François Guillier's Blog

Paris - Place d'Italie - 01 avril 2012 vers 14h :

Non ceci n'est pas un poisson ! La campagne d'affichage pour la prévention des incendies a bien lieu en ce moment et est bien supportée par la préfecture de police (logo en bas à gauche).

Et le commissariat de police du 13ème a bien été victime d'un incendie...

Le pire est que j'y ai été ce vendredi pour faire faire une procuration pour les présidentielles... j'espère que celle-ci avait été dispatchée (ou était stockée à l'abri)... parce que sinon elle est cuite !

Blimey! With my last blog entry 10 months ago and a average of 3 entries a year, I'd be lucky if I still had some readers left!

Oh well, never mind... this is just a quick note to left my potential readers that the photos from our stay in Morzine are now online :

http://www.guillier.org/travels/201201-01/ & http://www.guillier.org/travels/201201-02/

Enjoy!

Our photos of New York are now on line :-)

Cette note aurait due être écrite depuis longtemps puisque notre semaine à Morzine date de fin Janvier. D'ailleurs, des photos ont été publiées il y a un petit bout de temps. Mais je m'étais dit que je devrais de publier quelques bonnes adresses...

Pour les leçons, l'ESF est sans conteste un gage de qualité et on est sûr d'avoir des moniteurs qui connaissent à fond et le ski et les montages alentour.

Cette année, nous avons découvert le magasin Intersport (Easy2Ride) situé au pied des pistes. Personnel très accueillant, service parfait et si on le veut, on y laisse le matériel quand on n'est pas sur les pistes. A priori tous les magasins des bas des pistes offrent ce service mais on l'a découvert un peu par hasard.

Pour le logement, cette année nous sommes restés au chalet l'Alzette et nous comptons bien y retourner !

Enfin, à 2 pas du chalet, le restaurant La Chaudanne (où il est quasi-indispensable de réserver). Les portions sont énormes mais vous aider à digérer, le patron vient vous offrir le "coup de fusil" (eau de vie) avec sa bouteille en forme de.... fusil.

Il y a un carrefour, pas très loin de chez nous où la circulation automobile est très fortement limitée !

Si un automobiliste - non riverain - parvient à ce carrefour... bonne chance pour le quitter sans enfreindre le code de la route :-)

Je viens juste de mettre les photos de la 3ème édition "Rando GDF-SUEZ" 2010 à travers Paris.

Mes photos ici et site officiel là.

When I bought my flash last Christmas, I went for one of the cheapest options and decided to buy the EF 530 DG ST for my Samsung/Pentax SLR. It was a lot cheaper than Pentax models or Sigma's top end EF 530 DG Super and I thought I would not really need the wireless option anyway.

Since, I discovered that I was probably loosing some possibilities to have fun and that I could not even try the tricks from Strobist blog for example.

A simple cable is hard to find and amazingly expensive... something around 150€ !!!!

Then I spotted the Cactus flash triggers but they are indicated for "EF-530 DG ST (for Nikon only)". Browsing the web shows loads of problems with the EF-530 DG ST indeed.

While wondering what I could do, I noticed someone's comment (can't remember who/where but I thank you Mister!) saying that the best to do was to try the flash on a old "dumb" camera... if it fires, it is compatible!

I tried my flash Sigma Flash for Pentax on a quite ancient camera and it worked fine so hope was back.

While listening Déclencheur's chronicle, I decided to buy a cheap "Flash Remote Controller" from an Asian Ebay shop.

I went for the Seagull SYK-3 at cost of US $6.49 inc. postage and I am happy to report that it is perfectly compatible with the EF 530 DG ST for Pentax.

I ready to bet this is also the case for Cactus's models (and its clones) so basically it seems that there are 2 categories of "EF 530 DG ST" : The Canon (and Sony) version on one side needing very specifics signals on their pins, and the other side, the Nikon & Pentax version happy to fire when triggered crudely.

Back in October last year, we "had-a-go" at archery during Burwash manor apple-day. But 3 arrows and a couple of minutes is obviously quite short so I took and kept the business card.

We recently went for 4 hours of practice of Archery. Grand National Archery Society requires a 8 hours course before you can join a club but since it was not our objective, we booked only 4 hours thinking we would have had enough.

It turned out that it was clearly a mistake as first time goes very quickly and this activity seems highly addictive!

We really enjoyed it. Even the weather was OK (big shower just while having lunch but clear before and after so perfect timing).

Now we can't wait to go back to complete the 8 hours initial course (after all... why not? ;-) )

Contact: Robins Reach Archery - Beginners Courses - Private Tuition

Edit 11/06/2008: Second session was as good as first one (even the weather was perfect). Still highly recommended!

