The Great Geek Manual

1885
The first commercial motion-picture film is manufactured by the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company in Rochester, New York. It is the first film produced in continuous strips on reels.

1895
The Phantoscope, an early motion picture projector that enlarges film images for group exhibitions, is patented by Charles Francis Jenkins. (US No. 536,569) It will first be demonstrated at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia in October. Armat will later sell the rights to his invention to Thomas Edison, and Edison use the device as the basis of the Vitascope projector.

1923
The BBC introduces a daily weather forecast. Visit the official BBC website.

1936
The first two hundred inch diameter, reflecting mirror used in the construction of the Hale telescope is shipped from Corning, New York, to Mt. Palomar Observatory in California. The lens alone weighs twenty tons.
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A short while back, I got an Acer Aspire One Netbook for my birthday. Aside from the way its keyboard makes me feel like my hands are freakishly enormous, I love it.

Basically, I just wanted a cheap computer I could leave on my nightstand to use for my nightly reading, and the Aspire One is perfect for the job. It fits in my hand like a hardcover. Its battery doesn’t get hot; its fan is quiet; and its battery capacity is short enough that it’ll shut down in short order if I nod off mid-Spidey comic. It’s got enough juice for reading digitized comics, listening to an MP3 audiobook, or even running my favorite text-to-voice software, while having too little RAM for me to be tempted into a little late night gaming. The best part though, is that, thanks to the price, I can nod off with netbook still in hand without fear. Always before, I’ve been too overprotective of my laptops to bring them to bed. There was just too much risk that their screens might be damaged if they slid off the covers and hit the floor or I rolled over on to them. Not to mention the niggling fear that an overheated battery might turn me into a human torch.

Just two issues arose with my arrangement. First, I’ve never seen a computer that smudges and shows fingerprints faster than my netbook. Second, unlike laptops I’ve owned, the netbook’s screen is too dim to see the keyboard by or to read by, if I’m just using it as a jukebox while I’m working my way through a paperback.

Luckily, when Budget Gadgets contacted my to write a review for some of their products, it turned out to be an excellent opportunity to remedy both issues.

When they asked me check out their site, I immediately zeroed in on the Notebook Laptop Case Bag from HP and the USB 10 LED Light 896.
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Loved this. Whoever spent all the time it took to create this deserved a pat on back!

Source: Pixel Fantasy

1655
Christiaan Huygens discovers Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn, using a simple telescope with magnification of fifty, and subsequently determines the period of its revolution. The moon will be named two centuries later.

1857
Frederick Laggenheim takes the first photograph of a solar eclipse.

Leon Scott de Martinville patents the Phonautograph, the first machine to record sound, twenty years before Thomas Edison invents the first Phonograph. However, unlike the later phonograph, the device is able to record sound but unable to play it back. As such, the phonautograph will become well-known among scientists but will remain a scientific instrument used in the study of sound waves. Read more about the history of phonautograph.

Comics

• Over at Nerd World, they’re asking “Is Kick-Ass the New Watchmen?,” which in itself is pretty kick-ass as I myself was explaining the similarities between the two series to my brother the evening after we went to see the Watchmen film together. If you’re not reading Kick-Ass, you ought to peruse an issue next time you’re in a comic shop. It’s great series with a refreshing take on the whole medium.

Film

• CNet has a great round-up of the Top 10 Movie Recommendation Engines on the web, more than one of which is going into my bookmarks.
• SFX lists the Top five science errors in Sci-Fi.
• A Strange Eye takes a stab at choosing The 5 Worst Science Fiction Movies of All Time, but whoever picked them never saw Flash Gordon.
• Why is Blockbuster Suffering? Simple, Says CEO Jim Keyes. Because the Movies Suck.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “Faery Cats: The Cutest Killers” by Lucy A. Snyder and “Immersed in Matter” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman at PodCastle.
• Free Fiction: Read the Hugo-nominated “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang at NightShade Books.
• It strikes me that none of the books on the Times’ list of 10 Spectacular Second Novels is actually a Sequel.

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New Releases

The following books will be released this week:

Deadly Desire by Keri Arthur
Bantam. (ISBN: 978-0553591156) Paperback. Length: 368pp
Book 7 of the Riley Jensen, Guardian series. It’s no ordinary sorceress who can raise the dead to do her killing. But that’s exactly what Riley expects to find at the end of a trail of female corpses used—and discarded—in a bizarre ritual of evil. With pressure mounting to catch one fiend, another series of brutal slayings shocks the vampire world of her lover, Quinn. So the last thing Riley needs is the heat of the upcoming full moon bringing her werewolf hormones to a boil—or the reappearance of a sexy bounty hunter, the rogue wolf Kye Murphy.

