The Great Geek Manual

You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.

- Stephen Fry in “The internet and Me,” 2009.

1832
Samuel Morse will later cite this date as the day he first conceived on the electric telegraph system.

1860
The first company to manufacture internal combustion engines is founded.

1948
The United States National Bureau of Standards authorizes the construction of the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) by the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles, California. It will be one of the first electronic digital computers.

1951
All US color television receiver production is halted and banned for the duration of the Korean War.

The CBS television network stops broadcasting color television programs, which it had only begun June 25, due to the halt in color receiver production brought on by the Korean War.
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1842
In New York Harbor, inventor Samuel Morse lays the world’s first telegraph cable, across the length of a mile between the Battery and Governor’s Island. Unfortunately, before his system could be fully demonstrated, a passing ship pulls up the cable.

1871
English engineer and mathematician Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine, dies. At the time of his death, he is living in poverty after years of having funded his own projects after the government stopped funding them.

1878
Thomas Edison makes electricity available to private households for the first time.

1879
Thomas Edison manufactures the first incandescent light bulb.

1892
The first long-distance telephone line is established between the offices of the mayor of Chicago and the mayor of New York City.
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If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

- Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, 1952.

1604
German astronomer Johannes Kepler observes that an exceptionally bright star had suddenly appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus, which later turns out to be the last supernova to have been observed in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

1881
Bell and Tainter donates a sound recording machine to the Smithsonian Institution that uses jets of air to inscribe sounds.

1885
A steel-making process is patented by Sir Harry Bessemer, a British inventor and metallurgist. His patent is a method of making steel by blasting compressed air through molten iron to remove impurities and excess carbon called the “Bessemer Process,” which makes it possible to mass-produce steel inexpensively.

1888
The first issue of National Geographic Magazine goes on sale. It will initially be published irregularly, only when the National Geographic Society accumulated sufficient material to fill an issue. Visit the official National Geographic Magazine website.

Thomas Edison files a patent for the first movie projector, the Optical Phonograph, which projects images just 1/32-inch across. Edison claims that it will, “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”
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…it occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

- Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman, 2006.

Resources

10 Ways to Take your Site from One to One Million Users – At the Future of Web Apps conference Kevin Rose (Digg, Pownce, Wefollow) gave a cool presentation on the top 10 down and dirty ways you can grow your web app. He took the questions he’s most often asked and turned it into a very informative talk.

15 Podcasts That Will Make You Smarter – 15 great podcasts that will make you a smarter, more well rounded, and better informed person.

15 Terminal Commands for Hidden Settings in Snow Leopard – Every time Apple brings out a new version of OS X, Mac OS X Tips compiles a list of their favorite Terminal commands for enabling hidden features and changing hidden settings.

50 Must-Listen-to Lectures for Tech Lovers – The title speaks for itself. Here’s a collection of lectures covering a wide range of topics from colleges are the world.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 9.0 – Just out today, this basic antivirus and antispyware protection for Windows is available to download for free.

Five Best Windows Task Manager Alternatives – The Windows Task Manager is a functional but basic tool for keeping an eye on applications and activity on your computer. If you want to go beyond the built-in tool take a closer look at these alternatives. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Art

• Booooooom.com has just announced the winners of its Where the Wild Things Are Fort Contest. The photo gallery of the results of the contest are a must-see!
• Concept Art World has posted an awesome gallery of District 9 Concept Art. Turns out, Prawns might have been weirder.
• Fandomania has rounded up a gallery of The Shining tribute art from around Deviant Art.

Film

• AskMen has posted a gallery of the Top 10 Legendary Film Guns, starting with RoboCop’s Cobra Assault Cannon.
• DailyFill has posted an infographic that pinpointing the locations of various science fiction films in A Brief History of Space Films Since Star Wars.
• Hollywood.com picks the Best and Worst Children’s Book Movie Adaptations.
• A New York City film location scout revisits locations from the movie Taxi Driver (1976) and compares them to what’s there now. (Part 2, Part 3)
• Reelz Channel charts out The Highs and Lows of Vampire Movies.
• The Telegraph has compiled a list of 110 DVDs you Should Own by category.

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