A while back, I put a picture of my newly acquired toy . I since used it for various things, including records of cycle rides (eg. London-Cambridge in 2006).

I also use it to geotag most of my photos (although nothing has cropped up on the website yet).

The Garmin Legend Cx is great for this kind of tasks but (obviously) can't compete with "Sat Navs". The basic embedded map is quite primitive and doesn't provide much more than an overviews of Motorways & major roads. It is possible to buy better maps either as CDs or micro-SD cards but it's not cheap and since it had a very limited interest for me I never bothered.

But, thanks to the nice folks of OpenStreetMap, it is possible to upload better maps to GPS... including the Garmin ones.

Here is the page of pre-compiled maps for some European countries: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download.

Instructions are not terribly clear and using Sendmap didn't work for me.

So, here is how I do it (instruction under Linux but it's roughly the same for other OS):

• 1 - Download of a map in garmin format from (wiki page above)
• 2 - Rename it as gmapsupp.img
• 3 - Put the GPS in "USB Mass Storage" mode (Setup / Interface / USB Mass Storage)
• 4 - Mount the GPS as an external disk (like you would with a usb key or external hard drive) (eg something like mount /dev/garmin /media/garmin)
• 5 - create a Garmin directory if not already present (something like mkdir /media/garmin/Garmin)
• 6 - cp the gmapsupp.img file created in 2 in this directory (eg: cp gmapsupp.img /media/garmin/Garmin/gmapsupp.img)
• 7 - unmount the GPS (eg umount /media/garmin)... this actually synchronises the data and can take a while!
• 8 - unplug the USB connection on GPS which should reboot
• 9 - check the new card is loaded (it's on the "copyright/start up" page, "Find" page, "Setup / Map / Information" page)... have fun!

Tout nouveau tout chaud (à l'heure où j'écris ces lignes):

Le manuscrit de J.K. Rowling mise en vente aux enchères à été acheté par... Amazon !

Explications & photos en ligne sur tous les sites du groupe (et même en Japonais):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/beedlebard

http://www.amazon.fr/beedlebard

Just received today, my latest bill from Virgin Media (which used to be NTL).

If technically speaking they are rather good, NTL (re-branded or not) has a long reputation for having one of the "best" Billing & Customer service.

Anyway, I really enjoyed my bill today... The wording, is quite amazing (and pure British Humour(tm)?):

Yes, I do pay my bills! ...All of them!

Am I doing something extraordinary?

Am I the only one?

Should I stop right now, pretexting this is a waste of money?

Simon, organiser of most of the cycle rides I have done, has released a very good short film about cycling in Cambridge.

As a cycling commuter myself (80% of the time. If I don't use my bike, I walk), I cross the city every day.

It is a very well balance report of the existing (good and bad), the past, present and future of the facilities. Simon recognise the fact there are a "cyclists" who don't care about lights nor cycling the wrong way (and due to their selfish behaviour they are unfortunately the most visible ones) but also that there are far more cyclists law abiding who suffer from the generalisation: Cyclist = dangerous law breaker. Specially when used as an excuse by police and local authorities.

Highly recommended!

http://www.camcycle.org.uk/campaigning/film/

A couple of photos from some of the activities...

Sorry for the iPhone, iMac, iPod maniacs... we are talking about the Newtonian type of apple! ;-)

Here is a blog entry en English... main reason being that apparently I do have one reader (Yipee!). And this (unique?) reader complained he could not understand when I was writing in French. Since the last 4 posts were in French, I needed to practice my English anyway! ;-)

At the end of June, we were invited to the wedding of friends and former colleagues of Jane. The ceremony itself was in Torbole (near Lake Garda) and the reception in Marco.

On the Sunday, we went to Verona, just to see what was there. We didn't have any precise plan of visit nor much knowledge about the town. But we were lucky as the first Sunday of the month, all museums are either free or at reduced price.

Funnily enough, there were very few tourists in the street, with exception of the Villa Capuleti (so called-house of Juliet) and its famous balcony (and apparently tomb inside -- we didn't visit the house). This Tourist Attraction has probably as much truth in it as you could find in Disneyland, Shakespeare himself never visited Verona and apparently the earliest version of the story is set in Siena anyway. The entrance with all the padlocks, love messages and graffitis on the wall is kind of amazing.

To be honest, other buildings (churches, Roman Arena & Theatre, castles & palaces, etc...) seemed a lot more interesting.

Some photos (by Jane & myself) are now online (at last!): http://www.guillier.org/travels/200706-01/

... même l'Eurostar ! ;-)

Eurostar launches from St Pancras International

Le compte à rembours a commencé

Carte & informations dans la brochure (PDF) en bas de page.

Plus que 363 jours avant que l'on n'ait plus besoin de traverser Londres pour prendre l'Eurostar... Mieux vaut tard que jamais...