Last week, Dresden Codak creator Aaron Diaz posted his own interpretation of the DCnU on his Tumblr – including new designs and origin stories for our beloved Justice League. I really like his take on an more alien-like Superman and the geeky, Moss-influenced (!!!) Cyborg.

Superman

[...] In an attempt to assimilate the natives of the planet Mars, Krypton finally gained the attention of Colu, enforcer of the Omega Law, and was marked for extermination. A Kryptonian Scientist named Jor-El, specializing in passively and remotely observing nearby Earth, witnessed this and rapidly set a plan forward to save his infant son, Kal-El, from their fate. By sending him in a conventional rocket toward the backwater planet Earth, he guaranteed Kal-El’s safety from Colu. The rocket took over a thousand years to reach the planet, and upon reaching the surface, restructured Kal-El’s body so he would appear as a human. [...]

Cyborg

Born with a degenerative nervous system, Victor Stone nevertheless became a technological savant and eventually overcame his disability with cybernetics of his own design. Having always been obsessed with human enhancement, he instantly became enamored when news of a “Superman” circulated the world. In an attempt to win the favor of the newly formed Justice League, he proceeded to hack into their systems and even physically challenge them to prove his worth. Despite being ultimately defeated, Victor was accepted as a member and serves as their “IT guy.”

Character designs, origin stories, powers and notes for all JLA members are available on Aaron’s Tumblr.

From Wired UK:

MIT designer Adam Kumpf has created a side-scrolling Super Mario Bros. tribute game in a cardboard box. All you need to do is pull the handle on the box to trigger a servo motor which automatically opens the box. Mario is controlled by a knob (a potentiometer) that controls a servo arm, which allows him to jump above and below obstacles (baddies) on the landscape. The landscape itself is a conveyor belt which rotates, bringing the obstacles into Mario’s path.

Jonas Pfeil built a really nice throwable ball camera as part of his Master of Science thesis Throwable Camera Array for Capturing Spherical Panoramas at TU Berlin:

We present the Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera which captures a full spherical panorama when thrown into the air. At the peak of its flight, which is determined using an accelerometer, a full panoramic image is captured by 36 mobile phone camera modules.

More details available on his website.

(via Nerdcore)

Today, Apple released iOS 5 – the new version of its mobile operating system for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch – introducing more than 200 new features.

The installation process basically consists of three steps:

1. Full backup of your device
2. Installation of iOS 5 + new firmware
3. Restoring the device from the backup

On my iPhone, the installation went seamlessly (except for the part where I chose “I don’t want to use iCloud” and it simply crashed and rebooted), but the installation on my iPad was a bit trickier:

Basically, at the end of the backup process, iTunes would abort with the following message:

German for “Could not backup the iPad”

I closed all applications and even rebooted my iPad, but still no luck.

In case I’m not the only one who experienced problems, here’s how I “fixed” it:

I had some books in my iBooks bookshelf (two PDFs I downloaded via Safari and a free book from the iBookstore) that I never cared to back up. For some reason, those files crashed the backup process – So, here’s what you want to do:

Click on your iPad icon in iTunes, switch to the Books tab and synchronise all books. Another possibility is to simply delete those files from your iPad.

I hope this helps

Popular sharing service AddThis is celebrating its fifth anniversary and assembled its statistic data from the last five years into this nice infographic:

Click on the image to the see the full version (1159 x 7570 px / 1,8 MB)

In 2012, my dreams will come true … CBS is going to release Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu Ray!

CBS is, in fact, returning to the original film negatives, a mother lode of material encompassing 25,000-plus reels of footage, and editing the episodes together precisely as they were when they originally aired between 1987 and 1994. Visual effects will not be upconverted from videotape, but instead will be recompositioned. The freshly cut film will ultimately be transferred to high definition with 7.1 DTS Master Audio.

More info on StarTrek.com

At first it looked like just another Mario-like 2D Jump’n'Run, but then I turned into a freaking R-Type Jet … and now I’m Bomberman Interested? Click on the screenshot above to play it on Nitrome

(via Nerdcore)

When it comes to comic books, I’m a DC guy (and IDW’s TNG and TOS line of course) – I’m buying pretty much everything with The Flash in it and Animal Man is my new favorite, but I never got the hang on Marvel’s universe … To be honest, I don’t know many Marvel books, but I never got past the first few pages. When it comes to comic book movies, it’s a bit different … While I hated the comics, I really liked the Iron Man movies and X-Men: First Class is even one of my favorite superhero movies of all time. I even enjoyed the Fantastic Four adaptations But for some reason, I still don’t care about the characters themselves and are not interested in reading something about them.

That said, I’m looking forward to the Avengers movie (although I skipped Thor and Captain America) after seeing today’s theatrical trailer:

BTW: I like how they say “This May” – makes it sound like it’s “coming soon” and not in, you know, 7 months!

Adobe presented a new Photoshop feature at this year’s MAX that lets you remove blur with just a few mouse clicks (analyse *click*, make it sharp *click*, done.). It’s still experimental and there’s no info on when it’s going to be implemented, but the video below is really impressive.

(via FARK)

Dark Resurrection is the prequel to 2007′s Dark Resurrection Vol. 1 – I never heard of it before, but this Italian Star Wars fan flick is definitely worth a watch. If you don’t know any Italian: Don’t worry, there are English subtitles

Master Sorran, is obsessed by his search for an ancient civilization which, according to legend, holds the secret of immortality. After many years he lights upon the wreck of the civilisation’s most powerful starship: the Resurrection. Sorran ignores the dangers and orders his crew to dock. The explorers and Sorran himself will face the mysteries of the Resurrection and the secret of the origins of the dark side.
Volume 0, Volume 0, in the original script written by Angelo Licata and Fabrizio Rizzolo, was only the prologue of Volume 2. After months of post-production, we realised that the material deserved to be properly developed as it tells interesting stories about the past of evil Lord Sorran and the mythology of Eron; fulcrum of the entire story.