I have been a bit more geek lately and spent more time playing with my computer at night. I don’t know if it worths sharing it but I’ll let you judge:

The movie industry has put in place restrictions to make sure you can not easily read in Europe a DVD bought in the US (and vice-versa). They mostly want to make sure they don’t kill movie theaters by allowing customer to buy abroad movies that haven’t been presented yet. Therefore, they introduced the notion of zone. The world is separated in height zones and you can only change zone five times before having your dvd player locked to the last zone used. It makes sense if you live in Europe but if you’re traveling a lot or live in a country without movie theater but with people from all other the world, it’s a bit problematic. For Macbook Pro users, the solution is quite easy. You just need to check if your DVD drive is zone free (RPC-1). If not, then just update your DVD firmware. Finally, use Region X to reset the zone counter. If you don’t want to do it, you can either stop watching DVD, buy one laptop per zone or be a bad guy and only watch pirate movies (divx). But don’t hold me responsible for anything.

05 July 2011: A Darfurian internally displaced person (IDP) gives water to her cattle at Zamzam water point, North Darfur, Sudan. [Click on the picture to enlarge it].

Finally, I have been testing the new google+ social network. Most of my friends and acquaintance are still not registered so it’s difficult to have a final opinion but I particularly like the way the privacy settings are defined. The notion of circle is not different with the notion of limited profile on Facebook but is way more intuitive and you don’t need a PhD from Facebook University to understand all the options (or simply to find them). Wait and see …