The Great Geek Manual

1851
A total solar eclipse is first captured on a daguerreotype photograph by Busch and Berkowski, at the Royal Observatory in Königsberg, Prussia. It shows a slight but distinct impression of the corona during the total eclipse. Berkowski, a local daguerrotypist whose first name is never published, observed the eclipse at the Royal Observatory using a small 6cm refracting telescope attached to a 15.8cm Fraunhofer heliometer camera. The daguerreotype uses an 84 second exposure and is taken shortly after the beginning of totality.

1858
Fingerprints are used for the first time as a means of identification.

1896
Using an Edison Vitascope projector, a film is exhibited commercially for the first time anywhere in Canada at the West End Park, in Ottawa.

1930
John Logie Baird gives the first public demonstration of his large screen television in the UK at the London Coliseum Variety Theatre. The television’s screen displays an image thirty by seventy inches, created by 2,100 lamps which are operated by a mechanical commutator switch. The entire device is built into a small, wheeled trailer that can be moved on and off stage. The exhibition will continue for three weeks.
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To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.

- Cynthia Ozick

Resources

5 iPod Alternatives That Rock – With over 120 million units sold, no company comes close to the success that Apple has enjoyed with its iPod. But commercial success doesn’t necessarily mean the iPod is the best player on the market. In fact, many competing portable media players offer equally high sonic sonic performance, as well as a handful of features not found in the iPod.

9 Alternative Web Twitter Clients – Believe it or not, almost 50% of Twitter users, prefer to tweet directly from Twitter.com. This isn’t surprising, but most heavy Twitter users agree that Twitter.com is actually the poorest user experience among the plethora of alternative web applications to access the service.

15 New jQuery Plugins To Help You Conquer The Web – A fairly solid list of the newest jQuery Plugins to hit the internet.

Creating a Diorama Illusion in Photoshop – Have you ever built a diorama? Using a blur effect, you can create an attention-catching effect to make a object really pop in your composition.

Cutout NES – Cubecraft is offering up a downloadable cutout model of the Nintendo Entertainment System console. Print it out onto cardstock and voila! your own tiny gift box or desk toy. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Great apparel for your next zombie movie marathon! This design is available on t-shirts in sizes ranging from Kid’s Small to Men’s 3XL in ten different colors. It’s also available on hoodies.

Source: Noisebot

Film

• The trailer for Tron Legacy makes the movie look like a really nice compromise between the style of the original and modern movie sensibilities.
• The Spout Blog looks back at 10 Comic-Con Hits That Became Box Office Bombs.
• Watch the original Tron online at Google Videos.

Internet

• NPR covers the 40th Anniversary of the Comic-Con.
• Rotten Tomatoes has posted a slideshow of Cosplay from the 2009 Comic Con.
• Yikes! Ten years after the release of Star Wars Episode I, it’s evident that George Lucas has ruined Jake Lloyd’s life. The kid is one shove short of a psychotic break.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “A Certain Talent” by David Weber at The Williamson Effect.
• Free Fiction: Read “Elfrithe’s Ghost” by Kij Johnson at Realms of Fantasy.
• Free Fiction: Read the flash fiction “The Wages of Sin” by Lee Hughes.
• Free Fiction: Read “Special Needs” by K. D. Wentworth at Strip Mauled.
• Interview: Fandomania interviews author Kevin J. Anderson.
• Tor.com asks Is Print on Demand the future of Magazines?

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When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

- The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
Character: Sherlock Holmes

1866
Cyrus West Field finally succeeds, after three failures, to lay the first underwater transatlantic telegraph cable. The Atlantic Cable spans the 1,686 miles across the Atlantic Ocean between Valentia, Ireland and Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. Massachusetts merchant and financier Cyrus West Field first proposed laying a 2,000-mile copper cable along the ocean bottom from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1854, but the first three attempts ended in broken cables and failure. Field’s persistence finally paid off when the steamship SS Great Eastern, the largest ship afloat, successfully laid the cable along the level, sandy bottom of the North Atlantic. The cable will remain in use for nearly a century, and many future telecommunication historians will mark its completion as the dawn of the information age.

1875
Elisha Gray of Chicago, Illinois is granted a patent for “methods of transmitting musical impressions or sounds telegraphically,” the acoustic telegraph. (US No. 166,095, -6)

1888
The first electric automobile, designed by Philip W. Pratt, is demonstrated in Boston, Massachusetts. The three-wheeled vehicle is powered by six Electrical Accumulator Company cells, which weigh ninety pounds.

1909
In Fort Myer, Virginia, Orville Wright sets a record for the longest sustained flight in the army’s first airplane after remaining in the air for 1 hour, 12 minutes and 40. In his exhaustion from the flight, he crash-landed the plane, but he and his passenger were uninjured.

1940
Warner Brothers releases the Merrie Melodies animated short film Wild Hare, directed by Tex Avery, is released by Warner Bros. This short introduces Bugs Bunny who will appear in over one hundred sixty cartoons over the next twenty-four years. It also introduces his catchphrase, “What’s up, doc?”
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