PicoCool

Mmmm, geekiness. “Created by Sam Potts from the The New York Times. Click the image for a large version.” [via Epic-Fu]

Network: blogs

Debbie Howe makes handmade sterling silver jewelry that fuses technology and fashion, creating affordable and stylish geek chic. Necklaces and earrings are designed with power, eject, stop, and play buttons. There’s also mouse earrings and a help button necklace. (via UncommonGoods)

Network: blogs

The smart geeks at ThinkGeek are now selling a Wi-Fi Detector t-shirt that dynamically displays the current surrounding Wi-Fi signal strength with a glowing animation. You’ll need three AAA batteries to make the magic happen. The decal is removable so you can wash your shirt and not be a stinky geek. (via LaughingSquid)

Network: blogs

Laughing Squid writes: “In order to organize his huge collection of Star Wars toys, Josh Budich created tiny pixelated illustrations of each toy, that can then be sorted by film, series, year, etc.” Fantastic.

Network: blogs

Wait, did you say cute?  In this case, yes. The little personal Amigurumi KNinja on the left is a hand-knitted personal ninja complete with throwing star (courtesy of caross at Stylehive). On the right, it’s everybody’s favorite Ask A Ninja, which is now available at Netflix. Add to to your Netflix queue and support indie ninjas (via Mickipedia’s twitter).

Network: stylehive, twitter

Sometimes a site’s palette just doesn’t work for you, or you might have special eyesight or color blindness that makes reading on dark colors difficult.  As a web geek, I’ve been using my trusty “toggle CSS stylesheets” browser favelet from Tantek to strip the site of all styles, returning it to a state of default black font on a white browser background. Alex Payne’s twitter above leads to the Zap Colors bookmarklet posted on Russell Beattie’s blog. Zap Colors also makes the text on a page black and the background white but keeps the style formatting of the original page.

Network: twitter

All t’ world’s gone mad today with International Talk Like a Pirate Day, started by two guys, John Baur and Mark Summers in 1995 (back then, they’re the only ones who celebrated it). Dave Barry propelled it to popularity in this column in 2002.  Tonight, my Twitter stream and Twitterverse is all a buzz with pirate speak and pirate avatars. Oh, and don’t forget to go to Flickr, click “arrrrr!” in the footer and switch your language to pirate speak.  Images below.

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Network: twitterverse

Emoticons are so much a part of our everyday digital existence. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years.  CNET explains that “the origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic..."Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn’t,” said Fahlman, who is still on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.” Thanks to Andrew Mager for the tweet.

Network: twitter

Andrew Mager reminds us of the origins of the WorldWideWeb by posting this link to Tim Berners Lee and R. Cailliau’s original proposal for the WorldWideWeb. It’s been 17 years since they wrote this.  “HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.  The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user’s workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material…

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Network: pownce