The Great Geek Manual

1790
The United States federal Copyright Act is signed into law by president George Washington. The duration of the copyright prescribed under the law, which requires a record of the titled to be made prior to its publication in the district court where the author or proprietor resides, is fourteen years with an optional renewal period of a second fourteen.

1879
The first electric railway is launched during the Berlin Trades Exposition.

1927
The last Ford Model T rolls off the world-renounced assembly line, which had produced 15,007,003 vehicles.

1938
W2XBS broadcasts the film The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel, starring Leslie Howard. During the film’s broadcast, the station’s projectionist plays the reels out of sequel, bringing the film to its conclusion twenty minutes early. After the debacle, the NBC network won’t be able to secure the first-run rights for a film for years to come.

1943
Construction begins on ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The formal contract between the Moore School and the US Army doesn’t officially go into effect until July 1st. John Mauchly is the project’s chief consultant and J. Presper Eckert is the project’s chief engineer. It will take the school’s team approximately one year to design the ENIAC system another eighteen months and half a million dollars to build. By the time the system is fully operational, the war for which it the computer was meant to assist will be over.
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1783
The first daily paper in the US, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, is first published by Benjamin Towne in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1876
Thomas Edison is granted three patents for “an Improvement in Duplex Telegraphs” which allows a transmitted signal be sent over the same wire as incoming signals. (US No. 178,221, -2, -3)

1896
The first documented auto accident in history occurs in New York City when a Duryea Motor Wagon, driven by Henry Wells of Springfield, Massachusetts collides with a bicycle ridden by New York native Evylyn Thomas.

1898
English chemist Morris William Travers discovers the element Krypton. He names the element after the Greek word meaning “hidden.”
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Religious revivals have been endemic on the Number OneWorld ever since the gods retired and went to live in the sun. Nobody is exactly sure why. One view is that mankind has a desperate need to believe in something, preferably something so blatantly absurd that only blind, unquestioning faith will suffice—for example, the belief which sprang up in the late nineteenth century and was still widely current in Jason Derry’s time and which held that human beings were not in fact created at all but were somehow the descendants of bald, mutant monkeys. The other view is that there is never anything much on television during the summer.

- Ye Gods! by Tom Holt, 1992.

Why Google Meet-ups are always so easy to find.

Source: Jew Party

From Around the Web

3 Easy Ways To Restart Your Computer Over The Internet – Occasionally useful, especially for folks who developing or testing web apps and folks for download torrents at home while they’re at work.

Google Wave: A Complete Guide – Mashable runs down the features that have Google fan boys squee-ing with delight. So long Yahoo Mail, it looks like there’s a new most popular e-mail service in town!

How alternative search engines like Wolfram Alpha and Cuil can succeed – Is there room in the market for search engines that are nowhere near as good as the big names, but that nevertheless yield good results?

Prey – Prey is a simple and lightweight program that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

Reading and Writing to Excel Spreadsheets in Python – Dev Explorer provides a brief introduction to using Excel and Python in tandem.

Seven Reasons Why Wordpress 2.8 Is Better Than Ever – While investigating whether or not I should upgrade my Wordpress installation, I came across this article. I’m not entirely convinced, yet.

The Web’s most Dangerous Keywords – Which is the most dangerous keyword to search for using public search engines these days? It’s “screensavers” with a maximum risk of 59.1 percent, according to McAfee’s recently released report “The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms“.
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Comics

• Mania attempts to decide Who are The Greatest Comic Writers of All-Time?

Film

• Den of Geek reviews 10 Surprise deaths in Blockbuster Movies. (Spoilers Ahead)
• Here’s what it might look like if David Lynch had directed Return of the Jedi.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “American Nightmare” by Lilah Wild at Well Told Tales.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “The Dreaming Wind” by Jeffrey Ford at PodCastle.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “Hangman” by Abby “Merc” Rustad at Dunesteef.
• Free Fiction: Read “Deviations: Appetite” by Elissa Malcohn at Manybooks.
• Are you embarrassed about holes in your literacy? Here’s How to Lie About Books.
• Author Jim C. Hines runs down his favorite answers to the much-dreaded question Is Your Book Appropriate for My Child?
• Bloggers name their favorite underrated authors at Grasping for the Wind.
• The L.A. Times discusses Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane. “Before Conan, there was Kane, a Puritan swordsman on a restless search for justice.”
• There may be a lot of fan boys in trouble out there, because Manga Could Get You 15 Years in Prison…More at Wired.com.

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designboom is selling some 200MB recordable compact discs that look like floppy disks, complete with blue, green, red, and yellow labels. 200MB isn’t much these days, but these would be great for handing out vintage abandonware or arcade emulators as a party favors.

One cost US$10 or four cost US$28, plus US$4 shipping and handling, so they’re probably not something you’re going to use casually. Still, the picture alone is worth a nostalgic smile.

Source: DesignBoom Store

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

- J.G. Ballard, in the introduction of Crash, 1974.