Double ration aujourd’hui, avec ce petit dessin qui était initialement prévu pour un magazine.

Sans même entrer dans le vif du sujet, Bottomless Belly Button, roman graphique de Dash Shaw, en impose par ses mensurations : 720 pages, un dos de 5,5 cm sur lequel on trouve une foultitude d’infos, bref, une sacrée bête. Acclamé meilleure bande dessinée indépendante de l’année aux USA, le pavé édité par Fantagraphics arrive aux éditions Çà et là pour 30 €, un an après la sortie du tout aussi imposant Château l’Attente.

Mais rien à voir ici avec de la fantasy médiévale, Bottomless Belly Button flirte du côté de la chronique sociale iconoclaste à travers les aventures de la famille Loony, qu’on croirait presque sortie d’un film de Wes Anderson, genre Famille Tenenbaum. Il faut dire qu’après 40 ans de mariage, les parents Loony annoncent leur divorce, et réunissent tout le monde dans la maison familiale. Fantaisie parmi d’autres, Peter, le cadet de la famille, apparaît la quasi-totalité du bouquin sous les traits d’une grenouille – même s’il nous a fallu un quart du livre pour comprendre que ses narines n’étaient pas ses yeux ! –, en écho à sa position de loser que ce soit sur le plan professionnel ou sentimental. Lui, comme les autres, va vivre un séjour riche en rebondissements tapant au cÅ“ur de ses complexes. À la fin, tous les personnages auront évolué de façon perceptible.

Varié et hétéroclite, tant sur les thèmes que sur le plan visuel, avec des mises en pages éclatées pour rythmer les différentes parties et de nombreux jeux graphiques avec des onomatopées d’ambiances “musique à fond” et de mouvements “emmêle”, les 720 pages se lisent d’une traite. Pourtant, Bottomless Belly Button aura du mal à séduire ceux pour qui les histoires qui mènent en voyage dans la psyché des personnages ne font ni chaud ni froid. Reste qu’en la matière, grâce à ses trouvailles graphiques et à sa façon de traiter de façon simple les choses complexes, le roman graphique de Dash Shaw est ce qui s’est fait de mieux cette année !

Les images sont © Dash Shaw.

Un peu de poésie pour commencer ce joli mois de décembre avec un dessin que j’avais déjà diffusé il y a quelques années.

Apple did fairly well during its Black Friday sales event in spite of terrible economic conditions, claims Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu. While Apple is said to have kept to its normal discounts, hovering between 5 and 10 percent, checks with distributors and retail are said to show evidence of "strong" traffic at Apple outlets. Third-party vendors are said to have contributed even further, maki...

Nokia could be developing a new, much larger portable device that sits above its Internet Tablets in features, a new research note by UBS analyst Maynard Um says. Where the existing N810 has just a 4.1-inch display, investigations by Um point to the existence of either a notebook or tablet with a 9- or 10-inch display and features that have never existed on an Nseries tablet, such as a touchpad f...

The Riksbank brought forward its next policy board meeting by two weeks to Wednesday after data showed manufacturing contracted in November at its fastest pace since calculations began in 1994

BARCELONA (Reuters) - World mobile phone leader Nokia is expected to bolster its offering of high-end phones at a media and industry event in Barcelona on Tuesday, where it is also due to outline a push into Internet services.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=cFLgFV2k"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=7f7W39Tl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?i=7f7W39Tl" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?a=GYlp23ZK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/Reuters/InternetNews?i=GYlp23ZK" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Reuters/InternetNews/~4/7oknaY0H8Gw" height="1" width="1"/

A German woman is jailed for more than four years for killing two of her babies and keeping them in a freezer.

Amy Schatz / Wall Street Journal:
FCC Head Pushes Free Web Plan  —  Outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for action in December on a plan to offer free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans, despite objections from the wireless industry and some consumer groups.

The recent conviction in the MySpace suicide case could mean that the days of being able to freely lie on the Web could be coming to an end.

