The Great Geek Manual

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.

Build a Lamborghini for Dummies – Always wanted to own a Lamborghini but never have enough dough? How about making one yourself? This is what exactly Ken Imhoff did. He decided to just build one for himself right from his own basement! Using space tube frames and a host of other materials, a remarkably good replica of a Lamborghini was birthed but not without 10 years of effort.

Enjin – Enjin is a free, fully hosted service for gamers, clans, guilds, and communities to create and manage a high-end website with no hassle or complicated CMS issues.

How To Use Twitter and Not Be a Douchebag – Yes, I’m blogging but ignoring this post. Still, I’d greatly appreciate it if all the rest of you followed these rules.

Map of science – This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 scientific papers into 776 different scientific paradigms based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers.

PDF Download – This useful Acrobat alternative lets you see PDF documents as HTML without the hassle of pasting their address into Google.

Top 10: Tech Cities – We might not have jet packs, flying cars and food in a pill yet, but we do have the internet, HDTV and the iPod — solid technologies that make 21st-century living pretty cool. So where is the future coming from? Amazingly, it’s being created by a select group of cities that have strong research and development in technology and a population that embraces it.

Your Digital Life After Death – This week’s All Tech Considered segment deals with what happens after we reach our final mortal destination. Where do all our e-mails, social media accounts and important files go when we die and who’ll take of them for us in our absence?

Miscellaneous

Darth Vader’s Secret: Breathing Xenon
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
We need an Email Tax
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

Tech News

Apple Planning $1 Billion iDataCenter
FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts
Google increasingly battles Facebook in search
People Over 55 Are Quitting Facebook
Pirate Bay: In search of an unbiased Judge
Search Sucks and Microsoft Is (Almost) Here to Help
Service Pack 2 for Vista and Server 2008 finally arrives
U.S. Military Developing Hacking-for-Dummies Cyber-Warfare Device