate a bit in the visualisation of this timeline : the history on a toilet roll.

Interested in the future ? Faction Earth gives a probable future of the next 150 years : accelarated population growth and the formation of city clusters aka city plexes. Corporate and biological warfare with the origin of mutant humans and extinct life on Mars. Luckily, this possible future is all part of a computer game.

I'm not really satisfied about the result layout, but I'm still releasing Padre v0.3.0. The code is much, much cleaner, and the full dependency tree is calculated at once. I only need to eliminate the double patches out of the resulted table, but that's for later.

Debian GNU/Linux is celebrating its 10th birthday. Check debCONF for the birthday party nearest you! In case you're wondering what makes Debian so special, here''s a roundup of all special Debian things :


Debian's greatest achievement is creating a 100% free ( as in beer and free speech ), community supported GNU/Linux operating system, from an activist's point of view.

From a user's point of view, Debian's greatest achievement is having an "unstable" branch that is as stable as some other dist's releases, and of course apt-get, the wonderfull installation tool that is slowly being adopted by other distro's.

From a CS student's point of view, Debian's great achievement may be the package creation and management tools.

For sociologists, it may be the democratic nature of the project.

For me, it's simply that I get to use an OS that sucks less.

Wifi hotspots in airport terminals -- way too much paella -- wonderfull frappucino at Starbucks -- temperatures never below 30° Celsius -- trees of stone -- every board game in a Spanish Lord of the Rings edition -- houses for dragons -- art everywhere in a clean city.

Some of the fading memories of our trip to Barcelona, Spain.