The Great Geek Manual

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.

NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer – Get your own supercomputer. Experience cluster level computing performance—up to 250 times faster than standard PCs and workstations—right at your desk. The NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer is based on the revolutionary NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and powered by up to 960 parallel processing cores.

Robot warriors will get a Guide to Ethics – Smart missiles, rolling robots, and flying drones currently controlled by humans, are being used on the battlefield more every day. But what happens when humans are taken out of the loop, and robots are left to make decisions, like who to kill or what to bomb, on their own?

Why E-Books Look So Ugly – As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation. Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you’re reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or the Federalist Papers.

Wordpress Launches Video Sharing System – Wordpress (the blog system) has launched Videopress, their New Video Sharing Service. Features include automatic sd/dvd/hd quality conversions, automatic video podcast conversions, and other goodness. Very sexy looking little system.

Miscellaneous

A Brief History of Google Killers

Tech News

Another Scandal Surrounds Pirate Bay Judge
Facebook Gives Major Boost to OpenID
Harvard prof tells judge that P2P filesharing is “fair use”
Mint Considers Selling Anonymized Data from Its Users
Larry Page: Twitter made Google focus on Realtime Search