The Great Geek Manual

1898
Scientific American runs the first magazine advertisement for an automobile, placed by the world’s largest automobile factor The Winton Motor Car Company of Cleveland, Ohio. The ad invites readers to “dispense with a horse.”

1930
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) installs a large-screen television system at an RKO cinema in Schenectady, NY. The screen is five feet high.

1932
Walt Disney releases the film Flowers and Trees, the first short film to use the full-color three-strip Technicolor process. It will go on to become the first animation to win an Academy Award.

1935
The first ten Penguin Books, paperback reprints of titles previously published as hardbacks, are issued by publisher Allen Lane. Each title was priced at just sixpence each, the price of a pack of cigarettes, and features the Penguin brand image and a standardized cover design. The titles include works by Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, and Andre Maurois. The covers are color-coded: blue for biography, green for crime, and orange for fiction. Despite industry skepticism, Penguin sales will reach three million copies in the first year. Penguin paperback books represent an early step in the popularization of affordable paperback books that will become the norm off after World War II.
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Resources

13 Ways to Browser Test and Validate Your Work – Nettuts+ rounds up a list of the best tools to test your work before publishing it online. Makes for some great bookmarks for webdesigners.

15 Resources for Setting Up an E-Commerce Site with WordPress – WordPress is a popular blogging platform and content management system, but it can also be used for powering e-commerce websites. Although its primary purpose is not e-commerce, there are a number of plugins and themes available that will allow you to use WordPress for your online store.

Top 7 Places to Watch Great Minds in Action – The TED conference has been helping to blow people’s minds for many years now, and that’s in large part because they put videos of many of the TED talks online for anyone to watch, share, and spread for free. But there are a number of other conferences held each year around the world that also bring together visionaries, intellectuals, and luminaries from a wide variety of disciplines to discuss innovative ideas.

Top 10 Most Famous Hackers of All Time – Hackers are a very diverse bunch, a group simultaneously blamed with causing billions of dollars in damages as well as credited with the development of the World Wide Web. In this article, Focus introduces you to ten of the most famous hackers, both nefarious and heroic, to let you decide for yourself.
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Film

• Are these really The 50 Best Movie Villains? The Times Online thinks so.
• SciFi Wire on What Peter Jackson plans for the two Hobbit movies and why.
• Tolkien’s heirs want production of The Hobbit stopped… bolstering the case that copyright shouldn’t outlive an author for intellectual rights reformists everwhere.

Internet

• COED Magazine has posted a gallery of Cosplay Cuties for theComic-Con 2009.
• EdoPeno also has a gallery of San Diego Comic-Con Cosplay.
• EW names the 23 Sci-Fi Characters You Want on Your Buddy List.
• Joe Abercrombie laments the slow slide of RPG into obscurity, arguing that “RPGs have nothing like the wide cultural purchase they used to…”
• Here’s a playlist of Shakespearean plays available as videos on YouTube.

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1914
Transcontinental telephone service begins with a telephone conversation between Thomas A. Watson in San Francisco and Alexander Graham Bell in New York City in which they repeat their historic conversation from 1876.

1958
President Dwight Eisenhower signs the the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The act was introduced very soon after the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1. Visit the official NASA website.

1985
Bill Gates of Microsoft sends John Sculley of Apple Computer a second memo suggesting that Apple license its Mac OS, this time naming three prospective companies who might wish to create Mac clones.

1993
A federal court jury in San Francisco decides Atari Games infringed a Nintendo patent for the security system in the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Atari Games immediately announces that it will appeal the decision.
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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

- Weinberg’s Second Law

A few updates on my Motivational Posters from last year’s Comic-Con.

Photo Credit:
TheGameReviews

Photo Credit: Rottierook Flickr

Art

• Attention Deficit Delirium has posted a photo of a sculpture from 1913 that looks very much as if it could have be the concept behind General Grievous.
• Fanboy.com has a gallery of Toys from the Comic-Con.
• MarioAV has posted a gallery of Logo Mashups. Part 2 | Part 3

Film

• Colin, the zombie flick that cost seventy dollars to produce, is being released nationwide in the UK.
• Gunaxin chooses its top Ten Memorable Movie Endings.
• io9 ponders What If Greedo Really Shot First?
• The Jaded Viewer has posted a list of Top 10 Villains from Arnold Schwarzenegger Movies.
• The Latino Review has a re-cap of the Comic-Con Interview With Robert Downey Jr. On Iron Man 2.
• One writer with the Guardian is arguing that Watchmen is too faithful to Alan Moore’s original. I don’t buy the premise. Fans waited too long to be sold on an adaptation.

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