The Great Geek Manual

From Around the Web

15 foolish high-tech stories – In a year plagued by foolish Wall Street executives, financial shenanigans and just plain craziness, there have been a ton of foolish happenings. What we have here are 15 of the most interesting foolish follies that should at least make you wonder about the sanity of the world.

Etch your own Printed Circuit Board – In less than an hour and with nothing more than common household materials, you can make your own custom circuit board.

First Time Machine – In this video, the Discovery Channel interviews a scientist who believes he will be able to use lasers to send particles back through time, but only to a point in time at which the machine was already active. [video]

Funny or Not? April Fools’ Day Pranks Roundup – All around the web, websites are have a laugh to commemorate April Fool’s Day. Check them all out starting here.

Gaming as a Gateway Drug: Getting Girls into Technology – This panel at SXSW sparked a debate on Twitter during the conference. The panelists talked about how more and more girls are getting into video games and some of them eventually work in the gaming industry.

HugeURL.com – More is the new less. Why have a TinyURL when you could have a huge one? Call it overcompensation if you will. You’re just jealous.

Most common passwords – The following list was compiled from the results of three publicly leaked databases containing 116,782 passwords. Looking through the list, my mind is boggled by how many people use the most basic possible password.

The Settlers of Catan – Wired looks at the German board game that’s taking the world by storm, selling a staggering 15 million copies. Some are calling it the “killer app” of board games. You can play the game online.

Top 10 IT Villains – Every industry has its share of villains, and the computing world is no different. Here’s the top ten people we love to hate.

Use your PC and Webcam as a Motion Detector – This tutorial will take you step-by-step through setting up your PC and Webcam to act as a motion-detecting and recording security camera system. Best part? The software required to do it is all open source.

Western Internet Censorship: The Beginning of the End? – Australia and Germany are the only liberal democracies proposing a mandatory internet censorship regime. All of the schemes operate, or are proposed to operate, through multi-million dollar national networks of censorship machines.
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From Around the Web

10 operating systems the world left behind – You’re not really supposed to love an operating system. It’s like your car’s hydraulic system, your digestive system or the global financial system. It’s supposed to do its job — and not get in your way while you’re doing yours. But like your car, your guts and the economy, computers are more complicated than they seem. And so are our feelings about them.

101 Undiscovered Freebies – PC World scoured the Internet to come up with 101 innovative, entirely free downloads and services.

13 Great WordPress Speed Tips & Tricks for MAX Performance – Performance is a key factor for any successful website. And since WordPress is becoming more popular than ever, it will only be at its best when raised in the proper conditions. Here are a few things to try if you find that your WordPress site is not performing as well as it could be due to high traffic or hidden issues you don’t know about.

Cool New Things You Can Do with Your Mobile – A video of David Pogue discussing the latest trends in cellular phone and information technology at the TED conference. Both funny and informative.

Internet Archive – The single largest depository of Open Source content has moved its data from racks of Linux machines to a Sun MD, a 3 petabyte data center in a liquid cooled shipping container, sitting in Sun’s Santa Clara campus court yard. Check out the interactive tour of how it works and what it looks like.

Wikirank – An analytical tool that measures the popularity of trending topics on wikipedia. You can compare up to four topics and generate nifty embeddable graphs.
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From Around the Web

10 Best Firefox Addons for Security and Privacy – Security and privacy are major concerns these days. These addons will get you off on the right foot.

10 Hot Netbooks – Why are so many people buying netbooks? Well, they’re light as a feather and fulfill all the basic computing needs. But it’s the killer price that seals the deal for many. Here we highlight top-selling netbooks, from the (relatively) high end to the under-$300 range.

10 Unusual Operating Systems – This is Life has posted a gallery of screenshots of some of the most far-out operating systems you’ve never run.

Anonymity and Privacy Should Not Add Up to Prison Time – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has urged the United States Sentencing Commission to reject modifications to federal sentencing guidelines that would require extra prison time for people who use technology that hides one’s identity or location.