Fablehaven: Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary by Brandon Mull
Shadow Mountain. (ISBN: 978-1606410424) Hardcover. Length: 528pp
Two hidden artifacts have been found. Three more remain unrecovered. More preserves face destruction as the Society of the Evening Star relentlessly pursues new talismans. Reading in Patton s Journal of Secrets, Kendra learns the location of the key to a vault housing one of the artifacts. In order to retrieve it, the Knights of the Dawn must enter a death trap a dragon sanctuary called Wyrmroost

Outcast by Aaron Allston
Del Rey. (ISBN: 978-0345509062) Hardcover. 336pp
Book one of the Fate of the Jedi. After a violent civil war and the devastation wrought by the now-fallen Darth Caedus, the Galactic Alliance is in crisis–and in need. From all corners, politicians, power brokers, and military leaders converge on Coruscant for a crucial summit to restore order, negotiate differences, and determine the future of their unified worlds. But even more critical, and far more uncertain, is the future of the Jedi.

Stargazer by Claudia Gray
HarperTeen. (ISBN: 978-0061284403) Hardcover. Length: 336pp
An Evernight novel. Evernight Academy: an exclusive boarding school for the most beautiful, dangerous students of all—vampires. Bianca, born to two vampires, has always been told her destiny is to become one of them. But Bianca fell in love with Lucas—a vampire hunter sworn to destroy her kind. They were torn apart when his true identity was revealed, forcing him to flee the school. Although they may be separated, Bianca and Lucas will not give each other up. She will risk anything for the chance to see him again, even if it means coming face-to-face with the vampire hunters of Black Cross—or deceiving the powerful vampires of Evernight. Bianca’s secrets will force her to live a life of lies.

The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton
Del Rey. (ISBN: 978-0345496553) Hardcover. Length: 736pp
Second book of the Void Trilogy. The epic narrative chronicling humankind’s potentially self-destructive search for existential and spiritual fulfillment inside an ever-expanding black hole at the galactic core. As the millions of followers of the Living Dream plan a mass pilgrimage into the Void, others plot to stop their exodus, which they believe will only increase the Void’s expansion and hasten the end of the galaxy. To complicate matters, the alien Ocisen Empire has allied with an old nemesis of humanity, the Primes, and their combined military might stands poised as a tremendous threat.

This Is Not a Game: A Novel by Walter Jon Williams
Orbit. (ISBN: 978-0316003155) Hardcover. Length: 384pp
Once upon a time, there were four of them. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games… But when one of them is gunned down in a parking lot, the survivors become players in a very different kind of game. Caught between the dangerous worlds of the Russian Mafia and international finance, Dagmar must draw on all her resources — not least millions of online gamers– to track down the killer. In this near-future thriller, Walter Jon Williams weaves a pulse-pounding tale of intrigue, murder, and games where you don’t get an extra life.

From Around the Web

10 Best Firefox Addons for Security and Privacy – Security and privacy are major concerns these days. These addons will get you off on the right foot.

10 Hot Netbooks – Why are so many people buying netbooks? Well, they’re light as a feather and fulfill all the basic computing needs. But it’s the killer price that seals the deal for many. Here we highlight top-selling netbooks, from the (relatively) high end to the under-$300 range.

10 Unusual Operating Systems – This is Life has posted a gallery of screenshots of some of the most far-out operating systems you’ve never run.

Anonymity and Privacy Should Not Add Up to Prison Time – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has urged the United States Sentencing Commission to reject modifications to federal sentencing guidelines that would require extra prison time for people who use technology that hides one’s identity or location.

Are we headed into an era of “dumb tech?” – After a decade of unparalleled one-upmanship – the gigahertz race, the megapixel race, the storage race – we are now hitting a wall. So where does that leave the CE industry? Well, it’s now a race to the bottom. Video cameras that once cost $500 will now cost about $200.

Deep Packet Inspection Puts Open Internet at Risk – Ben Scott of Free Press claims in a new paper that “Potential abuses of Deep Packet Inspection put the Internet as we know it at risk.” And a follow-up at Ars Technica.

Do You REALLY Need a College Degree to Get a Programming Job? – There’s plenty of articles about the shortage of skilled IT workers, and the difficulty experienced by companies in finding qualified software developers. The whining would be far more credible if the Want Ads didn’t have a silly, arbitrary qualification: a college degree.
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1930
The planet Pluto is officially named. The name was suggest by a eleven year old girl named Venetia Burney. The name was selected from three suggestions by a unanimous vote of the members of the Lowell Observatory. The other two possible names were “Cronus” and “Minerva.” Read more about the history of Pluto.

1959
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) invites applications for over-the-air paid television experiments, for a three-year period. Only one trial will be permitted in any market with at least four commercial television stations.

The “Microwave Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation” (MASER) is patented by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes. (US No. 2,879,439) The device is an apparatus for producing coherent electromagnetic energy from excited atoms.

Robert Noyce of Texas Instruments (TI) publicly demonstrates the first integrated circuit. The circuit demonstrated consists of a sliver of Germanium with five components, each linked by wires.
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