The Great Geek Manual

The Code Project surveys Thirty-two of the Best Programming Fonts.

Graphic designers take note: VandelayDesign lists 45+ Sources and Sets of Photoshop Custom Shapes.

The How-To Geek compares the seven largest online musics services to discover which is best.

Inspired by xkcd comic, YouTube has added audio previews for comments.

Jay Walker’s jaw-dropping library is the stuff of every geek’s wet dreams.

Learning databases but have the attention span of a 5 year-old? The Manga Guide to Databases may be for you.

Make your own Home Brewed Hard Cider for this year’s Halloween celebration.

The SFWeekly has a gallery of The Babes and Beasts of BlizzCon 2008.

Spreadsheet Escape is a type of maze game that sends you shooting from cell to cell.

You can’t download at work, by why leave your home connect sitting idle? Control your uTorrent remotely.

1773
The Whirlpool Galaxy is discovered by Charles Messier

1884
Greenwich is established as the universal time meridian of longitude. At the behest of the US President, forty-one delegates from twenty-five nations meet in Washington, DC, for the International Meridian Conference. At the Conference, several important principles are established, including: a single meridian passing through the principal Transit Instrument at the Observatory in Greenwich from which all longitudes will be calculated and a universal day. The resolution fixing the Meridian at Greenwich is passed by a majority of twenty-two to one, with San Domingo opposed and both Brazil and France abstaining from the vote.

1953
The first US patent for a burglar alarm operated by ultrasonic sound is issued to Samuel Bagno of New York City. (US No. 2,655,645) The system detects movement in a confined space using a sound source emitted at 19,000 hertz, a frequency too high for humans to hear. The system can detect intruders by the difference in frequency of the reflected waves from a moving body created by the Doppler effect. It will be marked under the Alertronic brand name, and it will be first sold in June 1950.

1964
The Voskhod 1, the first spacecraft to carry a multi-person crew, returns safely to Earth.
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As machines become more and more efficient and perfect,
so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

- The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer, 1959.

Today is national Freethought Day, an observation of the end of the Salem Witch Trials celebrating secular freethinkers everywhere.

1923
Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen demonstrate their patented sound-film system using two interlocked machines, one for picture, one for optical sound, at the Palads Teatret, in Copenhagen. The system is subsequently used by Gaumont in France, Tonfilm in Germany, and Gaumont-British in the UK.

1958
Texas Instruments (TI) demonstrates working Integrated Circuits (IC) to Thomas J. Watson, Jr., president of International Business Machines (IBM).

1964
The Soviet Union (USSR) launches the Voskhod 1 spacecraft. It is the first spacecraft to carry multiple crew members and the first to carry a scientist or a physician into space. In the rush to launch the mission before the US Gemini flights, the crew are launched without spacesuits, ejection seats, or an escape tower. The mission will return television footage of the crew from space. The US will be left incensed that the Gemini flights had been upstaged, and the US-Soviet “Space Race” escalates. The three-man crew will return to Earth after sixteen orbits of the Earth, one day and seventeen minutes after it was launched, using retro rockets just prior to impact in order to cushion the parachute landing.

1979
Del Rey publishes the science fiction novel Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny as a hardcover. (ISBN-10: 0-345-28530-1) In Roadmarks, the central theme is time travel using a highway that links all times and all possible histories. The narrator and protagonist, Red Dorakeen, runs guns to the Greeks at Marathon, trying to secure their victory over the Persians, which in his timeline did not occur. Length: 185 pages
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I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

- Sir Isaac Newton
As quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir David Brewster, 1855.

1881
David H. Houston, a Scottish immigrant, patents roll film for cameras.

1887
Dorr E. Felt, of Chicago, Illinois, is granted a patent for the Comptometer, which is the first practical key-driven calculator. He experimented with an adding device that he built in a “macaroni box.” (US No. 371,496) The comptometer, an adder, displays a single register of results. Subtraction is carried out by nines-complement arithmetic, and multiplication by repeated addition. The comptometer will become commercially successful and be widely used in business. Read the patent.

1939
United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt receives the Einstein-Szilárd letter, in which notable physicists warn Roosevelt of the possibility that Nazi Germany could be conducting research on nuclear fission that may lead to the creation of atomic bombs and urge him to launch similar research before it was too late. The letter was written by Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, but received considerable national attention because it was also signed by renowned scientist and media icon Albert Einstein. The letter is arguably the genesis of the Manhattan Project, and it will later become legendary when it’s revealed by scientist Linus Pauling that, by the end of his life, signing this letter had become one of Einstein’s greatest regrets. Read the letter at HyperTextbook.com.

1950
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issues the first license to broadcast television in color to CBS after an ad hoc National Television System Committee is formed, the initials of which are applied to the system (NTSC). However, RCA will successfully dispute the license and block CBS from putting it into effect.
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Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hold, telling how it pass’d
O’er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent summer dealt.

- Autumnal Sonnet by William Allingham.

Ironically, today is both Tom Cruise Day in Japan, according to the Japan Memorial Day Association, as well as World Mental Health Day.

1796
The metric system is born. The date (10/10) was chosen as an allusion to the base ten system of measurements.

1846
Neptune’s moon, Triton, is discovered by William Lassell while he is observing the newly discovered planet Neptune. He was attempting to confirm his own observation that Neptune had a ring, which he made the previous week. Instead, he discovers the satellite. Soon after, Lassell will discover that the ring he thought he had seen is only a product of his new telescope’s distortion.

1886
The first tuxedo is worn at a dinner club in New York.

1955
The Alexandra Palace transmitter begins transmitting NTSC colour television test signals of the BBC, adapted to the 405-line standard.
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