The Great Geek Manual

From Around the Web

Bing vs. Google vs. Yahoo: Feature Smackdown – PC World compares the top features of three major search engines -Bing, Google, and Yahoo – in the ultimate search engine battle royale. The verdict seems to be that Google wins, with Yahoo close behind.

FileTwt – FileTwt brings filesharing to twitter. With FileTwt you can now easily upload and tweet about your files for free. There’s a 20MB size limit.

iPhone 3 Rumors – The TGR Blog has a great graphical round-up of features expected in the next iPhone release. My question is, where’s the grappling hook?

Opera 10 beta – The latest version of Opera is available. Experience a surprising array of new features, a fresh look and feel, and enhanced speed and performance. Since the alpha release we’ve now turned our attention to features.

Search is too important to leave to one company – Cory Doctorow argues that it may seem as unlikely as a publicly edited encyclopedia, but the internet needs a publicly controlled search engine.

Thank you, Napster – The Globe and Mail looks back at a decade of filesharing technology, beginning with Napster. Read the rest of this entry » » »

From Around the Web

11 Things You Didn’t Know About Steve Jobs – What makes a great entrepreneur tick? What drives them to go the extra mile to success? These lesser known facts about Steve Jobs might just give you a clue.

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization – Am I the only one who gets excited over infographics? Something about all that organized data sparks the imagination. Of course, I was the kind of kid who alphabetized by alphabet soup so…

Bing vs. Google – A side by side comparison of Bing and Google show a comical bit of bias on the part of Microsoft. [More evidence here] This may be why they registered BingSucks.com before anyone else could get to it.

The Car that Runs on Air and Magnets – Could we all be driving cars that don’t require a single drop of fuel in another decade? One company thinks so, and it’s about damn time.

Cory Doctorow & Charlie Stross Panel – Two popular sci-fi authors discuss privacy and copyright reform at the Open Rights Group’s panel discussion, “Resisting the All-Seeing Eye.” Read the rest of this entry » » »

From Around the Web

3 Easy Ways To Restart Your Computer Over The Internet – Occasionally useful, especially for folks who developing or testing web apps and folks for download torrents at home while they’re at work.

Google Wave: A Complete Guide – Mashable runs down the features that have Google fan boys squee-ing with delight. So long Yahoo Mail, it looks like there’s a new most popular e-mail service in town!

How alternative search engines like Wolfram Alpha and Cuil can succeed – Is there room in the market for search engines that are nowhere near as good as the big names, but that nevertheless yield good results?

Prey – Prey is a simple and lightweight program that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

Reading and Writing to Excel Spreadsheets in Python – Dev Explorer provides a brief introduction to using Excel and Python in tandem.

Seven Reasons Why Wordpress 2.8 Is Better Than Ever – While investigating whether or not I should upgrade my Wordpress installation, I came across this article. I’m not entirely convinced, yet.

The Web’s most Dangerous Keywords – Which is the most dangerous keyword to search for using public search engines these days? It’s “screensavers” with a maximum risk of 59.1 percent, according to McAfee’s recently released report “The Web’s Most Dangerous Search Terms“.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

From Around the Web

10 Golden Rules of Social Media – Aliza Sherman doles out some good advice on posting to the net these days.

1964 Antique MODEM Live Demo – There probably aren’t a lot of people out there who will get as excited about this as I did, but this is a video of an authentic acoustic modem connecting a modern laptop to Wikipedia. Very cool.

21 Essential Steps to Make Your PC Better/Faster/Stronger – A sucker buys a new PC at the first signs of a slowdown. A savvy power user gives his aged PC a fighting chance for redemption. From tweaking your OS to compressing files to overclocking your videocard or CPU, there are plenty of ways to tune up a computer, and none require a trip to Bob’s House of New PCs.

$800 Killer Gaming PC – Over the course of the last year, the power of the components that you can purchase for just $800 has drastically improved with the downturn in the economy. What you can build for less than a thousand buck today would have been difficult to find for less than two thousand back then.

Apple Lisa Operating System – Play with an emulation of a vintage 1983 Apple computer. Check out the manual in PDF format here.

Audiobooks 1.0 for iPhone – A free way to access an 1,800 volume library encompassing more than 9,800 hours of content. Although Audiobooks is advertising supported, the ads take relatively little screen space and are otherwise innocuous. This app isn’t perfect, but it’s free, the book selection impressive and the fast start function is just brilliant. Read the rest of this entry » » »

From Around the Web

6 Ways To Sync Music To Your iPhone Without iTunes – By default, iTunes is the only media player that you can use to sync your iPhone and iPod Touch with your computer. However, iTunes is only supported in Mac and Windows, which means Linux users with iPhones will have to find an alternative way to sync their iPhones, or at least get their music into the mobile device.

10 Twitter Hacks For Your Wordpress Blog – Twitter on the brain? These hacks may be for you. Twitter is, afterall, a powerful marketing and promotion tool that no active blogger can ignore.

30 Tutorials On Converting A PSD To XHTML And CSS – 30 of the best tutorials on web for converting A PSD to a XHTML & CSS layout. These tutorials you will learn the process on how to create a Photoshop web layout and be able to convert it into a valid XHTML & CSS web page.

Is A Terminator Scenario Possible? – H+ asks several roboticists, AI workers, SF writers, and other techie types a simple-minded question. Is a Terminator-like scenario possible? And if so, how likely is it?

