The Great Geek Manual

Film

• Blade Runner topped the British Film Institute’s Vision of the Future poll of movies to preserve for future generations.
• Geek Dad asks What Age Should my Boys Watch Star Wars?
• Watch the amazing short film 9, and check out the trailer for the seriously kick-ass feature film that is being made from it.
• Watchmen: HBO First Look will premiere on HBO Saturday, Feb. 28 at 6:45pm.

Internet

• Entertainment Weekly runs down the top 20 Black Sci-Fi Icons.
• I don’t usually need to stop and count the reasons I love the internet, but PC Pro makes some good points in its article, Ten brilliant things the Internet has Done.
• Wired ticks off the Top 10 Geeky Lists That Should Never Be Written.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “The Beast with Five Fingers” by William F. Harvey at The Cthulhu Podcast.
• Free Fiction: Read “The Gnomes Are Coast Guards” by Chantel Tattoli at Fantasy Magazine.
• Free Fiction: Read “The Historian’s Apprentice” by S. Andrew Swann at Genrewonk.
• Free Fiction: Read “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden” By C.S.E. Cooney at Subterranean Press.
• S. Andrew Swann interviews Tobias Buckell, author of Halo: The Cole Protocol.

1885
La Marcus Thompson of Coney Island, New York is issued the first US patent for a roller coaster, the “Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway,” which he had built at Coney Island in New York City in 1884. (US No. 332,762) For five cents a ride, passengers sit sideways in cars that travel a six hundred foot wooden railway, at a top speed of six miles per hour. Thompson, who will later be dubbed “the father of gravity,” will earn back his original US$1,600 investment within just three weeks.

1929
The Fox Film Corporation releases the western film “In Old Arizona,” directed by Irving Cummings and starring Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, and Dorothy Burgess, to US theaters. It is the first full-length talking motion picture to be shot outdoors on location in the US. IMDB listing Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

1930
The first episode of “Lone Ranger” is broadcast from radio station WXYZ-Detroit. The series will be enormously influential on future comic books.

1969
Astronomers at the University of Arizona establish the first optical identification of a pulsar, which is located in the Crab Nebula.

1981
The inauguration speech of US President Ronald Reagan is broadcast. It is the world’s first broadcast to feature live teletext subtitles for the hearing impaired.
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Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.

- Jim Jarmusch, film director.

30under30 – Inc Magazine names the thirty coolest you entrepreneurs in the U.S.. Marvel at the number connected to the web and wonder why none of them is you.

Build a Digital Picture Frame – Build your own electronic frame to display all of those digital photos that have been piling up on your hard drive yourself with this Hack-a-Day tutorial.

Epguides – This is an excellent index of genre television series. When you can’t find what you’re looking for at TV.com or Wikipedia, this is where to look.

History of the Internet – An animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.

How Google Is Making Us Smarter – In complete opposition to The Atlantic article (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”) that has been raising so many eyebrows around the web.

Quick fixes for Macs – TechRadar reviews the solutions to the ten most common Mac jam-ups.

TechToos – Tacky or Trendy? – Girl’s Entertainment Network looks at the emerging trend of tech-themed tattoos as fashion statements. You might love your Apple, but enough to get the Apple logo permanently inked into your skin?

Top 10 Night Sky Events of 2009 – If you’re an astronomy geek, you won’t want to miss these wonders of the night sky in the year to come.

Top 5 Reasons Why Geeks Are Sexy – Ms. Danielle rehashes those five reasons you’ve got to have us. It may be nothing you haven’t heard before, but I’m single, so I like to keep the reasons in circulation.

Ultimate List of Free Windows Software – A lengthy list of the over 150 FREE Windows applications available from Microsoft itself.

Who Writes Wikipedia? – The question may seem rhetorical. Obviously, the encyclopedia is written by thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people. But founder Jimbo Wales actually believes that most of Wikipedia’s content is provided by a very small core of users, about five hundred.

