7 Surprising Kick-Ass Things You Can Do with Google Sketchup – Sketchup is a free 3D modelling tool developed based on the philosophy that by giving people a small set of powerful, intuitive tools, you can lower the barrier of entry to 3D modeling, so that almost anyone can make quality 3D models with just a couple of sessions of practice.

100 Incredible Open Courses for the Ultimate Tech Geek – Here are 100 free resources for expanding your understanding the more advanced intricacies of computing.

101 really useful tips for Mac Beginners – No matter how long you’ve been using a Mac for there’s always more to learn and useful tips to discover.

Bookase.com – an online tool to search and compare price of new and used books among major ecommerce bookstores around the world.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave – This e-book’s complete contents are available for free online. Whet you appetite now for when it’s finally freed from beta.

How to make a district 9 Weapon – It may be a bit late, but this homemade film prop would look just as kick-ass sitting around the house as it would as part of a Halloween costume.

LisThings – This is an excellent virtual desktop corkboard that lets you create Post-It notes that you can see whenever you log into the site.

Spreeder – a free online speed-reading training tool. Paste in your desired text, tell it how many words per minute, and hit play.

Geocities Saved – ASCII has announced that its team has managed to archive quite a large portion of the websites hosted by the now-defunct Geocities.

Discussion

400,000 XO Laptops in Uruguay Cannot be Wrong
Are we becoming a gadget addicted generation?
Calling America’s bluff on Internet gambling
I Kept Playing — The Costs Of My Gaming Addiction
Why is it we don’t have artificial intelligence?

Entertainment

Colbert’s Best Robot Moments
Goodbye GeoCities: 7 Retro Things We’ll Miss Forever
Microsoft brings the Jingle for Bing to schools.

Tech News

Bloggers Mugged by Regulators: The FTC wants to police book reviews on Twitter
Carriers Eye Pay-As-You-Go Internet
The Internet is about to die. Literally die!
Yahoo Hires Lap Dancers For Hack Day, Apologizes

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.

Sublime Text – Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose. It’s a white-on-black, keyboard-friendly editor chocked full of powerful, but unobtrusive, features.

Top 5 Websites To Learn How To Hack Like A Pro – Whether you’re a college student, a middle-aged networking guru or a wife and mother fascinated by the world of online games – everyone occasionally comes across a situation where some form of hacking would make life a whole lot easier. MakeUseOf rounds up some useful resources to that end.

Tour of Google’s Chicago Headquarters – You probably knew that Google was a California-based technology company, but did you know they have 67 locations across the world, including one in Chicago?

Ubuntu 9.10 – Almost Perfect – Here’s a quick look and what makes this the best release of any Linux distro. Ever.

Discussion

10/GUI is a project that seeks to reinvent desktop human-computer interaction
According to Slate, Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.
On The Internet, Nobody Knows You’re Not In The USA
Why Google isn’t evil
Why Non-Geeks are Scared of Computers.
Why You Can’t Get Decent Earphones for Less Than $100

Entertainment

5 Creative Works of Laptop Computer Art
CollegeHumor has posted a video of Every Nickelback Wikipedia Page Vandalism Ever.
This is the best use of Twitter EVER!
Why Larry Ellison hates Cloud computing
The WikiReader is a $99 handheld device which contains a copy of the entire Wikipedia.

Tech News

Acer overtakes Dell in PC shipments
Computer Makers Aim to Banish Boot-Up Blues
Google Accounts for 6% of All Internet Traffic
Google Wave’s Little Secret: It Already Works On The iPhone
Microsoft teams with ‘Family Guy’ creator to promote Windows 7
Worst of recession over for the technology sector

5 Cool Websites to Play Chess Online !

15+ amazing anti IE resources – I hate Internet Explorer, and I’m pretty 99% of you do too. I have no idea why people are even still using it, but here’s what you can do to help stop it.

100 Excellent RSS Feeds for Lifelong Learners

101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site – When a massive overhaul is just too much work to undertake at one time. Instead, tackle these quick fixes over time, and you’ll be able to improve your Web site with minimal pain.

