The Great Geek Manual

From Around the Web

30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media – It seems everything online has a price associated with it. Whether you’re subscribing to a pay site for full articles or clicking on ads in a blog, everything online seems to have money associated with it. Luckily there is still a large, and very healthy, movement online for media files listed under the Creative Commons licenses.

Definitive List of CSS Frameworks – A CSS Framework is meant to provide ready-made solutions for various tasks that we perform on regular basis. In simple terms, an ideal CSS framework will provide you with a default style sheet which you should be able to use as a starting point for most of your web design projects.

FeedMil – This is a new “long tail” feed search engine with some very interesting features. It allows users to search info from various sources, such as blogs or microblogs, then to specify which aspects of the term are of most interest.

The Happy Hacker – This tutorial directory offers tips and insights to become an uberhacker, including how to build a railgun.

OneSwarm – OneSwarm is a new peer-to-peer tool that provides users with explicit control over their privacy by letting them determine how data is shared. Instead of sharing data indiscriminately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made public, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not others, and so forth.

The Pirate Google – A bittorrent search engine that makes use of Google Custom Search to restrict your searches to Torrent files.

Runes of Magic – This MMORPG is a World of Warcraft clone that has been receiving some very positive chatter across the internet. Not only does it fairly closely duplicate the WoW experience, it’s free to download and requires no subscription fees. Definitely worth a look if you’re flushing money away on Wow.

What Twitter Looks Like For Twitter Employees – Francophone geek site Nowhere Else says hackers sent them screenshots from the site Twitter employees use to manage the microblogging service, admin.twitter.com. The screenshots include some cool things, including nifty analytics like users created per day over the last three day.
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Art

• Paul Lickt is a photographer who specializes in Macro photography of Water droplets. Check out the gallery or at the Microworld Flickr.

Film

• Finally, Kevin Smith dishes on his role in the Superman film. It’s a funny narrative, even if the final result was tragic.
• Reuters has already called it: Wolverine is a massive disappointment.

Internet

• Cracked.com takes a look at what it might be like If Everything Was Made by Microsoft.
• College Humor give us a look at what Real Life Twitter might sound like.

Literature

• Interview: Bitten by Books talks with Jim Butcher, author of Turn Coat.
• Fans can now step into Harry Potter’s world at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Costumes, props and set designs will be on display at the museum from Thursday, April 30 through September 27, 2009.

Television

• Entertainment Weekly questions the Great Sci-Fi Divide, asking Why don’t we want science fiction on TV? My answer: not enough explosions.
• io9 explains the rules to A Dozen Science-Fiction Drinking Games.

Video Games

• If you enjoyed The King of Kong, you should check out this follow-up documentary, Motherboard: Twin Galaxies and the Golden Domes. It’s a look behinds the scenes of the world of competitive gaming.
• Love the smell of Half Life in the morning? A research team at Birmingham University is working on technology that could be used to add smells to video games.

Writing

• Charlie Stross discusses where authors get their ideas.

1006
Supernova SN 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history, in the southern constellation Lupus, near the star Beta Lupi. Chinese and Arabic astronomers note the supernova, but the speed of the still-expanding shock wave won’t be measured for nearly a millennium. It was also recorded by observers in Switzerland, Italy, Japan, Egypt, and Iraq. From the careful descriptions of the Chinese astronomers of how the light varies, the Supernova is apparently yellow in color and visible for over a year, possibly reaching a magnitude of up -9.

1665
Samuel Pepys makes his first diary reference to the Great Plague in London. “Great fears of the sicknesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.” The diary entries continue throughout the year, documenting the terrible conditions in the city as many thousands die, until Winter’s freezing cold reduces the number of fleas that spread the disease. The symptoms of the plague begin like those of a bad cold. A high fever follows, with vomiting and painful black swellings, called buboes appearing in the groin and under the armpits. His diaries will cover a period from January 1660 to May 1669. In them, he will also write about the Great Fire of London in 1666.

1796
The first US patent for a pill of any kind is issued to Samuel Lee, Jr., of Connecticut, for a “Composition of bilious pills” which he markets as “Lee’s Windham Pills.” The pills are highly popular for a long period. An 1803 advertisement for “Doctor Lee’s Patent New-London Bilious Pills” will describe them as “Interesting to all sea-faring People” and promise to cure a variety of ills, including “foul stomachs, where pukes are indicated.”
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Men who never get carried away should be.

- Malcolm Forbes

Comics

• Interview: Alan Moore talks about the ’80s comics scene but refuses to take credit for the medium’s transformation.

Film

• Feeling worried about the impending swine flu epidemic? Just to make you feel more panicked, io9 has put together a list of Eleven Visions of Life After the Great Epidemic.
• Finally, some good news about the upcoming Transformers film. The original voice actor, Frank Welker will provide the voice for Soundwave.
• Yahoo! Movies lies some of the most Infamous Movie Urban Legends to rest once and for all.

Internet

• A great Flickr photo-mosaic technique.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “Semi-Autonamous or ‘For Whom The Warranty Tolls’” by Jim Kling at Escape Pod.
• Interview: The Nebula Awards interviews Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

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[...] some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don’t help.

The Calvin and Hobbes anthology “It’s a Magical World” by Bill Watterson, 1996.

1879
Electric arc lamps are used for the first time in the United States, as street lights in Cleveland, Ohio.

1953
An episode of the science fiction series Space Patrol becomes the first experimental three-dimensional television broadcast in the US when it is transmitted by ABC affiliate KECA-TV in Los Angeles, California.

1957
The first military nuclear power plant is dedicated at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

1959
The UNIVAC picks four out of six winners at the Churchill Downs races in Louisville, Kentucky, setting a record for the correct choices in a horse race.

1964
The monster movie Mothra vs. Godzilla is released.
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It’s a bit of a slow week for genre fans. The highlight of the week is actually one short story packaged up into a short anthology, Ray Bradbury’s Marionettes, Inc.

Along with the new short, this anthology includes four other Bradbury stories about substitute people, including the famous novella I Sing the Body Electric, in addition to a rare, previously unpublished screen treatment.

Don’t worry. Next week, things pick up next week with the release of the next Sookie Stackhouse book and yet another post-mordem Tolkein book.

New Releases

The Grand Conjunction: Astropolis by Sean Williams
Ace. (ISBN-13: 978-0441017133) Paperback. Length: 336pp
Six hundred thousand years after Imre Bergamasc’s abdication, the Host rules the supposedly peaceful galaxy. But revolution is fomenting—and Imre’s unexpected return may be all it takes to light the final fuse. Release: April 28

Lover Avenged by J.R. Ward
NAL Hardcover. (ISBN-13: 978-0451225856) Hardcover. Length: 544pp
The seventh book in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Rehvenge has always kept his distance from the Brotherhood—even though his sister is married to a member, for he harbors a deadly secret that could make him a huge liability in their war against the lessers. As plots within and outside of the Brotherhood threaten to reveal the truth about Rehvenge, he turns to the only source of light in his darkening world, Ehlena, a vampire untouched by the corruption that has its hold on him—and the only thing standing between him and eternal destruction. Release: April 28 Read the rest of this entry » » »