The Great Geek Manual

Resources

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.
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Resources

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.
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Resources

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.
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Resources

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.
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Resources

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.
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Resources

25 Great Pirate Bay Alternatives – The end of the Pirate Bay is nearing. Even if the deal with GGF doesn’t go through the current owners are likely to sell to one of the other interested parties. For many BitTorrent fans this means that they have to find an alternative. Luckily there are plenty of good ones out there.

50 Alternatives to Craigslist – Let’s face it, Craigslist can be a mess. Here are a few sites offering specialized services and a few sites offering general classifieds.

Academic Earth – A growing site featuring videos of university lectures on a vast array of subjects from notable schools around the country.

How to Create Your Own Planets Using Your Panoramas – Here’s a tutorial that shows you how to turn any panorama or landscape photograph into a spherical planet with a just a few clicks in Photoshop.

SignMyImage – SignMyImage is a utility that allows users to embed an invisible watermark on their images. Paid users can use ImageSpider to crawl the internet to find copies of images bearing these watermarks. Could be useful for photographer and graphic designers.

Space: The Final Junkyard – EU Infastructure has posted an informative infographic on the all junk that is orbiting the Earth. It’s an eye-opener.
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Resources

5 Ways to Spice Up Your Gmail Signature – Sometimes the same old email signature day in and day out just won’t cut it. If you’re a Gmail (Gmail) user looking for some ways to mix it up a bit, you’ve come to the right place. Here are five ways to spice up your Gmail signature.

16 Javascript Tutorials Inspired By Social Networking Sites – A compilation of great scripts that allow users to simulate social networking features on their own websites, including: dZone Voting Systems, Facebook Style Chat, Twitter-Like Searches.

17 Awesome Firefox Plugins For Twitter – Everyday we are noticing new Twitter tools are coming up. There are lots of Firefox plugins too for Twitter which will make your Twitter experience even better.

Chopping the Numeric Keypad off a Keyboard – Here are step-by-step directions for removing that irritating numeric keypad off a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. The project looks simple enough.

Codepad – Is a like a a collaborative debugging tool like Pastebin with a built-in compiler/interpreter. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Resources

15 Great And Free Photoshop Alternatives – Photoshop is very expansive and not all designers afford to buy the original license of it. So, some designers try to look for free alternatives to Photoshop.

The 35 Best iPhone Apps Of 2009 (So Far) – There are a massive number of clones, one-off gimmicks, volumes of books and reference material, and a never-ending supply of uninteresting games. So here are what is worth of your time and money.

50+ WordPress Theme Cheat Sheets – It is not that hard to customize a WordPress theme but starting from scratch requires some experience or assistance. Here are all the code snippets you might possibly need.

100 Websites to Teach Yourself Photography – So you are thinking of taking up photography as a hobby. Where do you begin? The age of point and shoot is over. Everyone can create beautiful, easily processed photos with a digital camera. These 100 photography tutorials will bring you up to speed so your friends will be breaking down your door to photograph their wedding or big event.

Download a Copy of The Pirate Bay – In just a few days The Pirate Bay will be passed onto its new owners, marking the end of an era but not the end of BitTorrent. The nostalgic torrenters among us might want to download a copy of the site for archival purposes. Everyone can download it straight from The Pirate Bay, conveniently packed into a massive torrent amounting to 21.3 Gigabytes of data.

Heapr – Here’s a search engine that combines Google, WolframAlpha, Twitter, Flickr, and other sites in a clean and fast interface all at once!

Sightseeing with Google Satellite Maps – Welcome to the original Google Satellite Maps repository! Think of it as armchair sightseeing, now with 12989 destinations.
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