Everything You Need To Know About USB 3.0 – When Seagate first demonstrated SuperSpeed USB 3.0 in January at CES, we were promised that USB 3.0-compatible devices would be appearing by the end of 2009.

Google Wave First Look – If you’re not one of the 100,000 lucky users who gets an invitation to Google Wave today, don’t fret. You can check out Google Wave right here.

Nudge – A web-based rhythm generator that lets users record their own techno beat.

Spezify – A very visual meta search engine with a Flash interface. Excellent for searching the net for opinions on a current topic. Includes results in the form of images, videos, social networks, and webpages.

YouTorrent – Here’s a great torrent aggregation service that allows you to search for torrent files in real time.

Discussion

How To Fix the Airlines’ Stupid Gadget Rules
Why Microsoft’s ‘Courier’ Tablet Will Never Exist

Entertainment

Buildings That Look Like the Death Star – Sphereical Buildings
Convicted Hacker Left in Charge of Prison Computer System
Top 10 Funniest Google Suggest Results

Tech News

40 percent of Twitter is “pointless babble”

6 Facebook Hack Codes And Tips To Show Off Your Geeky Skills – The top 6 of my favorite Facebook “hack” codes and tips to other Facebook enthusiasts out there.

10 Revealing Infographics about the Web – Six Revisions offers up a variety of infographics and visualizations associated with the internet. You might just learn a thing or two about the web by looking at these awesome artworks!

Amazon SimpleDB – Last week, Amazon Web Services unveiled another service in its portfolio of simple web-driven services. The Simple Database Service. A counterpart to Amazon S3, SimpleDB allows developers to create and search large databases, but there are a few wrinkles that set it apart from the standard relational database model.

Most common passwords – If you see a password you use on this list, change it. Though, honestly, who still uses “password” as a password. That’s so 1995.

WhiteSmoke – This much-vaunted editing software claims to be as good an English professor when it comes to finding and pointing out the flaws in your writing, and it’s available for free! Is this the end of run-on sentences here at The Great Geek Manual? Tune in next week to find out.

Entertainment

Tech News

Cell Phones by the Numbers – Cellphones.org has posted an infographic on cellphone use that may be of interest to tech nerds. Turns out their are 271 million cells in the U.S. alone. Wow.

Five Free Tools for Multi-Monitor Computer Set-Ups – Several freeware and open source tools available for download to help you harness the power of multi-display set ups and get you up and running quickly.

How to Draw the Voronoi Diagram – Voronoi diagrams are fascinating geometric models because they can be used to describe almost literally everything from cell phone networks to radiolaria, at every scale, quantum foam to cosmic foam. Check out the short version at Flickr.

If You Printed The Internet – Creative Cloud has posted a great set of infographics on how much ink and paper it would take to print off a copy of the internet. The numbers turn out to be quite dizzying.

Perfect Full Page Background Image – CSS Tricks explains how to create a scalable background image without any whitespace on your website.

TWIP – An awesome comic series drawn by Greg Williams that illustrates some of the funniest comments made on Twitter.

Discussion

50 Cent: Piracy Is A Part Of The Marketing
Dear Facebook: Advice for the Young and the Networked
Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?

Entertainment

Facebook punks TechCrunch with a Fax This Photo feature
Want Your Own Dinosaur? Place Your Bids

Tech News

Google Offers 2 Million Digital Book Titles for the Espresso Book Machine
IEEE Stamps “Approved” on 802.11n Wi-Fi Standard

10 Things you should know about moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 – If you skipped Windows Vista and stuck with Windows XP, chances are good that you are now seriously considering moving to Windows 7 after it’s released on October 22. Not only should you begin planning for your operating system migration, but you should begin learning as much as you can about Windows 7.

50 Greatest Apple Wallpapers – Check it out. Blaberize has posted 50 downloaded desktop images featuring Apple’s iconic logo.

Build an analog TV station – With the transition to digital TV, the FCC has abandoned the old analog format. Luckily, you can take advantage of this and set up your own analog TV station. The FCC has a tool on their site to see what channels are open in your area to broadcast in.

