This is a really good attempt by some artists to showcase the sexist manner in which many female characters are portrayed in comics.

Check out the slideshow, it's really worth it.

I was a huge comic fan when I was in my teens and got into comics again last year, when DC revealed their 'New 52' campaign. I like the female body as much as the next guy, but I have problems with the fact that some people are trying to sell some of the sexist stuff in comics as something that empowers women.

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.

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.

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

Go to that link on an iPhone or iPad. Open in Safari.

Be amazed.

NASA is fucking awesome.

— Joel Housman (@joelhousman) August 15, 2012

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:

• Engineering and construction of the Curiosity Rover
• Living on Mars time
• Media and social media response to Curiosity
• IT used at NASA in general and by the Curiosity staff in particular
• Preparing the mission and the technology used
• Relevance of space programs and continued funding
• Star Trek, astronomy and NASA

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.

First of all; I love this guy's videos.
Second of all; science is awesome, even on this scale.

During the Game Horizon conference on 27 Jun 2012 Natural Motion CEO Torsten Reil told industry peers that mobile games marketing is ineffective.

We learnt the hard way that we really needed to rethink marketing. I don't think it works at all.

Given how many developers have only just learned that you need to know your way around marketing terms and advertise your work, this is a daunting prospect.
Fortunately Mr. Reil also told the audience that judging from his experience when dealing with mobile devices and AppStores the icon and name of the application are immensly important, and;

You can go viral in the old fashioned way on these devices. People will go out to a pub and show your game to their friends if they really like it. Very often it's because of production values and overall graphics. This is where we have a huge opportunity. We always want to wow people.

In other words: Quality is what it's all about.

Source: gamesindustry via Peter Cohen

As we've found out yesterday, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is going to be released to the public today.

This year I've decided to take a slightly more relaxed approach — e.g. I don't plan on doing a clean reinstall — but certain steps should always be taken before a major OS update. So here's what I did:

1. Check if the apps that I use on a daily basis are Mountain Lion compatible. This can be easily done using the site RoaringApps.

2. Backup my user data with Time Machine. This works pretty fast in my case, because I do TM backups on my Mac mini's secondary internal drive.

3. Clone my Mac mini's primary HDD with SuperDuper!, twice. I have one backup that goes to a FW800 HDD, usually updated daily and a secondary backup on a USB2.0 HDD that I won't touch until I'm fairly certain that 10.8 works fine. Of course, I checked the integrity of both backups, by booting from them.

That's it. Mountain Lion can come.

Vor Jahren, zu einer Zeit als die Topmodelle unter den Handys noch solch tolle Namen hatten wie Ericsson T39m, Siemens SL45, Nokia 8810 und Motorola Razr gab es den Spruch; "Handys sind das Einzige bei dem Männer sich darüber streiten wer das kleinere hat."

Vor wenigen Minuten habe ich zu hören bekommen, wie peinlich das iPhone 4S mit seinem 3,5 Zoll Display doch sei; vom Besitzer eines Samsung Galaxy Tab. Dessen Display hat eine Diagonale von über fünf Zoll.

Ich mochte diesen Spruch.