The Great Geek Manual

Resources

20 Smart Ways to Discover New Music – Tech Radar rounds up the best places online to find your new favourite band, beginning with Last.fm and moving on to many you may not have heard of before.

Choosing the Perfect CMS – Noupe has posted this excellent article on the comparative features of the most popular CMS systems, including Frog, Joomla, and WordPress.

DateLine – A small, simple app which displays a linear calendar on your desktop in a transparent window. It provides easy access to iCal by double clicking on a day. The background and text colors are customizable with support for transparency.

Hid.Im – A Hidim turns a torrent into a regular PNG image. You save the png yourself. You can post it anywhere. People can decode it, but it can’t be searched for… it won’t turn up in searches for those torrents, unless you provide text that matches.

How Much Is A Petabyte? – Mozy Blog visualizes how much data is contained in a Petabyte.

iPhone apps – the 10 smartest and the 10 stupidest – The soon-to-be-released iPhone 3.0 software will offer a slew of new capabilities to iPhone developers. The Register names the 10 smartest and 10 stupidest apps that the iTunes App Store has to offer. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Resources

10 things to know about Google Chrome OS – Google has finally confirmed that it will be releasing an operating system – with the Google Chrome OS arriving to offer competition to Microsoft, Apple and a whole host of Linux distros.

20 great WordPress Footer Designs for Inspiration – Gone were the days when having some copyright information and a simple text navigation in footer was all you needed. Today, designers are finding out more great ways to decorate footers in website design. Herea are some great footer designs used in wordpress blogs.

Free-OCR.com – Free-OCR.com is a free online OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool. You can use this to perform OCR on any image you supply. This service is free, no registration or e-mail address required.

Programmer or Serial Killer – Can you tell a coder from a cannibal? Try to guess which of the following spent their time hacking computers, and which preferred hacking away at corpses. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Best Physics Blogs

Those physics has long been a topic of some fascination for me, it seems like the field is advancing more rapidly than can practically be followed by a laymen these day. Not to mention that even the most devoted enthusiasts have a rough time of wading through what the average physicist considers publishable copy. Luckily, there’s no shortage of physics blogs aimed armchair physicists. Here are a few of my favorites, carefully chosen for readability from across the web.

Bad Astronomy – Discover magazine’s astronomy blog written by astronomer Phil Plait. It focused on astronomy, with a frequent-but-short posts that are about an equal mix of hard science and entertainment.

Cocktail Party Physics – Fascinating forays into different areas of physics concerning pop culture.

Cosmic Log – A news blog covering physical sciences, space science, and technology innovation. It’s currently written by MSNBC science editor Alan Boyle.

Cosmic Variance – Discover magazine’s theoretical physics blog, written by seven or so physicists and astrophysicists, covering recent physics news, research, and discoveries. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Resources

5 Things to Know About The Pirate Bay Sale – The sale of The Pirate Bay to a Swedish software company, which plans to revamp the site and launch a new business model to compensate rights holders, has most everyone in the P2P community scratching their heads today.

16 Bitchin’ commands and shortcuts for Twitter – Everyone’s favorite social engine has a surprising range of search line commands.

How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network’s WEP Password with BackTrack – You already know that if you want to lock down your Wi-Fi network, you should opt for WPA encryption because WEP is easy to crack. But did you know how easy? Take a look.

How to Create the Ultimate Gaming Laptop Setup – As with any passion, you’re not satisfied with a mediocre setup. Some people pimp out their cars, other obsess over knickknacks, why shouldn’t you treat your passion with the same respect? Here are several tips on creating the ultimate gaming setup.

Readability – This amazing little script makes read articles on the web more enjoyable by removing all the clutter from webpages. It is a must if you read newspapers online with any frequency. It’s project page is over at Google Code.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Resources

6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations – Mashable takes a look at ways to graphically visualize the Twittersphere.

How to drive a Model T – Henry Ford Estate volunteer, Ed Hebb describes the intricacies of driving the ubiquitous Model T. Produced for the Henry Ford Estate’s “Centennial of the Model T ” celebration.

Inside the World’s Greatest Keyboard – PC World salutes the greatest keyboard EVER made, the IBM Model-M, the standard by which all other keyboards must be judged. (Check the Flickr photos.)

Never reboot Ubuntu Again – Ksplice Uptrack is a new service that lets you effortlessly keep your systems up to date and secure, without rebooting.

Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features – Firefox 3.5 is a pretty substantial update to the popular open-source browser, and it’s just around the corner. See what features, fixes, and clever new tools are worth getting excited about in the next big release.
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Resources

10 Hidden iPhone 3.0 Features – Now that many had the chance to play around with the new iPhone OS, plenty of undocumented features and nifty updates are starting to show up. PC World runs down the most notable of them.

10 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Firebug – Firebug is one of the most popular tools used by web developers. In this article, NetTuts take a closer look at ten of its most attractive features.

40+ Essential Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets – Because sometimes its just easier to have an image to consult than to go fishing on Google.

Breadbox 64 – Believe it or not, this is a Twitter client for the Commodore 64. It uses Contiki, a very nice embedded OS, and the MMC Replay cartridge with the RR-Net add on for the physical connection to the net. So if you’ve got one, break it out!

Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Bowl – AKA the “instant diabetes bowl” is the invention of food writer and critic Michael Ruhlman and the brainchild of his son.

Clicky Web Analytics – The newest kid on the web number block may actually has a leg up on Google. The only downside is that it’s a pay service.

Wandoojin.wordpress.com – A homeless man in DC has a wordpress blog which he posts images to using a remote camera. He hauls around a shopping cart around that not only contains his clothes, but is also festooned with cardboard signs advertising different web addresses.
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Resources

10 Easy ways to fix common WordPress headaches – There always seems to be some common WordPress problems that need you to dive into the code and hack away, here is a sample of plugins to help stop the hacking!

100 Firefox Add-Ons to Create a Truly Brilliant Browser – The Internet is full of smart tools these days, but only if you have the patience to go out and find them. So what if you could turn your browser into a little black book of awesome shortcuts, organizers, alerts and blogging assistants? Well, you can. Read on to learn about the 100 Firefox add-ons you need to create a truly brilliant browser that will make your life oodles easier.

40 Essential iPhone Applications For Web Designers – Web designers can be struck with inspiration at any time, but if you’re away from your computer there isn’t much you can do. Well, with an iPhone or an iPod Touch that has all changed. Now you can make notes, pick color schemes, ping servers and even FTP a file to your device, edit it and then upload it back. Why bother being tied down to a desk anymore when you can work just as easily from a beach if inspiration hits you?

Create a Clean and Colorful Web Layout in Photoshop – Tutorial9 explains how to create a clean corporate layout in Photoshop.

The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany – Germany is on the verge of censoring its Internet: The government – a grand coalition between the German social democrats and conservative party – seems united in its decision: On Thursday the parliament is to vote on the erection of an internet censorship architecture.

How To Ask the Boss If You Can Work Remotely – You’ve considered it. You’ve researched the implications. You’ve spoken to your significant other/landlord/dog and made sure they’re comfortable with the idea. You’re all ready to work remotely. All that remains is (cue suspenseful music) to ask the boss.

A look inside the fastest supercomputer in Europe – What is now the fastest supercomputer in Europe was recently unveiled at a research institute in Jülich, Germany. The computer, named Jugene, is capable of a massive one trillion computing operations per second.

Opera Unite – Opera 10 introduces a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Opera Unite harnesses the power of today’s fast connections and hardware, allowing all of us to help define the future landscape of the Web, one computer at a time. Read about how Opera Unite is going to change the way we interact on the Web on labs.opera.com.
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From Around the Web

10 Cool Things To Do With Your Old Laptop – Give your old stand-by a new lease on life!

22 Mixed Quality WordPress Hacks – WordPress needs no introduction among designers and writers. It’s usually known as a synonym for blogging. Now days every other WordPress blogs look more or less similar, to stand uniquely out from the rest, you need to tweak it a little bit by using quality hacks.

BitBlinder Free Anonymous BitTorrent – A brand new open source project which promises to cloak your torrents, hide your browsing and get round many obstructive filters.

The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection – In the 220 milliseconds after proceeding to checkout on an ecommerce site, a lot of interesting stuff happened to make Firefox change the address bar color and put a lock in the lower right corner. Using Wireshark, Jeff Moser walks through the process.

How AJAX Works: 10 Practical Uses For AJAX – AJAX has gotten more and more popular over the years, and has allowed web applications to act more and more like desktop applications. AJAX can provide a lot of additional functionality that could not be accomplished any other way. Read the rest of this entry » » »