The Great Geek Manual

This is a beautiful infographic of popular website emerging across the web. Click it to see a larger version.

I can’t say that I see much use for it, but it certainly is engrossing. After I first saw it, I spent quite a while searching it for site and people I equate with the internet. It’s better than a Where’s Waldo poster.

Source: formforce Flickr Account

Source: Found via Miss Geeky

This is a guest post from laptopLogic.com – make sure to check out their big selection of laptop reviews where you can find your ultimate inexpensive laptop.

With the Kindle 2 coming out, there’s a mass flurry over eBooks once again. The idea of carrying a digital library in ones pocket is absolutely thrilling to some (and sacrilege to others).

Who wants to spend hundreds of dollars on an ebook reader, though? Do you read enough books in a year to justify that cost? Assuming you spend a ‘mere’ $200 on an eReader, you could by 33 $5.99 paperbacks–or almost three books a month every month. Do you read that often?

If you’ve already got a smartphone of some sorts (or an audio player that is similar, a la iPod Touch), then you’ve already got the hardware to make your own eReader. With a few simple steps, you can have your own pocket library for less than $20.
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Over at PerlMonks, a user going by the handle Falkkin proposed to his girlfriend, Vortacist, who turns out to be a first-year robotics Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon. Yet another example of Geek Love.

Source: Perl Monks via Greg Laden

This physics engine from Umeå University is seriously entertaining. There’s no objective, but watching it’s effects at work is likely to eat up a good piece of your day.
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With the price of computers dropping like stones, the lifespan of the average household computer is rapidly dwindling. With perfectly decent laptops being offered for less than the average teen makes in a week on a summer job, it’s incredibly tempting to trade in last year’s model at the first sign of system lag. Especially since the deplorable scarcity of Windows installation disks in circulation leaves those of who grew up re-installing Windows 95 as a weekend pastime feeling a bit insecure.

Luckily there is a short list of simple steps you can take to significantly lengthen your computer’s practical lifespan.

01. Check what Programs are Running in Memory.
You can see a list of what processes are running on your system by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up the Close Program dialog box. If you check your processes while all the other programs are closed, the explorer, system tray, and your antivirus program are all that should be running. If anything else is running, such as an antivirus sheduler, RealPlayer, or WinAmp, move on to step two, pruning your startup processes. If you don’t recognize a process, check Google. For a more in-depth analysis of running processes, try TaskInfo. TaskInfo is a supped-up version of Window’s own task manager.

02. Prune your the Startup processes.
This can be accomplished using the built-in MSConfig utility. Press the Start button, select Run, and type “msconfig” into the dialog box. Once the System Configuration Utility pops up, go to the Startup tab and unselect superfluous processes. If you aren’t certain what processes are necessary and which and aren’t, just remember that Google is your friend. If you want to simplify this step, if you’re working with a large number of computer, or if you’re a real novice, I suggest you download StartupList. StartupList gives you a much deeper look into Window’s processes, which also makes it useful in finding and removing spyware and viruses.
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It’s irritating to have to clear your browser’s entire history. Over time, you come to rely on the address bar’s auto-complete feature, but eventually, everyone gets a mistyped address lodged in their history. It pops up every time you go to enter the correct address, and it can become a real pain.

Unfortunately, unlike Firefox, Internet Explorer doesn’t offer an easy way to remove just one entry from the address bar’s history. Luckily, there is a workaround.
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Artigo has just recently released an ultra compact computer kit about the size of your external run-of-the-mill USB hard drive, based on the credit card sized Pico-ITX motherboard. It features a 1GHz processor, support for 1GB of memory, four USB ports, audio ports, a LAN port, and a VGA port. You provide your own hard drive, keyboard, mouse, and RAM, along with all assembly. The entire kit cost only US$300, meaning that it offers the prudent shopper the opportunity to assemble a fairly decent machine for well under US$500.

The machine is so small that PC World author Tom Mainelli notes it’s potential to fit in the 5.25-inch drive bay of traditional computers, which is, in itself, an exciting possibility. The ability to run one computer within another with the two linked via ethernet or USB is certain to lead a wide range of hacks.

Check the kit out for yourself at the Via website.