The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Depixelating Pixel Art: “Naïve upsampling of pixel art images leads to unsatisfactory results. Our algorithm extracts a smooth, resolution-independent vector representation from the image which is suitable for high-resolution display devices.”
• Gallery Nucleus has posted a flyer for its Harry Potter Art Exhibition
• Green Lantern Concept Art
• James Hance has been working on a line of Firefly / Muppet Mash-Ups. Dr. Bunsen has never looked so menacing.
• Skull Kid Cosplay

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Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Better Than Jelly Beans” by Doug Hilton at Beam Me Up! Podcast.
• Listen to “Black Petals” (Pt 1) by Michael Moorcock at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “Creature” by Ramsey Shehadeh at Drabblecast.
• Listen to “The Fire Of Asshurbanipal” by Robert E. Howard at Cthulhu Podcast.
• Listen to “Judgment of Swords and Souls” by Saladin Ahmed at PodCastle.
• Listen to “The Night Train” by Lavie Tidhar at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “Simulacrum” (Pt 2) by Ken Liu at Beam Me Up! Podcast.
• Listen to “Tippler’s Bane” by Evelyn Wang at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “The Voyage Of The Van Leeuwenhoek” by John Medaille at Dunesteef.

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And I would like to point out that books are not only for reading. There are other things we (and our computers) can do with the words in books. We can count them, sort them, make comparisons among them, search for patterns in their distribution, classify them, catalog them, analyze them. Yes, these are nerdy, mechanical, reductionist assaults on literature-but they are also methods of extracting meaning from text, just as reading is. And they scale better.

- “Bit Lit” by Brian Hayes
First published by American Scientist, May-June 2011.

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

- “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” by Herbert Simon
Published in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest by Martin Greenberger, 1971.

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract-a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.

- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick, 2011.

Utilities and Resources

• CardFlick – helps you create beautiful business cards with your iPhone. CardFlick has beautiful card themes, easy customization, and you can share your card with our patent-pending CardFlick.
• MAFIAA Fire – a Firefox plug-in that connects users an alternate domain for government-seized filesharing websites via a crowd-sourced database
• Plizy – a mobile application and service that utilizes a sophisticated intelligence engine to generate video based on your interests, as well as the interests of your friends. Think Flipboard meets Pandora for video, plus social, on your iPad.

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Art

• 10 Alternative Gremlins Posters
• Artists capture the spirit of space
• Into the Pixel Video Game Art Winners
• Link Crossplay Cosplay
• Olly Moss creates Victorian Silhouettes of pop culture icons, including Captain Jack Sparrow and a Dalek.
• SNES Style Doctor Who Intro
• Spock’s Daughter by Phil Noto

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