The Great Geek Manual

The other day, surfing around the web, I ran across the a list of 20 Cheesiest Pick-up Lines to Use on Graphic Designers, and while I was reading them, I came up with a few of my own. Here they are, in all their glory.

10. I wish I could take you home with me to capture the color of your eyes with my Color Cue.

9. Would you take a look at my brush and give me your professional opinion on whether or not its ready for broad distribution?

8. When you walked into the room, I could have sworn someone hit shift – left bracket, because the hardness of my brush increased noticably.

7. You know, it’s true what they say. Big hands, big font collection.
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Resources

11 Cool iPhone Keypad Codes – Your iPhone can play games, browse the internet, watch YouTube videos and more but there are also some nifty tricks you can use to find out some neat information about your phone.

15 Useful Twitter Tools For Web Workers – There are hundreds of third party applications to make twitter easier and better to use. But who has time to try them all? In an effort to streamline the list to only useful apps, I have created a list of 15 apps that should do the job.

Avoid Gmail’s Sponsored Links – Here’s an interesting tip that keeps GMail ads at bay. I’m not sure if its worth the effort, but it’s still interesting.

BitTorrent Behind the Scenes – Torrent Freak takes a brief peek behind the scenes of IsoHunt, including a photo of one of their server racks.

Dirpy – This is a useful little tool that converts YouTube videos into downloadable MP3 tracks without any drama.

Forestle – The eco-friendly charity search engine is about to celebrate its first birthday. This month’s donation has preserved over 247 acres of rainforest.
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Art

• Check out The broke-down steampunk dystopian Magic Kingdom of Epic Mickey
• Here’s a gallery of Custom Design Imperial Stormtroopers from the comic-con.

Film

• Film School Rejects names the The 7 Most Buzzed About Movies of Comic-Con 2009.
• GeekDad explains how one family tragedy has proven that George Lucas Is an Evil Genius.
• Geekend asks What are your Low-budget science-fiction film favorites?

Internet

• It’s funny how, with the passage of time, all the males slowly filter out of photo galleries from the Comic-Con. Ten months from now, you could swear only busty girls attended the event.

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Have absolutely no idea what the source of this image is. I just found it floating about Reddit. Quite possibly, it came from the Monkey Ninja, but if anyone knows for certain, give a shout out below.

Art

• Check out this photo of a Zombie StormTrooper!

Comics

• Dell Rey has announced that it will be releasing an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Film

• John Scalzi looks at SciFi’s Baddest Computers, asking if they’re evil or just misunderstood… my vote is cast for evil.
• M. Joseph Young offers detailed temporal analyses of the timelines of the most popular time travel films, including: 12 Monkeys, Donnie Darko, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Terminator.
• NeoSprockets deflats 8 Embarrassing Hollywood Tech Cliches.

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Therein lies the paradox of Free: People are making lots of money charging nothing. Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00.

- Free by Chris Anderson

Read the book online for free at Google Books >>

1790
The very first United States patent is granted to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a process for making potash and pearl ashes for use in in soap and fertilizer. (US No. 1) The patent is granted for a term of fourteen years and signed by President George Washington, who signed the first US patent statute into law on April 10, 1790.

1930
The radio program The Shadow airs for the first time on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Listen to original episodes of The Shadow at the Internet Archive.

1964
The American space probe Ranger 7 transmits the first photo moon’s surface ever taken by a US spacecraft, mapping the surface for a future lunar landing. Ranger 7 carries six slow-scan vidicon TV cameras capable of transmitting high-resolution television pictures of the lunar surface. A total of 4,308 photographs before Ranger 7 crashed in Mare Cognitum (Sea of Clouds).

1971
NASA astronaut Dave Scott becomes the first person to drive a vehicle on the Moon. The battery-powered Lunar Rover (LRV) is first used during the Apollo 15 mission, in the mountainous Hadley-Apennine region. The LRV, built by Boeing, weighs 460lb (209kg) and folds into a space 5ft by 20in (1.5m by 0.5m). Each wheel is independently driven by a 200W electric motor, and the rover has a top speed of about 8mph. It allows the astronauts to travel further from their landing site to sample a wider variety of lunar materials. During the course of the mission, the car travels 17.4 miles (28km) and is used to collect about 168 pounds (76kg) of lunar material to return to Earth.
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The enemy of every author is not piracy, but obscurity.

Tim O’Reilly, as quoted in Free
By Chris Anderson.