The Great Geek Manual

Don’t mess with a wizard when he’s wizarding!

- Fool Moon, book two of The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher, 2001.

From Around the Web

10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About – You know that site with videos and all? It turns out that its quite popular and you happen to visit and use it quite often. Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about.

The 5 Best Screen Capture Tools – Capturing your computer screen is a terribly handy trick in all sorts of situations, ranging from creating tutorials to capturing web moments for posterity. Lifehacker helps with a rundown of the five most popular screen capture applications.

15 iPhone Apps Created by College Students – Apple’s iPhone application platform has made it easier than ever for hopeful software developers of all types to create a product and bring it to market. Here are just a few examples.

Best Source Code Comments – Stack Overflow has an awesome thread on stupid and funny code comments, including such chestnuts as //When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing, //Now, God only knows, and (“drunk, fix later”).

Cold Fusion is Hot Again – When first presented in 1989 cold fusion was quickly dismissed as junk science. But, as Sixty Minutes reports, there’s renewed buzz among scientists that cold fusion could lead to monumental breakthroughs in energy production. [Video]

Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009 – Over the years a range of GUI’s have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windows, Amiga, Linux, Symbian OS, and more. In the following article, we’ll be taking a look at the evolution of the interface designs of the major operating systems since the 80’s.

Particles Have Free Will – A new paper co-authored by mathematician John Conway, inventor of a cellular automata demonstration known as the Game of Life, argues that you can’t explain the spin or decay of particles by randomness, nor are they determined, so free will is the only option left. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Film

• Listverse’s choices for the 20 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies of the 90s are a HUGE improvement over its first attempt at making such a list. It includes many of my own personal favorites.
• These Top 15 Film Misquotes are rather surprising. Strange how I never actually realized that Darth Vader never said “Luke, I am your father.” It might be time for me to treat myself to another Star Wars marathon.

Internet

• Do you think you have what it takes to survive the Zombie Apocalypse? These Top 10 Tips for Surviving a Zombie Attack could help.
• io9 runs down a list of 15 Evil Corporations in Science Fiction, remembering to include my personal favorite, Fatboy Industries.
• MuVChat Encourages In-Theater Texting to create a MST3K environment in which to watch films. Where I’m from, we save development costs by just doing it verbally.
• William Shatner Motivational Posters for those with waaay too much time on their hands.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “Bugs in the Arroyo” by Steven Gould at Tor.com.
• Interview: Science Fiction and Other ODDysseys interviews Robert J. Sawyer, author of WWW:Wake.
• Martin’s Booklog has posted a list of Some Good Cyberpunk Reading. It’s a solid start, but it does overlook a few items, such as Daemon by Daniel Suarez.
• There are claims being made that Stephanie Meyer stole the idea for Twilight and the rest of the series from a short story written by her college roommate. Only, I’m asking myself, can you really plagiarize three books from one short story, or this just a case of borrowing an idea?

Writing

• Justine Musk discusses Writing Fiction in the Digital Age. [Direct link broken.]

Film

• The 7Touch Group discusses Science Fiction Throughout the Ages and Into the Future.
• Ask Men has posted a gallery of the Top Ten Credit Sequences of all time.
• Fantasy Magazine shares a list of the Top Ten Miscastings in Fantasy Movies. My favorite is number four: “Everyone in the Star Wars prequels.”
• It turns out that Paramount is struggling to attract the younger demographics to Star Trek.
• Premiere’s list of Movie Stars Who Die the Most is a great concept, but, I’m sorry to say, it’s also a big load of FAIL. Because, as we all know, Bill Murray ought to top the for Groundhog Day alone.

Internet

• According to a new study, 66.3 Million US TV Viewers are Simultaneously Using a PC While Watching TV, including a third of men.
• Dork Yearbook is an entire site devoted to old, embarrassing photos of nerdy kids.
• In the latest episode of Jeff Talks to God, Jeff asks Do Wormholes really exist? Hilarity ensues.
• Top 10 Results We’d Like to See From the Rise of the Geeks

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “The Ascendant” by Ted Kosmatka at Subterranean Online.

Television

• Daily P.O.P. reflects on Dr Who and the Sonic Screwdriver, pointing out that it was only when Russell T. Davies took over Doctor Who that the Sonic Screwdriver became capable of doing anything. For which I say thank-you Mr. Davies.
• Say it’s not so! The Omaha Sci-Fi Examiner asks Will the Great Recession kill my favorite sci-fi?

Another clip of Tim Burton’s upcoming film 9 has hit the web, and it still looks pretty bad-ass. I had been figuring that the first clip had contained all the best action sequences, but this may end up being one of those uber-rare cartoons that holds your attention from beginning to end.

9 hits the theaters this September.

1841
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe is published by Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It will widely be considered the first detective story. Read the story online at Project Gutenberg.

1876
The first national chemical society in the United States, the American Chemical Society, is organized in New York City. Visit the official American Chemical Society website.

1902
Pierre and Marie Curie isolate one gram of radium, the first sample of a radioactive element. They refined it from eight tons of pitchblende ore.

1926
Western Electric and Warner Bros. introduce Vitaphone, a process to add sound to film.

1939
David Sarnoff, president of Radio Corporation of America (RCA), delivers a speech to an NBC camera announcing the launch of regular public television service with the formal opening of the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Flushing, New York on April 30th. “Now we add radio sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth in this country of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch of hope in a troubled world. It is a creative force which we must learn to utilize for the benifit of all mankind.” The speech is broadcast by RCA subsidiary NBC to two hundred televisions across the state of New York. Despite its miniscule audience, the event marks the birth of commercial television. By the end of the year, a thousand receivers will be sold in the US. Screens are initially only about five inches across.
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Even a broken clock gets it right occasionally.

- Turn Coat, book eleven of The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher, 2009.

1928
The final volume of the Oxford English Dictionary is published. Read more about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. Visit the official Oxford English Dictionary website.

1957
Herbert Bright, the manager of the data processing center at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania receives a stack of computer punch cards in the mail from the FORTRAN development team at International Business Machines (IBM). Guessing the unlabeled cards to be a compiler for FORTRAN, the world’s first computer programming language, he writes a small missing comma diagnostic in FORTRAN and runs it on his IBM 704 mainframe. The event marks the first time that FORTRAN has been used outside IBM, “in the wild.” The 704 requires its operating system to be loaded from a tape before each use, and from beginning to end, creating and executing the program requires between two and four hours. The name for the language is an amalgam of the words “FORmula TRANslator.” It will go on to be the first successful high-level programming language.

1965
Electronics magazine publishes an article by Gordon Moore, head of research and development for Fairchild Semiconductor, on the future of semiconductor components. In the article, Moore predicts that transistor density on integrated circuits will double every eighteen months for the next ten years. This theory would eventually come to be known as Moore’s law.

1971
Salyut 1 is launched on a Proton rocket by the Soviet Union. Although it consists of only a single module, it becomes the first space station to orbit Earth. Salyut 1 will reenter Earth’s atmosphere on October 11, 1971, to be followed by six more future Salyut stations.
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