Cheetah running in slow motion. Flimed using a 1200 frame per second camera
Simply beautiful.
via Mike Mitchell
Simply beautiful.
via Mike Mitchell
Now that I'll be reviving my early 2008 MacBook Pro, I remembered that the small detachable plug of the power supply broke a few weeks before I stopped using the machine. I didn't really matter so I didn't replace it. Now that I'll be using the machine again—I actually believe that it's going to become my main machine again while writing my thesis—having a small plug and thus a compact power supply seems useful.
I called-up the local Apple Premium reseller to enquire about that availability of this small piece of plastic and metal and was told that they have them in stock. When I asked about the price my jaw dropped: € 19,–
A second call to another reseller yielded the same result. I kid you not, this small thing costs exactly as much as a brand new 12 W iPad power supply.
You see, I have nothing against premium pricing, but this just seems stupid, not greedy but stupid. Putting a prohibitive price on a spare part for something that can break so easily (mind you, in the European version, the contacts aren't retractable) simply makes no sense to me.
What am I going to do? Simple, I'll get the 12 W power supply and use the 10 W one as a spare. Faster charging times for my iPad 2 and iPhone 4S and a new plug are a much better deal than the alternative.
Seriously, just do it.
Anybody who has opened an electronic device once in their life has seen a chip cooler/fan combination that keeps the silicon chips cool.
This way of controlling the temperature of electronics is pretty old, fairly inefficient and tends to be pretty noisy. The innovations made in the last few years in the field of computer hardware and consumer electronics are mostly concerned with reducing the noise that is emitted by the fan. In their latest flagship laptop, Apple has introduced a fan with asymmetrically spaced impeller blades that leads to a lower operating volume by spreading the sound produced across a broader range of the frequency spectrum.
In the future cooling might work a bit differently, at least if the researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have anything to say about this. They have developed a cooling unit that works without a fan or any kind of thermal compounds that are usually put between the cooler and the chip.
All of this is still in prototype stage, but it looks extremely promising. You can find out more about this technology by following the link below or watching the embedded video.
This is something I didn't know. It should come in handy when sending sensitive documents like a résumé.
Found on Macworld
I know this has been around for more than a week, but it is too good not to repost.
If you're at all excited about the Curiosity mission, tap the link in the quoted tweet on an iOS device.
Here it is: http://t.co/5rupu21Y
— Joel Housman (@joelhousman) August 15, 2012
Go to that link on an iPhone or iPad. Open in Safari.
Be amazed.
NASA is fucking awesome.
John C. Welch of angrymacbastards.com got the chance to interview David Oh, the Lead Flight Director of NASA's Curiosity mission. Some of the topics discussed are:
Definitely worth a listen.
Oh and if you think you might enjoy a couple of intelligent people call out Apple-related stupidity in the tech press once a week, you should subscribe to the Angry Mac Bastards podcast. It's one of my two favourite shows but not for the faint of heart; the guys and gals don't mince words, so consider yourselves warned.
Realmac Software has a nice post on their blog, outlining a few tips on how to keep your iOS device secure. The one I didn't know about involves the passcode lock:
Before you Turn Passcode On you should consider whether to turn Simple Passcode off. With Simple Passcode on you will set a 4-digit number, with it off you can set a longer alphanumeric passcode. Longer alphanumeric passcodes are more secure but also a little more fiddly to enter on the lock screen as you'll be presented with the full keyboard instead of the numeric keypad. But here's a pro tip where you can get best of both worlds. If you have Simple Passcode off and set a long passcode that only contains numbers the lock screen will now present the numeric keypad instead of the full keyboard. Now you can choose a longer, more secure numeric passcode which is both easier to remember and quicker to enter that an alphanumeric one.
Pretty nifty if you ask me. Head over to the post on the Realmac Software blog for the other tips.
I'm currently translating two scientific texts that I need for my Master's Thesis from Chinese to German. It's difficult stuff, because both texts deal with concepts about internet memes and often feature fairly new words that haven't yet found their way into dictionaries and sometimes aren't even used widely enough to have reliable translations in user generated online dictionaries.
At times like this I sit here hugging my iPhone or iPad because they run Pleco. It's an application for learners and users of Chinese that I've been using since I started studying sinology (back then on a Palm Treo 650).
This piece of software has made my life so much easier, I really don't want to imagine studying Chinese without it. Lately the built-in document reader and the plethora of paid and free dictionaries have become the main reasons for my love of this application.
It's worth every cent and available for both iOS devices and a number of Android devices.
If you're a student of Chinese and don't use this software I consider you a masochist.
I simply cannot understand how politicians like him have wives that don't divorce them and (grand-) daughters that don't disown them, when they make misogynistic and criminally moronic statements that negate the reality of womanhood in general and the reality of female rape victims in particular.