The Great Geek Manual

1880
The Edison Electric Illuminating Company is incorporated to provide electric light to New York City with one million dollars in capital. Within fourteen months, the service will have 508 subscribers and power 12,732 bulbs. The company will become the prototype for all other local illuminating companies established in the eighties.

1902
The first radiotelegraphic transmission of a complete text is achieved.

1903
The first powered flight is made by the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright on the sands of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina using a gasoline engine. The flight, made in the in the Wright Flyer lasts twelve seconds and spans a distance of 120 feet (or 36.5 meters.)

1953
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approves the revised RCA all-electronic color television system and discontinues the CBS sequential color system. Color broadcasts will begin thirty days later. Radio Corporation of America (RCA) transmits its new NBC Chimes logo at 5:32pm to celebrate.
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A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.

- Adlai Stevenson

Resources

5 Online Photo Sharing sites which are Free Alternatives to Flickr

6 Tips On How To Unblock A Web Page From Behind A Firewall – Sometimes you might find yourself not being able to access a particular website, and you may be wondering why. One reason for not being able to access the site is that the site may just be down – check out Down For Everyone Or Just Me to see if the site is down or not. If it is blocked, here are a few tips on how to unblock a web page from behind a firewall.

10 New Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know – Last week Facebook rolled out a new version of their privacy settings to all users. Privacy settings are something that many Facebook users are regularly confused about. As important as privacy is to Facebook users, it’s a great time to update your account.

Hassle-Free Virtual Private Network – Need to access files on your home computer while you’re at the office? A virtual private network will give you a direct link to your desktop over the Internet, and the easiest way to set one up is with Hamachi.

How to Convert a Netbook Into a Touchscreen PC – Tablet PCs may be the next big thing in computers, but netbooks are cheap and widely available now. Why wait for Apple to do it for you? Here’s how to make your own touchcreen PC, starting with an off-the-shelf netbook. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Do you ever get the feeling that someone over at Comcast just isn’t putting in their best effort? On the other hand, maybe this is just a subtle effort to drive viewers to the Pay-per-View channels.

Art

• The Avalanche Software Art Blog has some great Twilight fan art.
• Bruton Stroube takes photos of people upside down… basically to make them look like bloated (and surprised) treasure trolls.
• DesignBoom has just unleashed The Baddest Baby Carriage ever designed.
• DJMick has posted a gallery of 24 Beggars With Funny Signs.
• StreetLevel has a tongue-in-cheek gallery of Zombified Star Wars Posters.
• Unreality explains The Hierarchy of Morgan Freeman.

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Definitions of the intellectual are many and diverse. They have, however, one trait in common, which makes them also different from all other definitions: they are all self-definitions. Indeed, their authors are the members of the same rare species they attempt to define… The specifically intellectual form of the operation—self-definition—masks its universal content which is the reproduction and reinforcement of a given social configuration, and—with it—a given (or claimed) status for the group.

- Legislators and interpreters – On Modernity, Post-Modernity, Intellectuals by Zygmunt Bauman, 1987.

December 16th is the birthday of renowned science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke (1917) and Philip K. Dick (1928), as well as authors Peter Dickinson (1927) and Randall Garrett (1927).

1897
The first US submarine to be equipped with an internal combustion engine, the Argonaut, is demonstrated on the Patapsco River. During the demonstration, twenty-two members of the press make descents in the vessel for up to four hours. It was built in 1897 at the Columbian Iron Works and Dry Dock Company of Baltimore, Maryland for its inventor, Simon Lake. The submarine is thirty-six feet (11m) long and nine feet (2.7m) in diameter with wheels to travel on the sea floor. Lake was issued patents for the submarine on April 7, 1896 (US No. 557,835) and on April 20, 1897 (US No. 581,213).

1907
The first radio broadcast of a singer in the US, featuring Eugenia H. Farrar, is transmitted by Lee De Forest from the Brooklyn Naval Yard in Brooklyn, New York to mark the departure of Admiral Robley Dunglison Evans (“Fighting Bob Evans”), commanded the US Navy’s “Great White Fleet,” on its world-wide cruise.

1915
Albert Einstein publishes the definitive form of his General Theory of Relativity.

1925
The silent film Wolf Blood, also known as Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest, is released in the US. It is one of the first werewolf films. In it, a grievously injured logger must accept a blood transfusion from a wolf, and after his recovery, he and his fellow lumberjacks believe that he is transforming into a werewolf. IMDB profile Running time: 1 hr 8 mins
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