Film

• In honor of the late Ricardo Montalban, who died last week, SciFi Wire ticks off 16 Factoids you didn’t know about Star Trek’s Khan.
• List Universe names 15 Great Science Fiction Movies Of The Seventies that you know and love.
• Soundtrack Geek lists The Top 5 Fantasy/Science Fiction Film Scores of 2008, becoming perhaps the first positive list of the new year to include The Day the Earth Stood Still.
• The Tech Republic counts down The 51 geek movies of 2009. It’s not going to be a great year, but it will definitely have its high points.

Internet

• For the young at heart: How to build a Cardboard Spaceship.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson and “Dark Rooms” by Lisa Goldstein over at Asimov’s.
• Free Fiction: Wowo is offering a huge batch of top-shelf novels, including “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut, “The Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham, and “Simulacron-3” by Daniel F. Galouye.
• The Guardian offers up a list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. The list ends up discrediting itself with attempts to appeal to too broad an audience, but it contains a large number of great vintage reading suggestions.
• Why I Write Science Fiction: An Apology by Alan DeNiro. “If science fiction is a choice that one makes before writing a story, then dismissing it part and parcel simply can’t make sense, especially if particular writers are trying their darndest to reinvigorate the usual, even shopworn tropes-or invent new ones altogether.”

Television

• The classic sci-fi series The Prisoner from the ’60s returns as a reinvented mini-series.
• io9 looks back at BattleStar Galactica’s Top “What The Frak” Moments So Far.

Video Games

• The Escapist has posted what may very well be the greatest video game review EVER. Ironically, the review is what may well be one of the worst games ever.
• Gamersradar looks at Characters you never knew had the same voice actor. Cortana played by Princess Peach?
• Though the theme has been flogged to death, Spike revisits The Top 10 Worst Games Based on Movies.
• Zork! Zork! Zork! The classic interactive fiction game is going to be revamped and remade as an online roleplaying game! Yes, it’s likely to only share its name with the remake, but I’m still excited.

1875
Thomas A. Edison is issued a patent on a “Telegraph Apparatus” (No. 158,787).

1903
The first trans-atlantic radio message is sent from President Roosevelt to King Edward VII by way of the stations at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Poldhu, England. It is not generally known whether the message was relayed by ships on the Atlantic or whether it was received directly from Cape Cod in its complete form. A station even larger than the one at Poldhu was begun in 1905, at Clifden, Ireland, and in 1907 this plant and a twin station at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, were opened for limited commercial trans-Atlantic radio service.

1904
Thomas A. Edison is issued a patent for an “Electrical Automobile” (No. 750,102) designed with a driving motor that may be conveniently and effectively utilized for the purpose of charging the batteries. Thus a small steam engine, preferable of the turbine type, was connected to the armature of an electric motor. By reversing the rotation of the motor-armature, the electric motor converts to a generator for charging the batteries. A clutch then is used to disconnect the motor from the driving wheels during charging (or, the wheels could be jacked up during the charging operation). In usual operation, the motor ran from storage batteries to power the carriage.

1953
Sixty-eight percent of all United States television sets are tuned in to I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth.
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Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical sciences by resolving into components.

- “Commentary on the Ethics I” by Thomas Aquinas.

1838
Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail demonstrate early elements of the telegraph system, including a code which will come to be known as Morse code.

1896
The X-ray machine is exhibited as the “Parisian sensation” to the public for the first time in the US at Casino Chambers in New York City, for twenty-five cents admission.

1903
Guglielmo Marconi’s third North American wireless station in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, transmits a two thousand word signal, including a message from President Theodore Roosevelt, to the station at Glace Bay, Canada to be forwarded to Poldhu, England, but due to the signal’s strength, it is received directly by England, becoming the first transatlantic radio signal to be transmitted eastward.

1938
J.W. Bryce writes a memorandum outlining the development of the Harvard Mark I, which will be completed in 1944. The Harvard Mark I will be the first fully automatic computer. Once complete, it will be capable of computing three additions or subtractions a second and storing seventy-two numbers in its memory.

1961
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorizes AT&T to conduct experimental radio stations for Project Telstar, an Earth-satellite communications study. Telstar is the first active communications satellite as well as the first privately owned satellite. It transmits telephone and high-speed data communications.
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