The Great Geek Manual

1809
The first patent issued in the US for a metallic writing pen is issued to Peregrine Williamson, a Baltimore jeweler. The pens are made of steel rolled from wire to for a steel quill that never needs its nib to be sharpened. A few steel pens have already been in use in Britain.

1899
The Marconi Wireless Company of America is incorporated in New Jersey.

1904
The first direct current, electric motor to be patented in the US is issued to Mathias Pfatischer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (US No.775,310) The “Variable Speed Motor” is designed to “effect commutation without sparking, with a variable load as well as at variable speed and which is capable of rotation in either direction.”

1906
The International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin adopts the Morse code representation of the letters S.O.S. as a universal distress signal. The previous distress signal was C.Q.D., which was the usual call sign CQ, plus the letter “D” for Distress.

1932
The first US patent for a computer-controlled gasoline pump is issued to inventors Robert J. Jauch, Ivan R. Farnham and Ross H. Arnold. (US No. 1,888,533) The “Liquid Dispensing Apparatus” meters fluids while displaying the exact amount (in gallons) dispensed.
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Age of the Hacker is Over? – Thanks to technological advances, hackers and phishers aren’t getting away with cybercrime the way they used to.

Black Friday Deals – Mashable rounds-up the 10 Best Resources for finding great deals in the mall madness that follows Thanksgiving.

Courseware Links for Artists – ArtCareer.net has posted a directory of over a hundred links to college courses for burgeoning artists, including lectures on art history, photography, and video production.

IBM to Build “Thinking” Computers – With a government grant from DARPA, IBM is slated to begin the first phase of research on “cognitive computing,” essentially building computers that work like living brains.

Meteor over Edmonton – A police dash cam caught a few seconds of spectacular footage of the recent meteor that fell this week in Edmonton, Canada. Check out the preview of our eventual Armageddon.

Photoshop Text Effects – Photoshop Roadmap shares eighty ways to transform headers into works of art, then another thirty.

Pilot School – A collection of television series pilot scripts, including: Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, Hill Street Blues, The Sopranos, The West Wing, and The Wire.

Top 25 days in Computing History – Tech Central has put together a timeline of the events in the computer industry that changed the world, beginning with the day that Charles Babbage announced his design for his analytical engine.

The Turbaconducken – Consider this culinary treat for your next holiday meal. It’s a chicken stuffed in duck stuffed in a turkey, all wrapped in bacon and otherwise known as a bacon-wrapped turducken.

What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science? – Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at M.I.T. wonders why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one.

The latest trailer for the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, directed by Henry Selick. It looks to be another animated classic like The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Film

• Film School Rejects interviews Ben Burtt the genius behind the sound effects of Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and Wall-E.
• Rotten Tomatoes names the sexiest vampires in film.
• Spill counts down 10 Vampires Who Will Turn Your Skin White… a few videos you may want to rent to ward off all the teenage girl mojo of the Twilight film in theaters this weekend.
• Vanity Fair hypes the Twilight film, mainly because every single person in it looks as if they stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad.
• You can save yourself a fortune in video rental fees by heading over at College Humor, where The Fine Brothers spoil 100 films in under 5 minutes.

Internet

• Chris van Dyke discusses Race in Dungeons & Dragons and presents a powerpoint presentation on the topic at Nerd Nite. Now there’s a discuss on the essay over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog.
• Don’t bother clicking this link, but take note: The Europeana is the European Union’s new digital library. It provides multilingual access to two million digitized books from over a thousand institutions in the 27 EU states. Just after its launch, the site crashed as its servers were overwhelmed by over “10 million hits an hour.“
• The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, my favorite magazine, is switching its URL to http://www.fandsf.com.
• Monty Python has announced its decision to launch a YouTube channel. Check out the video announcement.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “The Last Devil” by Sarah L. Edwards at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
• Over at the Barnes and Noble Bookclub Forums, they’re discussing the Top Ten Paranormal Releases of 2008. The Outlaw Demon Wails by Kim Harrison (which was great) makes number one on the moderator’s list, though I would have personally chosen Jim Butcher’s Small Favor.

Music

• Jonathan Coulton performs the song “Creepy Doll” with the assistance of Neil Gaiman on a tamberine. Yes, I said Neil Gaiman on the a tamberine.

Television

• Watch the full episode of Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II online.

Video Games

• You know it’s true love when… An Eve Online player has agreed to marry his girlfriend if she fills a Choron with corpses. For those of you not familiar with the game, that’s 50,000 – 80,000 corpses. I can’t wait to hear what he has to do before the wedding night.

Video from: Geeks are Sexy via H-I-R Net
Diagram from: Sam Kass

What is matter? — Never mind.
What is mind? — No matter.

- Thomas Hewitt Key in Punch magazine, July 14, 1855.

1877
Thomas Edison announces the invention of his “talking machine,” which he will later name the phonograph. The device can record and play sound using a tin-foil cylinder. He will receive a patent for the invention on February 19, 1878.

1905
Albert Einstein publishes his paper, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”, in the journal “Annalen der Physik“. This paper reveals the relationship between energy and mass and leads to the mass-energy equivalence formula E = MC².

1969
The first ARPANET link is established, after a bit of tweaking, between UCLA and the SRI machine at Stanford over a 50Kbps connection. An earlier attempt had failed when the SRI system crashed after typing “L” and “O” of the login command. Most industry historians consider this to be the birth of the internet.

1983
After two years of testing, Time, Inc. announces that it will not go commercial with its Time Teletext system, closing it down.
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Abandoned but not Forgotten – A great site for photo galleries and tales of urban exploring. Among the most recent editions to the collection is this pants-soiling tour of the Linda Vista Hospital… where I wouldn’t go after dark even for a stack of cash.

After Mac – Juan over at After Mac points the way to a high-res x-ray image of an Aluminum MacBook that would look pretty sweet as a desktop.

E = MC² – It took 103 years, but Einstein’s formula, first proposed in the paper “Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content?”, has finally been corroborated.

Let me Google that for You – Could this be my new favorite web service? The survey says yes! Just type is an appropriately sardonic query and this page will return a link to an animation demonstrating just how to use Google. It’s a great visual aid when you get an itch to answer those idiotic forum questions.

The Plan – The New York publishes Jack Handey’s plan for a really great bank heist. Unfortunately, the plan isn’t foolproof. For it to work, certain things must happen…

Poladroid – A free app for Macs that lets you drag an image onto the Polaroid camera at the corner of your screen, then spits out an image that develops as you watch. Very Retro-chic.

Twiter Micro Round-Up:

30 Twitter Apps We Actually Use and 140 After That
Custom Twitter backgrounds, only $100 unless you’re popular
Has Twitter Become the Kleenex of Microblogging?
How Much Would You Pay For Twitter?
HOW NOT TO: Build Your Twitter Community
What Twitter Needs To Go Mainstream

WordPress 2.7 – Technosailer takes a look at ten things you need to know about this blog platform’s next incarnation, because (yet again) the admin interface has undergone dramatic alterations. Well complimented by these screenshots.

Zenbe – A new startup that brings social and collaborative features to your e-mail accounts, such as calendars, forum threads, Twitter feeds, and wiki features. I’m already using it, and it’s indispensable for group projects.