Tonight I met a guru. Not an expert, a real guru: the kind of spiritual guide who has theories, speaks wonders, and has followers. This all started when a friend of mine invited me over to have a quick chat with this phenomenal genius from Canada who has invented methods …

Lunch time. I had been waiting outside for my colleagues to show up for close to 10 minutes when they said they were following me. Getting impatient, I wrote an SMS to my office mate containing the single word: MANGER. Interestingly enough, Android does not allow me to set a …

The Paris events were dreadful. Being assassinated for drawing cartoons is probably the most stupid thing that could ever happen. I am particularly touched by the death of Cabu, a cartoonist who, to me, has been part of the French culture forever. Whenever something of importance happened worldwide, Cabu was …

The following recipe took me a whole evening to find, so I am documenting it here in hope it could be useful to somebody else.

I recently upgraded my home network to a beefier TP-Link C5 Archer. This little box packs two Wi-Fi access points in 2.4 and 5GHz …

Got my hands on an old but faithful laptop recently. The thing is a lot faster than my son's desktop, so I thought it would make a nice update for him. First thing I did was upgrade the laptop's disk to an SSD and install Linux Mint. This is now …

Sarkozy was president of France during five years from 2007 to 2012. During those five long years, the French media switched to full-Sarkozy mode, as if he was the only newsworthy person on this planet. Most newspapers would not hesitate to put his picture on the front page on a …

Planes taking off in Hannover. Nothing new, but I like this picture.

See also http://twistedsifter.com/2012/02/picture-of-the-day-striking-multiple-exposure-shot-of-takeoffs-at-hannover-aiport/

Just saw this xkcd being pointed to by ESO today: xkcd Telescope names.

The Very Large Telescope is a project I was lucky enough to help bring from its infancy to daily operations. In the crowd of engineers who worked on that project, Daniel Enard was considered by most as …

Say you rent a box somewhere on the Internet. You installed Debian stable on it because you want it to be nice and stable and run a few daemons that are useful to have online. Could be to hold your vast music collection, family pictures, or use it as remote …

The night was clear, we would not be playing Bomberman in the VLT control room that night. Clear skies and a sub-arcsecond seeing meant we would have a full batch of data to process every hour or so until the next morning. Once the calibrations had finished, the telescope operator …