The Great Geek Manual

Calvin and Jobs is a brilliant takes on Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.

Five Apps You Run That Suck, and Five Replacements That Don’t, mostly for filesharers.


Five things you Must know about sleep… one of them being that Edison slept like a baby.

How many of the 100 Most Common English Words can you guess in five minutes? You might be surprised to discover “Paris” and “Hilton” are in there.

Scientists are becoming interested in How Magicians Control your Mind

Reality Wired bring you a gallery of the Ten Best Halo 3 “Dead Corpse” Alphabet Letters.

Ten things you might not know about robots, unless of course you are one.

The New York Times bursts your bubble in an article debunking the Myths surrounding Coffee.

Time Magazine shares its 25 Gotta Have Travel Gadgets in a surprisingly hip list.

Twelve robots that have invaded American homes other than your Transformer set.

Source: Pixdaus

1181
A supernova is observed by Chinese astronomers in the constellation now known as Cassiopeia, and independently observed one day later in Japan. The star will remain visible for 185 days.

1753
Professor Georg Richmann of St. Petersburg, Moscow, is killed during an experiment with lightning, just one year after Benjamin Franklin’s own experiment involving a kite. Richmann had attached a wire to the top of his house and led it down to an iron bar suspended above “the electric needle” and a bowl of water partly filled with iron filings. Richmann was struck by lighting during a storm as he stood about a foot from the bar, closely observing the needle. “A globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches diameter from the bar struck Richmann’s forehead” with “an explosion like that of a small cannon.” His assistant, Sokolaw, who survives, is thrown to the floor, where he feels receives several blows to his back. After recovering, he finds burn marks and fragments of hot wire on the back of his clothes.

1926
The Warner Brothers studio gives the first public exhibition of the Vitaphone system for showing talking motion pictures. The exhibition features the first Vitaphone film, the silent feature Don Juan starring John Barrymore, which features a musical score and sound effects but no dialog, as well as several talkie short subject films featuring comedians and singers, and a greeting from motion picture industry spokesman Will Hays.

1928
The serial “Real Folks” premieres on NBC radio. It is among the first radio serials, and thus, one the very first regular series in the history electronic media.
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It’s been a week since the San Diego Comic-Con passed through the the blogosphere like a hurricane, and in that week, I’ve spent some time reflecting on my experiences, condensing what I’ve learned into a few pearls of wisdom.

Okay! So I didn’t actually go to the Con in person. But I feel as if I did after the onslaught of ConContent I’ve had to wade through on every single blog I read daily. So just sit back and share the suffering…

12. Even Comic-Con content won’t make anyone care about your blog!

11. Geek has a smell. A nearly tangible smell. Brace yourself.

10. Eye contact. It has the unfortunate effect of encouraging them. You know the ones. Avoid it.

09. Not every character in creation needs its own action figure, despite the example Lucas has set over the years. The proof in the booths.
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Source: Photobucket via Delicious via Waxy via… oh God, not again…

Eleven iPhone Apps that will clean out your junk drawer, including a digital Dice Bag.

Five ways to keep your PC cool on a hot summer day.

New Ways to Play with Old Hardware includes a surprising range of avant-guard art.

Popular Mechanics provides instruction on How to Build Your Own Speakers: Step-by-Step DIY Tech.

Search criminal records online for free… for now. Better check your own name before heading out to your next job interview.

Smashing Magazine’s Small Design Study Of Big Blogs shed a bit of light of what the average surfer expect from a blog… then is expanded.

Socyberty counts down the planet’s 13 Most Dangerously Endangered Species, which include Scarlet Macaws.

To hell with hundred dollar computers, one group is designing a Twelve Dollar Computer for the third-world.

Tom’s Hardware debunks the Apple Mac Cost Misconception. Macs do not cost more than their PC counterparts.

Twenty-five examples of creative web navigation from Vandelay Design.

Videos of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at the Comic Con.

“…nonsense and beauty have close connections,
–closer connections than Art will allow…”

- The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster, 1907.
Character: Mr. Failing. Part I, Chapter 12.

1858
At 2:45am, the first telegraph message sent via undersea cable is transmitted from Trinity Bay, Newfoundland to Valentia, Ireland at a rate of approximately four words per minute. The project’s supervising engineer, Charles Bright, will later be knighted for the achievement.

1864
Giovanni Batista Donati makes the first spectroscopic observations of a comet tail using the small comet, Tempel, 1864 II. He discovers that, at a distance from the Sun, the spectrum of a comet is identical to that of the Sun, because its visibility is only reflected sunlight. Donati demonstrates that a comet tail formed close to the Sun contains luminous gas. In the spectrum of light from the comet tail, Donati discerned three absorption bands superimposed on a continuous spectrum, which he designates as alpha, beta, and gamma.

1962
Astronomers Allan Sandage and Thomas Matthews accidentally discover the first quasar, 3C 273.

1963
Britain, America and Russia signed a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in Moscow to prohibit nuclear weapons tests “or any other nuclear explosion” in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. The treaty still allows for underground testing, but stipulates that such tests couldn’t cause “radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits” of their own nation. A total of one hundred eight countries will sign the LNTB Treaty before it goes into effect on October 10, 1963.
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