Are we headed into an era of “dumb tech?” – After a decade of unparalleled one-upmanship – the gigahertz race, the megapixel race, the storage race – we are now hitting a wall. So where does that leave the CE industry? Well, it’s now a race to the bottom. Video cameras that once cost $500 will now cost about $200.

Deep Packet Inspection Puts Open Internet at Risk – Ben Scott of Free Press claims in a new paper that “Potential abuses of Deep Packet Inspection put the Internet as we know it at risk.” And a follow-up at Ars Technica.

Do You REALLY Need a College Degree to Get a Programming Job? – There’s plenty of articles about the shortage of skilled IT workers, and the difficulty experienced by companies in finding qualified software developers. The whining would be far more credible if the Want Ads didn’t have a silly, arbitrary qualification: a college degree.
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From Around the Web

10 Must-Have Gmail Filters Available for Download – Lifehacker rounds up Firefox add-ons too new for official approval, but seriously useful. They include the ability to automate download management and image uploading, queue up MP3s, and manage Gmail tasks anywhere.

10 Ways to Automatically & Manually Backup MySQL Database – There are several ways to backup MySQL data. In this article we’ll look at how to backup your databases using different methods, we will also learn how to achieve an automatic backup solution to make the process easier.

Anatomy of Cloud Computing – Cloud computing is changing the way we provision hardware and software for on-demand capacity fulfillment. Gone are the days of idle CPUs, empty memory, or unused drive space. The cloud charges us for what we use as we use it. Niall Kennedy provides an overview of the cloud hosting landscape with a particular focus on cloud utilization by web companies.

Behind the Scenes at Mininova – Most BitTorrent sites operate in the shadows, with operators who rarely speak in public and guard their identities closely. Mininova is not one of those sites and in a new interview, company directors Erik Dubbelboer and Niek van der Maas reveal a little more about running one of the world’s biggest BitTorrent sites.

BitTorrent Freed Music, and Now It’s Yours – The Internet and file-sharing networks like BitTorrent have shifted music promotion from the labels to the people. Increasingly, record labels are losing control over what music the masses are listening to, and according to some musicians this is is actually a good thing.
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10 Annoying Habits of a Geeky Spouse – Everyone has annoying habits, and a sizable part of every successful marriage is learning to live with those things each other does that annoy you.

10 Excellent Open Source and Free Alternatives to Photoshop – Six revisions shares a collection of 10 excellent examples of open source and free alternatives to Adobe Photoshop.

12 Excellent Tools for Picking a Domain Name – Selecting the perfect domain name for your website is the most important, and oftentimes hardest, step in establishing a web presence. Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you ease the burden of checking available domains and suggesting similar names that are related to your searches.

15 Free Downloads To Pep Up Your Old PC – Got an aging Windows laptop or desktop computer, but money’s too tight to buy a new one? These free tools for Windows will help breathe new life into your old machine.

15 Inspiring Bruce Lee Quotes That Aspiring Hackers Can Learn From – Bruce Lee is highly regarded as one of the most influential martial artist of all time. His mental strength contributed much to his success. He believed that any knowledge ultimately led to self-knowledge, and said that his chosen method of self-expression was martial arts.

Lecturer makes YouTube his Classroom – A computer science lecturer at the University of NSW, who has pioneered the use of YouTube at Australian universities, is offering high school students the chance to get started on their computing degrees early, and what’s more, he using board games to do it.

Stream Your Music Library to Any Computer – If you spend all day on a series of different computers, like a university student does, this is a must-read tutorial. It explains how to use an Apache server to turn your computer into a remote jukebox.

25 Best Tech Interface Photoshop Brushes – The Web Design Leger shares a really astonishing brush set for creating high-tech interfaces.
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From Around the Web

21 Guilty Pleasures for Geeks – Tech Radar counts down the habits that all Geeks share but few like to speak of.

50 Things Every Mac Geek Should Know – If you consider yourself a hardcore Mac user, here are a few things you ought to know.

