The Great Geek Manual

Resources

6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations – Mashable takes a look at ways to graphically visualize the Twittersphere.

How to drive a Model T – Henry Ford Estate volunteer, Ed Hebb describes the intricacies of driving the ubiquitous Model T. Produced for the Henry Ford Estate’s “Centennial of the Model T ” celebration.

Inside the World’s Greatest Keyboard – PC World salutes the greatest keyboard EVER made, the IBM Model-M, the standard by which all other keyboards must be judged. (Check the Flickr photos.)

Never reboot Ubuntu Again – Ksplice Uptrack is a new service that lets you effortlessly keep your systems up to date and secure, without rebooting.

Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features – Firefox 3.5 is a pretty substantial update to the popular open-source browser, and it’s just around the corner. See what features, fixes, and clever new tools are worth getting excited about in the next big release.
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Internet

• College Humor presents Web Site Story, a modern take on a classic musical. (Come to think of it, Pandora is just like hanging out at a hipster bar.)

Literature

• Free Fiction: “Droidmaker” by Michael Rubin is now available as a free download. Droidmaker is a history of Lucasfilm, the creation of Pixar, and more.
• The Electric Velocipede Blog asks Have you ever bought a Book for its Design?
• When The Lord of the Rings doesn’t cut it: Confessions of a fantasy junkie.

Science

• NASA has found the missing Moon landing tapes. Viewers have only ever seen poor quality footage of the original landing because the original analogue tapes containing the pictures beamed direct from the lunar surface were lost almost as soon as they were recorded.

Television

• Breaking news from Stephen Colbert: The Dead Can Twitter.
• Michael Emerson discusses the coming season of Lost.

Video Games

• Neatorama has posted a stop motion video of Classic Arcade Games recreated with Legos.
• Soon, WoW players will be able to switch sides… could this mean the end of the Alliance?

New Releases

2042: The Battle is Coming by Frederick Ransom Gray
Tate Publishing. (ISBN-13: 978-1606965443) Paperback. Length: 284pp
Everyone fights. Few survive… In 2042: The Battle is Coming, brilliant bio-chemical discoveries elevate the Dark Forces of Evil (DFOE) to superpower status. Emperor Vuunderjahr’s relentless pursuit of global domination leads him to a systematic enslavement and dehumanization of the world’s population. Only three wayward field operatives remain active from the once-prominent Free World. The agents unexpectedly join allegiance with wacky rebels, known as Beaters. Their mission: vanquish Dr. Vuunderjahr and the DFOE empire, thereby restoring freedoms to a lost world. Meanwhile, they’re all too familiar with the realization that The Battle is Coming.

Hazards by Mike Resnick
Subterranean. (ISBN-13: 978-1596062306) Hardcover. Length: 280pp
After his Adventures in Africa, his Exploits in Asia, and his Encounters in Europe, everyone’s favorite man of the cloth, the irrepressible Right Reverend Honorable Doctor Lucifer Jones, is back to tell you about the Hazards he encounters in South America. They include the terrifying Island of Annoyed Souls, the discovery of the Lost Continent of Moo (spelled correctly for a change), a battle with safari ants that even Charlton Heston wouldn’t want any part of, and a pair of Bird Girls who live in matching Chartreuse Mansions.
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1879
The first electric company in the US to produce and sell electricity California Electric Light Company is established in San Francisco, California.

1905
Albert Einstein publishes the article “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies“, wherein he introduces the concept of special relativity.

1908
At around 7:15am, northwest of Lake Baikal, Russia, a huge fireball nearly as bright as the Sun is seen crossing the sky. Minutes later, there is a huge flash and a shock wave felt up to 400 miles (650km) away. Over Tunguska, a meteorite traveling at over 60,000mph (25km per second) penetrates Earth’s atmosphere, heats to about 10,000°C, and detonates 3 to 4 miles (6 to 10km) above the ground. The blast releases the energy of 10-50 Megatons of TNT, destroying 830 square miles (2,150 sq km) of forest (approximately 80 million trees) and leaving no trace of life. The Tunguska rock came out of the Taurid Meteor storm that crosses Earth’s orbit twice a year. Read more about The Tunguska Event.

1930
The first US broadcast to be transmitted globally takes place, using a series of short-wave radio relays with only a one-eighth of a second delay. The broadcast, a live oration from Clyde D. Wagoner, originates at station W2XAD in Schenectady, New York.
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A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect — who… plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

- Thomas Henry Huxley, replying to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce during a debate on Darwin’s theory of evolution at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, June 30, 1860.

Film

• According to sources, Stan Lee is set to appear in Iron Man 2 as Larry King.
• IGN names the Top Ten Summer Soldiers of the silver screen, starting with Vasquez from Aliens.

Internet

• Bloggasm wonders if Tor Books is seeking to become the Amazon of science fiction and fantasy?
• Check out CNN’s coverage of this year’s Webby Awards and its recipients’ five-word acceptance speeches.
• OnlineDegreesHubs has compiled a list of 12 Celebs Who Give Geeks Hope for Fame and Fortune.
• There, I Fixed It is the latest internet meme to gain steam. It feature pictures of half-assed repairs and mods of everything from cars to silverware.

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Hemlock is a great short film produced in less than three months by self-taught animator Tyson Ibele for the latest CGSociety challenge, “Steampunk – Myths & Legends.”

Source: CGSociety