Build your Own File Server – Intac walks you through the simple process of building your own Ubuntu-run stack.

Fonolo – Maybe the best website ever, Fonolo calls to large, impersonal corporations, presses the right buttons and stays on hold for you until a human comes on the line. Then your phone rings and voilà, you can talk to a live person about your account. Fonolo even gives you the option to record your conversation as an MP3, just in case your chat with customer support becomes an argument.

Freenet – free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish “freesites” (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in “darknet” mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect.

Hierarchy of Digital Distractions – Information is Beautiful presents a Maslow-esque pyramid of electronic priorities in the social life of the average web addict. Beautifully designed.

How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, Start to Finish – LifeHacker has a great update on it’s classic tutorial on how to run OS X on a PC. This version actually involves less work than the previous version.

inumbr – A great service that provides users with free, temporary, and anonymous phone numbers. Similar to e-mail forwarding services. If you’ve been nervous about giving out your phone number for fear of getting put on telemarketing lists, bookmark this now.

YourHackerz.com – I never thought services like this were legitimate, but evidently they are, if this article is to be believed. For just a hundred dollars, they claim to be able to get the password of basically any free e-mail service.

Discussion

50 things that are being killed by the internet
Are Dictionaries Becoming Obsolete?
Is speech-to-text the new touch for cell phones?
The Web will dismember universities, just like newspapers.

Entertainment

Backyard Geniuses: 10 Incredibly Cool DIY Projects
Cirque du Soleil show in space
How Team of Geeks Cracked Spy Trade
List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions
Steampunk Laptop Looks Old, Works
Why Parents should be banned from Facebook.

Tech News

Microsoft pushes for single global patent system… dun dun dun
Teenager invents £23 solar panel that could be solution to developing world’s energy needs … made from human hair.

18 Cool Things Windows 7 Does That Vista Doesn’t – There aren’t many changes to the overall look of Windows 7. Microsoft seems to have spent its time on the feedback it received from Vista, but there are 18 features that are impressive.

Midomi – a musical search engine powered by your voice. All you have to do is sing or hum the song that’s stuck in your head.

Olark.com – This service inserts a tiny window on top of your website that allows users to chat live. It’s quick, simple, and it looks a lot better than a shoutbox.

PDFPirate – An online tool that strips .PDF files of all copy restrictions, so that it can freely be duplicated and manipulated.

Wikispeedia – Yet another Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon type game where users are present with two articles to travel between as quickly as possible.

Discussion

Five Features We Want to See in Firefox

Entertainment

Physical Storage vs. Digital Storage

Tech News

STUDY: Social Media Is for Narcissists
Tax authorities using social networks to find tax cheats
Tim Hwang has just announced ROFLCon II, a follow-up to the infamous conference on Internet culture and memes held at MIT.
Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text

12 Words You Can Never Say in the Office – Business has put together a list of outdated tech terms, phrases that you shouldn’t be using at work anymore because they will make you seem old. This is especially true if you’re looking for a new job.

Find a Flickr page from the .jpg’s URL – Tekzilla has finally found a way to find out who a Flickr photo belongs to based on its location! About time. Now you have no excuse not to give proper credit.

The Geek’s Guide to Seattle – A virtual tour of some of the region’s most interesting and notable technology locations, including Bill Gates’ House.

A Geek’s Tour of Silicon Valley – A gallery of photos of the Valley’s most historical and notable technology centers, beginning with the Hewlett-Packard garage.

LicenseCrawler – a free, portable tool to retrieve license keys and serial numbers from the depths of your registry. Sure, you could crawl your registry manually to extract all the info yourself, but why bother when LicenseCrawler is there to do it for you?

Your Guide To Music On The Web – Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music.

Discussion

How Many Marriages Started Online?

Entertainment

Seven Crimes That Will Get You a Smaller Fine than Filesharing
Top 10 Geekiest Constructed Languages

Tech News

Judge: MPAA Hasn’t Proven Isohunt Users Broke U.S. Laws
New Attack Cracks Common Wi-Fi Encryption in a Minute