How to keep the Government from Spying on you – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a “Surveillance Self-Defense” site, designed to provide Americans with practical advice on how to keep their government from snooping on their private communications.

Music That Makes You Stupid – CalTech grad student Virgil Griffith has correlated music preferences with SAT scores using University groupings off Facebook. It makes for intriguing, if unscientific, reading.

Pirate Bay Accused Does Remote Sysadmin From Courtroom – “A server was down and I restarted it,” Fredrik Neij said. He is one of the four founders of The Pirate Bay that stand accused of “complicity to making copyrighted material accessible” (yes, that’s the charge). “We have Internet access [in the court room] so it was no problem.”

Technology is Amazing, and Nobody’s Happy – A clip from one of the last episodes of Late Night to be hosted by Conan O’Brien features a conversation with the comedian Louis C.K. During this conversation, C.K. makes the observation that “Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy.” And by “everything,” he means technology.

XMarks – Is a new site that works like a giant reputation engine for the internet. Based on the principal that, if it’s bookmarked, it’s good, the site operates through a Firefox Add-on.

Why computer voices still don’t sound human – Slate.com explains the difficulties preventing the next big break through in text-to-voice technologies.
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From Around the Web

20 Useful PHP Components & Tutorials for Everyday Project – Learn to build a simple CMS, create charts, paginate navigation pages, and resize images with the tutorials listed in this directory.

40+ Places to Sell Your Designs Online – Whether you’re a graphic designer, web designer or other creative professional, finding work in a down economy can be tough. And what do you do when a client doesn’t want your brilliant design, or you have no work to do to begin with?

42 Amazing Sources of Lego Inspiration and Creativity – Everybody loves Legos, but some people are more gifted than others, leaving the rest of us untalented hacks to sit back and gawk.

Enigma Desktop 2.0 – If you’re looking for an amazing minimalist theme for your Windows desktop, you have to check this one out! There’s a bit more information over at Lifehacker.

How to Hide Anything inside JPG Files – My Top Clip explains how to conceal just about any type of file inside a jpg using nothing more than your run-of-the-mill compression software.

Top 10 Tools for Your Blog or Web Site – Lifehacker shares links that make having your own hosted web domain cheaper and easier than ever. Tools to help anyone launch and maintain an internet presence.

Viking Defense – Another tower defense game, with Vikings.

What’s a Hulu? – Mental Floss explains The Origins of 8 High-Tech Names. Here are the stories behind the naming of TiVo, BlackBerry and more – including what they were almost called.
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From Around the Web

10 Ways To Speed Up Torrent Downloads – This tutorial runs down the settings you should start out with when you turn to bittorrent to find your media. Most people just download a client and jump in, but a small bit of refinement goes a long way.

20 Best iPhone Photo & Video Applications – A directory of some great 3rd party apps that enhance iPhone photography by letting you edit and share your photos easily with friends.

Etherpad – This online collaboration tool is unique in that it allows multiple people work on the same document at the same time, in real time. For a cool demo, watch Paul Graham write a thread in real-time. It could be a tool for coming to a better understanding of your own writing process.

Jurassic Web – Slate Magazine takes a look at the Internet of 1996 through the eyes of the Internet Archive with more that a bit of nostalgia.

Programming Contests and Puzzles Online – GrokCode encourages users to practice their code-fu by participating in this directory of competitions, exercises, and puzzles.

OneSwarm Turns P2P into F2F – Oneswarm is an application that allows users to control how they share files, allowing them to limit transfers to a select group of friends, thus avoiding RIAA entanglements.

Tircd – Tircd presents twitter as an irc channel. You can connect to tircd and twitter through your irc client.

Turn a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X Netbook – Create a 9-inch, 3G-equipped, nearly pocket-sized computer to run OS X on a budget.

The Ultimate Guide to Kindle 2.0 – Online Degree World offers up a directory of hacks, support, tips, and news stories about the new Kindle.
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