The Great Geek Manual

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.

- Albert Einstein

1887
The first book written in Esperanto, the international language invented by Ludwig Zamenhof, is published.

1958
The United States Army launches Explorer IV, the fourth successful US satellite.

1961
The Japanese film Alakazam the Great, based on the manga by Osamu Tezuka, becomes one of the first anime films ever to be released in the United States. IMDB listing

1963
Syncom 2, the world’s first geosynchronous satellite, is launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta B booster rocket.

1969
Scientists first examine the forty-six pounds of rocks retrieved by Apollo 11 astronauts from the Moon in sample return containers (SRCs). The first “rock box” is opened in the Vacuum Laboratory of the Manned Spacecraft Center’s Lunar Receiving Laboratory, Building 37, at 3:55pm.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a hardcore bibliophile, but we’re a common enough lot these day. And the one sight that always makes me linger over a webpage is rows and rows of neatly organized books. So, in an effort to draw more like-minded read here to my little blog, I decided to round-up a gallery of photos of some of the most beautiful libraries I’ve ever seen photos of. Enjoy.

Abbey Library St. Gall in Saint Gallen, Switzerland
Photo Credit: Gerda Steiner & Jorg Lenzlinger.

The Astronomy Library of the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands
Photo Credit: (Erik)

1837
The first commercial use of an electric telegraph is successfully demonstrated by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. They ran the six-wire telegraph line 2.4km from Euston to Camden Town in London along the Great Western Railway Company railway track. This first device will prove to be impractical because the code it transmits uses simultaneous combinations of five keys and is limited to twenty letters. The letters J, C, Q, U, X and Z are omitted.

1907
Boris Rosing of St Petersburg, Russia applies for the first patent on a cathode ray tube, which will later be granted on October 30, 1910. Rosing invented the first television system to use cathode ray tubes and mirror drums.

1909
French aviator Louis Blériot flies across the English Channel in a monoplane, traveling from Calais, France to Dover, England in thirty-seven minutes. It is the world’s first international overseas airplane flight. Blériot makes the historic crossing after Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, offered £1,000 to the first pilot to do so.

1920
The first transatlantic two-way radio broadcast is transmitted.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

- Stephen Hawking in Der Spiegel, October 17, 1988.

Art

• Movieline has posted a gallery of Tron Legacy Concept Art from the Comic-Con.

Comics

• A.V. Club names 21 artists who changed mainstream comics.

Film

• August 21st, audiences nationwide can screen 15 minutes of Avatar for Free.
• Manofest has posted a gallery of The 10 Greatest Screaming Lines In Movie History, and surprisingly, “Khaaaaan” doesn’t even come close to number one.
• SciFi Scanner’s Mary Robinette Kowal picks the The Ten Chickiest Fantasy Flicks. I’d like to nominate Meet Joe Black.
• The Shiznit picks out the Top 50 Best Movie Deaths Movie Feature.

Read the rest of this entry » » »

Resources

3 Ways to Speed up Your Site with PHP – These days, with broadband connections the norm, we don’t need to worry as much about internet speeds or the filesize of our pages. However, that’s not to say that we still shouldn’t do so. If you wish to reduce the load times on your server, decrease the number of HTTP requests, and go that extra bit for your visitors, there are a few techniques that you can use. This tutorial covers a number of PHP tricks, including caching and compression.

5 TED Talks on Science That Will Blow Your Mind – Some of the most entertaining, informative and mind-blowing science videos on the web come from TED – the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference. Challenged to give the “talk of their lives,” the world’s top scientists and science communicators have been dazzling audiences – many of whom are thought leaders, trend-setters and entertainers – for years now.

15 Really Useful Web-based HTML Editors – Web-based HTML Editor, WYSIWYG editor, or rich text editor, is a web component that let users enter rich text input within the browser. Most of the time, these html editors are used within content management systems where administrators or authors can easily create posts and contents from the backend system. Read the rest of this entry » » »

I found this amazing shot over at Weisheng’s photostream. There’s an article on this bookstore, which is located inside a former Dominican church in Maastrichtthe, over at De Zeen. The same shop also happens to be number one on the Guardian’s list of The World’s 10 Best Bookshops.

God, if there were a bookstore like this anywhere in driving distance of where I live, I’d hide out in the bathroom at closing so that I wouldn’t have to leave during the weekends. All the kids would know me as the crazy hobo of the church bookstore.

Source: Weisheng’s photostream