The Great Geek Manual

From Around the Web

20 More Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know – More scripts to help you turn your website into a slick, high-end commercial product. This installment in the series includes an image Carousel and a jwysiwyg text field.

20 Useful CSS Tips For Beginners – In the old days, we depend a lot of on developers and programmers to help update the website, even when it’s just a minor one. Thanks to the CSS and it’s flexibility, styles can be extract independently away from the codes. Now, with some basic understanding of CSS, even a novice can easily change the style of a website.

30 Hand-picked Flash and Essential Actionscript 3.0 Tutorials – This article provides 30 Impressive Flash and Actionscript 3.0 tutorials which can enrich your design skills and may serve as an inspiration for your Flash-projects.

50 Useful Twitter Tools for Writers and Researchers – Twitter is a wonderful social tool, but did you know that it’s also a goldmine of information? You can use Twitter to get the latest scoop on current events as well as topical interests.

Charge Your Cellphone Using Wasted Heat – A new implementation you can build without spending all that money on those expensive seebeck generators. This one uses Peltiers in reverse to generate rather than cool. They aren’t as efficient but they are much more affordable. Plus most of the parts required are made from scrap.

NASA Scientist Predicts We’ll Meet E.T. by 2019 – Smith said “We’re ardently searching for evidence of life on our closest planet, I think it’s coming, I really do — at some point, we’ll turn over a rock, and by gosh there it is.”

The Pirate Bay verdict goes English, and we dish the dirt – The Pirate Bay ruling has been translated into English, and it’s full of little surprises. Ars dives in to answer the big questions: who possessed those Klomifen tablets, how much did the state pay to defend The Pirate Bay admins, and why did the backers consider moving to Argentina?

Steampunk Segway – The Legway, a human-powered and completely green version of the Segway, is built from old iron and copper plumbing.

Troys: One Twitter Script to Rule Them All – Troy’s Twitter Script provides so many useful tweaks to almost every Twitter view that it was almost overwhelming. Read the Read Write Web write out to learn more.

Twones – Twones is a music service and a new way to store, organize, find and share music played all over the web: YouTube, Myspace, Last.fm, Hypemachine, Favtape, or Blog at one single point of access.
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Comics

• AMOG calls for readers to “Just Say No” to Hollywood Making These Comic Book Movies.

Film

• Fan Cinema Today points the way to 5 Must-See Short Star Wars Fan Films
• Let Geeksploit’s list of the Most Disturbing Movies serve as a warning. Some things cannot be unseen.
• Heckler Spray names the Top 20 Sci-Fi Movie Villains of the silver screen.
• Leonard Nimoy explains why he came back to Star Trek.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “Best Laid Plans” by Crystalwizard and “The Colors Twelve” by Shaun Saunders at Beam Me Up.
• Interview: Sci-Fi Fan Letter talks with Robert J. Sawyer, author of WWWWake.
• Flashlight Worthy is a blog devoted to reading lists. Currently, it features 404 lists covering a broad range of topics from 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winners to Writing tutorials.
• John Scalzi on Really the Only Thing That Has to Be Said About the YA Thing.

Television

• How much is watching TV costing you?
• This may well be the harshest break-up ever.

I love this song. It puts a smile on my face every single time I hear it. This is the long version. The song originally debuted on the group’s television series. Check out the Flight of the Conchords’ official site for more information.

1922
Radio station WOI in Ames, Iowa becomes the first educational radio station to be licensed in the United States.

1926
The term “wave mechanics” is coined by nuclear physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a letter to Albert Einstein. The term is used to describe the newly emerging branch of physics which interprets the behavior of subatomic particles according to a mathematical description of a wave motion.

1932
Ultra short wave (7.3m) television is demonstrated for the first time in Britain.

1967
Bell Laboratories announces the development of a new “light knife” which allows surgeons to use the focused beam of a laser as a scalpel.

1986
Russia makes the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occured on April 26, public knowledge. Visit the official United Nations Chernobyl website.
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Why do you do it? Why? Why get up? Why keep fighting? You believe you’re fighting for something; for more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is, do you even know? Is it freedom, or truth? Perhaps peace. Could it be for love? Illusions, vagueries of perception; temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself. although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, you must know it by now, you can’t win, it’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, why, why do you persist?

- The Matrix Revolutions, 2003.
Character: Agent Smith

From Around the Web

10 Beautiful Web UI libraries – Are you looking for any interesting and beautiful Web User Interface libraries for your next web site or Rich Internet Application ? Take a look at this list with ten WUI I suggest you to try in order to simplify your work and develope faster beautiful and usable user interfaces.

David Pogue: When it comes to tech, simplicity sells – This video from TED is worth watching just to hear Pogue parody “The Sound of Silence.” In this talk, he talks about the problems that arise from complex user interfaces. Funny, insightful, and thought-provoking.

Flickr users make accidental maps – Billions of photos have now been uploaded to the internet, and many are tagged with text descriptions. Some are even geotagged – stamped with the latitude and longitude coordinates at which the image was taken. David Crandall analysed the data attached to 35 million photos uploaded to Flickr to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites.

How To Make Microsoft Office 2007 Look Like Office 2003 – UBitMenu is a small plugin for Microsoft Office 2007 (Excel, Word, and PowerPoint) that makes Office 2007 look like Ofice 2003.

Perfectly Safe To Remove Files and Folders – The Bold_Fortune Forums offers up a tutorial for slimming down you installation of Windows XP that will be especially helpful to Netbook users who need every megabyte.

Preserving Geocities – Yahoo! is shutting down Geocities soon, and Jason Scott is doing his best to archive what has survived Yahoo’s previous purges. It’s an important effort. Geocities contains some significant gems, like the this transcript of the first AOL chat with Koko the guerrilla.

Top 10 Ubuntu Downloads – The reviews are in, and the just-released Ubuntu 9.04, i.e. “Jaunty Jackalope,” rates as a slick, fully-formed Linux desktop. Looking to get started or upgrade your system? We’re recommending 10 downloads for everyone to try.

Warcraft on an iPhone – The Crackberry can kiss its monopoly on addiction goodbye. There’s a new obsession in town: World of Warcraft over Vollee.
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Anything Han can do, Kirk can do better!

Source: NCOTB