Tag: GEEK

I've often thought that guide books should dedicate a few more column inches to geeky attractions. Why must holidays be about food and wine tasting, or strolling along a sun-kissed seaside boulevard? 'You must see the original Renaissance paintings! And the sculptures!' -- why?! 'The ruins of...' Shut up! I'm a geek! If I had to choose between surfing the 'Net in a coffee shop and tasting wine, ...

I love Roman Nurik's Android-inspired theme for Google Chrome -- but it's nice to change things up every now and then. Today, I've switched over to a new theme called Hardware which was inspired by (or remixed from) Roman's theme. Instead of Robot's muted grays and greens, Hardware is electric blue on black with a printed circuit overlay. If you're a fan of darker themes, this is one of the ...

Playing for only the fifth time in a decade, Man or Astro-man? delivered straightforward, hard-driving rock, plus a flaming Theremin, lightning bolt generator and a computer keyboard played like a guitar emitting "System 7 resource sounds" (a techno geek thrill). The band also did spacesuit antics, amplifier climbing, drum kit crashing and the 1990s surf punk rock that has maintained an ...

Fabrice Bellard, touting an algorithm 20 times more efficient any any other, has just calculated pi nearly 2.7 trillion digits. In doing so he beats the existing record of 2.6 trillion set in August 2009. But this isn't just a victory in the number-of-digits sense! No, this is a victory for the humble desktop PC... and for Linux, because of course, every home brew wannabe supercomputer runs ...

My buddy Dave once shared with me a bit of computing wisdom which I've since found invaluable. "Proper troubleshooting requires a Teddy Bear." As it was told to me -- long ago in a university computer lab not so far away -- there was a sysadmin who became frustrated with the number of questions he was asked by student developers. It wasn't that the questions were invalid, or that the ...

The iPhone has become one of best loved geek toys of the decade, and it's not hard to see why: the slim phone that Steve built packs a powerful processor, 3d graphics, and the power of Mac OS X. In the past, we have seen various 3rd party apps available for the device, but nothing quite so nerdy of as this: Apparently, there is some demand for APT on the iPhone, and somebody went ahead and ported ...

Have you ever wanted to let your geek freak flag fly for just a little while? Say you're at a tradeshow, or some other gathering of the ubergeeky, and you want just a little special edge to rise above the rest. Look no further, geek temporary tattoos are here. Temporary tattoo maker Archie McFee has crafted this rather geeky set of tats you can use to ensure you never, ever get a girlfriend. ...

Some people can't seem to get this idea out of their heads that gifts have to be something physical. When I began to think about the holidays this year, I thought about all the things I wouldn't mind having, and I thought of mostly physical hold-it-in-your-hand gifts I want. Most of the gifts I hope to get happen to be virtual. Here is a nice rundown of some of the things you might think about ...

Ajax may be the coolest thing since sliced arrays (*ducks*), but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really compare to many of the things on David A. Wheeler's list of The Most Important Software Innovations. The updated-for-2006 list spans more than 150 years, from the birth of software (with Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1837) to the first compiler in 1952 to the spreadsheet in 1978 and so ...

I am both delighted and alarmed by the winners of Engadget's birthday cake contest. In case you hadn't heard, Engadget has been celebrating its 2nd birthday and ran a contest for the prize was a really sweet Alienware PC. The challenge was to bake the coolest gadget-themed birthday cake. I knew they'd get a lot of entries, but I had no idea the lengths Engadget's crazy readers would go to. I don't ...

Here's a bit of silly fun: IP Spotting will tell you how "interesting" your IP address is. It uses a number of criteria to give your IP address a score, like how many of its four octets are prime numbers, what country it's from, and what poker hand it represents. It also gives you a little pictogram of your IP in binary, like the one at right. My IP address only scored 10—how about ...