Apparently we weren't the only ones a little baffled by the pricing of VZW's Omnia—after being available for only six days, the price has dropped down to $200 (with the same $70 rebate and two-year...

pFiled under: a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/text/" rel="tag"Text/a, a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/office/" rel="tag"Office/a, a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/productivity/" rel="tag"Productivity/a/pdiv align="center"a href="http://textflow.com"img hspace="8" border="0" align="middle" vspace="8" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.downloadsquad.com/media/2008/11/textflow1.jpg" //abr //div a href="http://www.textflow.com/"Textflow/a is an Adobe AIR-based collaboration app that allows you to incorporate changes from several different people into one Word document. Sending your draft to everyone you're working with, and then manually combining all of their versions is a pain. With Textflow, you can just drop in each person's document and see a side-by-side view of the changes, and then put everything in order with a little bit of dragging. The app is now in public beta.br /br /If you've used track changes in Word, Textflow's "choose or refuse" interface will be familiar to you. But textflow is like track changes on steroids, if you'll pardon a clicheacute;. Besides the ability to handle several sets of changes from several separate Word files at once, it's also a lot easier to tell at a glance who's changed what, and decide which version to use. There's even a scrapboard to store ideas you're not sure about yet. The best part is that your collaborators don't even have to know what Textflow is for you to use it effectively.br /br /br /[via a href="http://blog.go2web20.net/2008/11/textflow-beta-goes-public-real.html"Go2Web20 Blog/a]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/01/textflow-parallel-word-processing-app-now-in-public-beta/"Textflow parallel word processing app now in public beta/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com"Download Squad/a on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 11:00:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href=http://www.textflow.com/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/01/textflow-parallel-word-processing-app-now-in-public-beta/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/forward/1386179/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/01/textflow-parallel-word-processing-app-now-in-public-beta/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/TDpvmO0pryy7q7emc_wplry33-w/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/TDpvmO0pryy7q7emc_wplry33-w/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/downloadsquad?a=cSZamu03"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/downloadsquad?i=cSZamu03" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/downloadsquad?a=EsE4Glxa"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/downloadsquad?i=EsE4Glxa" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/downloadsquad/~4/M7Dbb1ticqs" height="1" width="1"/

pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/ford/" rel="tag"Ford/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/volvo/" rel="tag"Volvo/a/pimg vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autoblog.com/media/2008/12/studio_for_sale_opt.jpg" alt="" /br /br /Ford announced today that it's "re-evaluating strategic options for Volvo Car Corporation", which in plain English means that it may sell the Swedish brand that it's owned since 1998. The Dearborn-based automaker says this re-evaluation will take about three months, during which Ford and Volvo will work together as they always have. While the sale of Volvo will be no doubt be decided upon during this time, Ford has also said it will be working on propping Volvo up as a stand-alone business since the Premier Automotive Group, which once included Volvo, Jaguar, Aston Martin and Land Rover, has been dismantled. There's no mention of how much Ford thinks it can get for Volvo or whether any companies have actually expressed interest in the foreign brand known most for slavish devotion to safety. Though Volvo sales have been down sharply this year, the same can be said for virtually every brand in the industry. Potential suitors of Volvo may also be interested in the a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/11/24/volvo-s60-concept-teased-again-ahead-of-detroit-auto-show/"new S60/a that will debut next month at the Detroit Auto Show and may improve the brand's fortunes.br /br /[Source: Ford]pa href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/01/swedish-sell-a-thon-ford-reconsiders-selling-volvo/" rel="bookmark"Continue reading emSwedish Sell-A-Thon! Ford reconsiders selling Volvo/em/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/01/swedish-sell-a-thon-ford-reconsiders-selling-volvo/"Swedish Sell-A-Thon! Ford reconsiders selling Volvo/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:59:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/01/swedish-sell-a-thon-ford-reconsiders-selling-volvo/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1387278/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2008/12/01/swedish-sell-a-thon-ford-reconsiders-selling-volvo/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/2QNunFYhMhGt5I3L0QJgyvG7X1Y/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/2QNunFYhMhGt5I3L0QJgyvG7X1Y/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=7CxdpGMC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=7CxdpGMC" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=IQ7FDp8s"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=IQ7FDp8s" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/y5WczDaK5gE" height="1" width="1"/

h4Monty chides Sun for premature, bug-riddled release/h4 pMySQL creator Michael “Monty” Widenius has gone on a noisy rant about last week’s release of MySQL 5.1 because Sun Microsystems has unleashed the database even though it still contains “fatal bugs”..../p

A closely watched index of the nation's manufacturing activity fell further in November, to a 26-year low, and remained at a level indicating overall economic contraction for the second straight month.img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/money_latest/~4/TA5imW9mLiE" height="1" width="1"/

