The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Project: Rooftop offers up user-submitted redesigns of Batman’s costume. The one submitted by Steve LeCouilliard about half-way down the page gets my vote. The grand prize winner looks a little too much like the Kick-Ass rendition of a Batman costume.

Comics

• Yet another mother over-reacting to comics… though I’m surprised an elementary library carried Spider-Man.

Film

• Jay Tomio discusses her Love and Hate Relationship with Star Wars.

Internet

• Esquire magazine looks back at The Five Best Pranks Ever Filmed and Posted to YouTube.
• io9 counts down the Twenty of the Best Physicians in Science Fiction, and no, Doctor Who isn’t included in the list.
• SpaceTimeTV collects and lets you watch all the best educational videos online from full length documentaries.
• What if the Star Wars trilogy had a Dallas-style intro? Mash-up goodness.
• X-Men film hits the web on April Fools, but it’s no hoax… unless its on Warner Bros. So how did X-Men Origins: Wolverine get leaked?

Read the rest of this entry » » »

[Anonymous is] the first internet-based superconsciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they’re a group? Because they’re travelling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely.

- Chris Landers, in the Baltimore City Paper, April 2, 2008.

Hey what if they’re removed by cultists?

From Around the Web

15 foolish high-tech stories – In a year plagued by foolish Wall Street executives, financial shenanigans and just plain craziness, there have been a ton of foolish happenings. What we have here are 15 of the most interesting foolish follies that should at least make you wonder about the sanity of the world.

Etch your own Printed Circuit Board – In less than an hour and with nothing more than common household materials, you can make your own custom circuit board.

First Time Machine – In this video, the Discovery Channel interviews a scientist who believes he will be able to use lasers to send particles back through time, but only to a point in time at which the machine was already active. [video]

Funny or Not? April Fools’ Day Pranks Roundup – All around the web, websites are have a laugh to commemorate April Fool’s Day. Check them all out starting here.

Gaming as a Gateway Drug: Getting Girls into Technology – This panel at SXSW sparked a debate on Twitter during the conference. The panelists talked about how more and more girls are getting into video games and some of them eventually work in the gaming industry.

HugeURL.com – More is the new less. Why have a TinyURL when you could have a huge one? Call it overcompensation if you will. You’re just jealous.

Most common passwords – The following list was compiled from the results of three publicly leaked databases containing 116,782 passwords. Looking through the list, my mind is boggled by how many people use the most basic possible password.

The Settlers of Catan – Wired looks at the German board game that’s taking the world by storm, selling a staggering 15 million copies. Some are calling it the “killer app” of board games. You can play the game online.

Top 10 IT Villains – Every industry has its share of villains, and the computing world is no different. Here’s the top ten people we love to hate.

Use your PC and Webcam as a Motion Detector – This tutorial will take you step-by-step through setting up your PC and Webcam to act as a motion-detecting and recording security camera system. Best part? The software required to do it is all open source.

Western Internet Censorship: The Beginning of the End? – Australia and Germany are the only liberal democracies proposing a mandatory internet censorship regime. All of the schemes operate, or are proposed to operate, through multi-million dollar national networks of censorship machines.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Foolproof systems do not take into account the ingenuity of fools.

- Gene Brown

I wonder sometimes if manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

- Alan Coren

If you want to test a genius, set a fool on him.

- Leonid S. Sukhorukov

Today is April Fools’ Day!

1826
Samuel Morey patents the internal combustion engine.

1948
Alpher, Bethe and Gamow’s famous letter is published in the journal Physical Review. The “Big Bang” theory had previously been around as an alternative to the “Steady State theory.” Their paper argues through a mathematical analysis that that the Big Bang would explain the relative abundance of the light elements hydrogen and helium in proportion to heavier elements in the universe. The paper is written by physics PhD student Ralph Alpher and his adviser George Gamow. The highly respected physicist Hans Bethe was persuaded to lend his name as a co-author partly due to the amusing similarity between their names and “alpha, beta, gamma,” the first letters of the Greek alphabet, however, Bethe will actually later make significant contributions to the theory.

1960
The first weather observation satellite, Tiros I, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the United States in order to test experimental techniques for taking television footage of weather patterns from orbit. It is the first of several launched in the TIROS program, named for their function: Television Infrared Observation Satellite. The launch is NASA’s first step in determining whether satellites can be useful in the study of the Earth. At that time, the effectiveness of satellite observations was still unproven. TIROS will prove extremely successful in weather forecasting.
Read the rest of this entry » » »