The Great Geek Manual

1868
Thomas Edison of Boston, Massachusetts applies for his first patent. The patent is for an “electrographic vote recorder,” which will enable a legislators to register a vote either for or against an issue by turning a switch to the right or left. Before his death in 1931, Edison will come to be known as one of the most prolific inventors in history, with a record 1,093 US patents.

1923
Radio amateur Léon Deloy (call sign 8 AB) of Nice, France connects on a 109 meter wavelength with F.H. Schnell (call sign 1 MO) in Hartford, Connecticut in the first two-way trans-Atlantic radio transmission. Deloy announced his intention to make contact with an American earlier in the year at the ARRL convention in Chicago. As a result, many Americans were listening for the signal.

1948
The first instant camera, Polaroid Land Camera, first goes on sale at a Boston department store. The camera, invented by Dr. Edwin Land, produces a sepia-colored photograph in approximately one minute. Price: US$89.75

1964
NASA launches the Mariner 4 probe on a mission to Mars from Cape Kennedy. On July 14, 1965, it will become the first satellite to transmit close-up photographs of the planet.
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The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn’t think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.

- Steve Ballmer

Art

• Check out Fandomania’s round-up of Assassin’s Creed Fan Art.
• Check out this awesome transforming Transformer billboard.
• Fantasy-Atlas.org is a website that collects maps from popular series.

Comics

• News: Zack Whedon to write new six-issue Terminator comic for Dark Horse.
• Dodgem Logic is the website of Alan Moore’s self-published magazine.

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Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God’s gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.

- Freeman Dyson

Art

• The Lego Matrix features a series of scenes from The Matrix recreated with Legos.

Comics

• AV Club has compiled a great list of The best comics of the ’00s.

Film

• News: Straczynski says that his script for a potential Silver Surfer movie is complete, but that development on the film has stalled.
• Watch Pieces of April over at SlashControl for free!

Internet

• College Humor envisions 5 Star Wars (Facebook) Status Updates.
• GeekDad puts a Thanksgiving twist on some of sci-fi’s best lines!
• Noveller, for those novels you write throughout the day. (At the noveller site, try signing up. Hysterical!)

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Art

• These Ketchup packets protesting landmines are both funny and little disturbingc.
• Su Blackwell is an artist who creates amazing paper sculptures from and based on books.

Comics

• SciFi Scanner reminds us of 10 Reasons Comic Book Movie Fans Are Thankful.

Film

• Interview: Cinematical interviews The Road Director John Hillcoat.
• The Dallas Observer has compiled a nostalgic list of the Top 10 Thanksgiving Dinners in Movies. My favorite is Pieces of April.
• I laughed my ass off at this: The Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight. It’s just sooo true.

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I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.

- Jon Stewart

Resources

10 Free Server & Network Monitoring Tools that Kick Ass – When you have a website or a network, it’s helpful to be aware of any issues as soon as they occur. There are open source and freeware server/network monitoring tools that will supervise your infrastructure for any issues that may arise. These tools are meant to aid you in avoiding being taken offline and evaluating if your resource needs has outgrown your infrastructure.

20 essential free apps for your new Windows 7 PC – Here are 20 free Windows 7 applications that stand out in terms of quality of results you get of them. Ninite is a quick and easy way to download most of these applications into a single customized installer.

The Go Programmning Language – Go is Google’s new programming language. Watch a video introduction. Supposedly, it compiles faster than c/c++ and runs just as fast.

Google Wave Cheat Sheet – Church Tech Matters has compiled a list of commands for Google’s new Wave service.
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