Mac Hacks: 17 AppleScripts To Make Your Life Easier – Quite a few AppleScripts are available on the Web, ready for you to use, so you don’t even need to look at their code. This article presents you with 17 of the most useful ones.

“Repurpose” Documentary Video – A video that reveals some of the brilliant hacking scene in Montreal, centering on the Foulab collective and hackspace.

Why Isn’t Wireless Net Access Available Everywhere? – You might remember a time when everyone—from telco giants to corner coffee shops—was furiously serving up Wi-Fi. McDonald’s became an Internet café, and dozens of municipalities nationwide were racing to set up open hot spots. Your broadband connection was about to be as portable as your cell phone. That was like five years ago.

Windows 7: The Complete Guide (Now With RC1!) – Here’s everything of value that has been learned about Win 7, packed in a complete, easy-to-read guide.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

From Around the Web

Apple’s 11 Most Intriguing Computer Designs – From the first Apple to the MacBook Air, Macs have been regarded as technologically innovative, beautiful in product design and, over time, become just plain cool.

Computer memory to last a billion years – In an attempt to address the problem of a digital dark age engineers at Berkeley have developed a technique called Nanoscale Reversible Mass Transport for Archival Memory that is intended to combine high bit-density and deep-time survival.

How Cyberbullying Prevention Act Could Land You In Prison – The next time you let loose on some asshole online, you’d better make sure that asshole isn’t a kid…

How Silicon Chips Are Made – It may seem an impossible transformation, but these fiendishly complex components are made from nothing more glamorous than sand. Such a transformative feat isn’t simple. The production process requires more than 300 individual steps. However, they can be neatly summed up in just ten…

Lawyer: RIAA must pay back all $100M it has collected – Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson has now gotten involved in two more file-sharing lawsuits, including the Jammie Thomas retrial in Minnesota. But it’s in the other, lesser-known case, that Nesson and a former student demand the RIAA pay back all $100 million it has collected in settlement money over the years.

Plugging In $40 Computers – What would you do with a $40 Linux computer the size of a three-prong plug adapter? It’s a tiny plastic box that you plug into an electric outlet. There’s no display. But there is an Ethernet jack to connect to a home network and a U.S.B. socket for attaching a hard drive, camera or other device.

The TED Commandments – Rules every speaker needs to know – One of the reasons the speeches are so good is that TED’s organizers send upcoming speakers a stone tablet, engraved with the “TED Commandments”. Amy Tan in her TED Talk described the arrival of the TED Commandments as “something that creates a near-death experience; but near-death is good for creativity…”

What 13,500 pages micro-etched into nickel looks like – The good folks over at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena who organized the Data and Art show that the Rosetta Disk was in, were kind enough to get some really nice photos taken of the micro-etched data side of the disk. What you are looking at is over 13,000 tiny pages describing over 1,500 languages. To see each page you would need a 500x microscope.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

From Around the Web

Build you Own Recession Special – PC Magazine walks readers through the parts and components necessary to build a “surprisingly robust” system for only four hundred dollars.

Duck Duck Go – A new search engine that can recognize special category pages, calculations, phone numbers, zip codes, ISBN numbers, product codes, as well as street and IP adresses. It’s displays about five of the most relevant sites to prevent info overload, and does a pretty good job keeping them relevant.

Five Reasons Why Humanoid Robots Will Someday Fight Our Wars – Robots are officially on the battlefield—UAVs like the Predator and Reaper patrol the skies while militarized bomb-disposal robots like the Talon detonate explosives on the ground. But where are the humanoids? Roboticist and author Daniel H. Wilson makes the case for a humanoid robot army.

Mozilla Labs Jetpack – Mozilla has released an experimental program, Jetpack, that allows anyone who can build a web page to build a Firefox add-on. This means that if you only know HTML, you can build simple extensions for the popular browser. Jetpack also supports CSS design and Javascript.

The Quad-Core, 1-kW, Liquid-Cooled Desk – Popular Mechanics outlines the construction of a serious cool desk that contains its own computer.

Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies – A lone group of Swiss scientists have been using scattered LEDs, neural circuity, and an army of miniature robots to explore the very basis of good and evil. No, you aren’t reading the back cover of a DVD in the “one dollar each, please get this trash out of our store” bin of your local blockbuster -this research is very real and very, very awesome.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

From Around the Web

10 Amazing Gadgets You Can’t Get Here – Do tiny TVs, intelligent cell phones, and superpowerful netbooks and headphones make you drool? Get a tissue–you can’t buy any of this terrific tech in the U.S. just yet.

The 10 coolest jobs in tech – They may not have high wages or great career prospects, but there are some jobs so desirable that you’d pay to do them.

Cory Doctorow discusses DRM at Microsoft Research – This talk was originally given to Microsoft’s Research Group and other interested parties from within the company at their Redmond offices on June 17, 2004.

HOW TO: Exchange Business Cards With Twitter @Replies – twtBizCard, from the same people behind the beautiful yet simplistic twtapps, makes its grand entrance as quite possibly the simplest way to send and receive business cards. Now exchanging business cards is as easy as sending an @reply to a Twitter name with the hashtag #twtBizCard.

Nerf Sentry Gun – This Nerf Sentry Gun was developed as a final project for Cornell University’s CS1114 Matlab Robotics class. It features a motion-controlled Nerf gun equipped with optical recognition software that allows the device to recognize identification badges.

New search engines aspire to supplement Google – Despite what you may think, Google is not the only player. New search engines that are popping up across the Web strive to make searches faster, smarter, more personal and more visually interesting. Read the rest of this entry » » »