The Great Geek Manual

It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.

- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling, 2005.

Resources

10 Things Your iPod Won’t Tell You: Revealed – A word of warning for those who may be considering buying an iPod in the future.

10 Quick Ways to Print Calendars Online – Why are you still paying for desktop calenders? Customize and print off your own design.

18 Essential Skills for a Maker – AntonOlsen recently posted an article on GeekDad enumerating 100 Essential Skills for Geeks. As he was inspired to do so by a list of “Essential Skills for Men”, so I am inspired to make this list of essential skills for Makers.

Computer Hardware Chart – Here’s a rather thorough chart of computer ports and plugs, both old and new.

Game Crafter – This site is the Cafe Press of board games. Design and market your own card game or board game at no cost to yourself. Then, sit back and wait for the royalties to roll in.

Goofram – Goofram is a search engine that combines the results of Google and Wolfram Alpha on the same screen. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Seniors take note!

1850
The Harvard Observatory photographs a star for the first time in history. The star is Vega in the constellation Lyra. Visit the official Harvard Observatory website.

1899
The NEC Corporation (the Nippon Electric Company, Limited) is reorganized as a joint-stock company, becoming the first Japanese joint venture with foreign capital, which was provided by Western Electric. Visit the official NEC website.

1955
Arco, Idaho becomes the first town in the world to be run entirely on nuclear power during a one hour test performed by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

1970
Ralph Baer demonstrates the television-based video game system he invented to electronics manufacturer Magnavox. Magnavox’s Bill Enders negotiates an exclusive license to manufacture the system and sub-license Sanders Associates’ related patents.
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Over at the What to Fix blog, Daniel compares the increasingly-pervasive technology of today to the use of Heroin in early North America in this thought-provoking essay.

In 1850 people didn’t know how their favorite symphony sounded. Back then, it was common for musicians to work hectic schedules and perform multiple shows in a row. Instruments were frequently out of tune and good, consistent timing was fairly new. In addition, going to the symphony was a big deal: you dressed up, you hitched up the horses, you went into town.

You might only hear your favorite symphony 5 or 6 times in your life. Each time it was probably slightly in a different key, with a slightly different tempo, played with slightly different instruments, and each time you actively strained to hear and remember how it all sounded.

You would sit very attentively, absorbing each and every note and drumbeat of the symphony. It was a play, a painting, an imaginary world come to life, and you were living in it. It was magic.

Source: What to Fix

1847
In Maryland, the first telegraph company is established.

1890
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for the Quadruplex Telegraph. (US No. 420,594) This new telegraph is designed to transmit and receive four independent signals over a single wire, two in one direction and two in the opposite direction. The separate transmitting keys transmit a signal with either a high or low current strength which is then received with sounders that respond only the high or the low strength signal. Read more about the Quadruplex Telegraph at the Edison Papers website.

1902
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for a Reversible Galvanic Battery, a battery with a revolutionarily large capacity for its weight. (US No. 692,507) It makes use of Cadmium as the oxidizable element, an oxide of Cobalt or Nickel as its depolarizer, and flakes of a conducting substance, such as Graphite.

1936
Radium E, the first synthetic radioactive substance, is first produced in the US by Dr. John Jacob Livingood at the University of California at Berkeley by bombarding the element Bismuth with neutrons.
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1878
The first commercial telephone exchange is the world is installed in New Haven, Connecticut to serve twenty-one subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. For the first six weeks, the exchange will not be operated at night. The first experimental message sent over the system is “Ahoy, ahoy.” The first operator is George W. Coy. A Bell franchise had been awarded for New Haven and Middlesex Counties to Coy on November 3, 1877, paid for by incorporating the system into a company with two financial partners. Coy improvised the first crude switchboard, building it from carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire. The concept of interconnecting phone wires had been tried before by three other men, but none of them had operated commercially. Click here to view the original patent application for the telephone exchange.

1930
Austrian-Hungarian physicist Dr. Julius Edgar Lilienfeld is issued a patent in Canada for the first solid-state amplifying transistor.

1952
The Bank of America and SRI sign a contract for the development, construction, and testing of a pilot model Electronic Recording Machine – Accounting (ERMA) to provide service to the bank’s twelve branches at a cost of US$850,000 over four years, with an additional $25,000 for subcontracts. However, engineers will later estimate that the grand total of the project was closer to US$10 million.

The EDVAC, one of the earliest electronic computers, runs its first production program.

1958
Construction begins on the first privately owned thorium-uranium atomic reactor in Buchanan, New York. The Consolidated Edison Company’s Indian Point 1 nuclear generating station is the plant designed to utilize uranium-235 supplemented with thorium-232. It will be built at a cost of one hundred million dollars on the former site of an amusement park. It will produce 275,000kW of power for New York City. It will be decommissioned on October 31, 1974 due to a lack of an emergency cooling system for the reactor core.
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The crew over at Topless Robot, one of my favorite blogs, recently posted what must be the geekiest Craigslist ad ever… and maybe the most romantic for those gamer girls out there (where ever you’re hiding). It was posted on March 11th for the University Mall in Chapel Hill, North Carolina under the title “GameStop Girl, I want to kill robotic zombie terrorists with you – m4w”.

Dearest GameStop Girl,

When I walked into your store that fateful Tuesday, I expected only to find a smattering of half-decent titles tucked back there amongst the used 360 games. Instead I found you, surrounded by a beam of light, halfway between Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty 3. Your gorgeous dark hair was radiant in contrast with the rainbow of colors on the deluxe Bioshock behind you. The Game of the Year held no interest for me when I saw you look up and smile, even though both could hold me in Rapture.

You commanded the register when it was my turn to check out with the Orange Box. Yes, I was finally getting to play Portal. Lucky me, you said with the cutest smile. Lucky me, I thought, and then knew you had the Portal to my heart. I could care less if the cake is a lie, I’d still want to share it with you.

Oh GameStop Girl, how you make my heart meter skip a beat. If you were being held captive in a mountain fortress by a ruthless mutant mafia gangboss and I had to fight my way through 16 levels of fire-breathing undead ninjas with swords the size of small ponies, I would find a way, even if, after every level, a small man continued to taunt me by saying that you were in another castle. EVEN IF.

So, yes, GameStop Girl, I want to kill robotic zombie terrorists with you. You can even have the deluxe shotgun with explosive scattershot. I’ll just use this knife over here. I’ll do anything for you, just for the small, slightest chance that someday – someday – you and me could be a Wii.

Source: Craigslist via Kotaku