Developer to use technology for cross platform titles, with plans to create an SDK for other studios

img class=face src=http://planet.ubuntu.com/heads/jucato.png alt= pWhew! November is finally over! I never expected it to actually be that hectic, usually because nothing much happens except in the first week (Mama#8217;s birthday). But that is precisely what happened. Ironically, it has probably been one of the most productive months I#8217;ve had this whole year./p pI could probably say that half of the busy-ness of November was devoted to personal matters: birthdays, church/community activities, and health problems. I got a very big wake up call regarding my physical status, so I need to put a lot of effort into losing weight and staying fit. I#8217;m not sure if the a href=http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.htmlhacker#8217;s diet/a is something that I can apply, given culture and situation considerations, but I#8217;ll give it a try. In the meantime, I#8217;ve taken some preventive measures and have declared war on all forms of soda/pop/soft drinks/whatever-you-call-them-in-your-country which started three weeks ago. That means (sniff) farewell to a href=http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.htmlMountain Dew/a./p pBut I#8217;ve also been busy with the tech side of life. School has started again next month, and this time my subjects are more interesting and challenging (and the books equally incompetent) than last semester: Data Structures and Algorithms and Computer Structure and Organization. I#8217;m really starting to feel that I#8217;ve enrolled in a Computer Science course./p pI was also finally able to finish (technically) a major web-related project that has been going on (very slowly) for months. It was my first attempt at using a href=http://www.textpattern.comTextpattern/a, which probably gives me enough experience to start migrating my whole site over to it. Sure it#8217;s not as simple as WordPress, where you can just install it (or have it installed) and blog away. But it isn#8217;t that complicated. Understanding how it#8217;s basic presentation components work together is the key. The hardest part for me was actually #8220;translating#8221; the plain XHTML/CSS to Textpattern, complete with dynamic content and such. In a way, it#8217;s a lot like programming with a library (TXP Tags), which I actually found appealing./p pLast, but definitely not the least, I managed to cram my way through my Qt book finally. Although I have to admit that skipped on a few chapters that either didn#8217;t interest me or were well beyond my current areas (databases, threading, OpenGL, embedded). I focused mostly on the beginning chapters, which is IMHO the minimal Qt necessary to start KDE hacking. Just for fun, I put together this very simple, crude, and primitive #8220;web browser#8221;:/p pa href=http://jucato.org/stuff/project.jpegimg src=http://jucato.org/stuff/project.jpeg alt=My Crude Browser //a/p p(P.S. This made an early college Windows fantasy of mine come true. But I have no intentions of going beyond that). The book, by the way, is available for free (legally) at the a href=http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/how-to-learn-qt.htmlQt documentation pages/a (unfortunately, only the first edition is available for free, which is a bit dated now)./p pBut more than actually finishing a book that I bought a year ago, this milestone practically means that I#8217;m ready for real KDE coding, which has been the ultimate goal for the past 2 years. I might be able to blog about the a href=http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorialsmany KDE tutorials/a as I go along (but knowing my own blogging discipline, or lack of it, I won#8217;t hold my own breath). Now I#8217;m really excited./p pCheers to an eventful November and here#8217;s to an even busier December! img src=http://jucato.org/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif alt=:D class=wp-smiley / /p

Something about this Acer Aspire One with wheels just looks so... right. After suiting up the laptop with a tiny motor, some "crazy" wheels and an Arduino Diecimila, the crafty DIY-er wrote a bit of code that commands the unit to perform simple movements like turn left, turn right, move forward, and pause, while transmitting some breathtaking video of its travels back to a different computer via WiFi. The unit doesn't do reverse yet, nor can it pop wheelies -- after all, it's no Rovio -- though the wishlist of possible improvements is fairly uh... impressive. Check the video (not the Acer-transmitted one) after the break, though we have to give you fair warning: the robot steamrolls a cat near the end.

Continue reading Arduino-armed Acer Aspire One and wheels tools around, shoots video

Filed under: Robots

Arduino-armed Acer Aspire One and wheels tools around, shoots video originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A 30,000-ton luxury cruise ship outran pirates off the coast of Yemen this weekend, the ship's owner said Monday.div class="feedflare" a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=VoFnjZa7"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=6f7innie"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=Se4TMi9d"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=Se4TMi9d" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=gDj6riU8"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://rss.cnn.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=u4f5bndQ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=u4f5bndQ" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~4/tKSpuUXAp48" height="1" width="1"/

A 30,000-ton luxury cruise ship outran pirates off the coast of Yemen this weekend, the ship's owner said Monday.

Learn how to find, redact, or replace text patterns you define after converting scanned images into searchable documents. Hide sensitive personal information like social security numbers and credit card numbers to protect privacy. Pegasus Imaging’s SDKs and this sample project show you how.