Robert Quigley, Author at The Mary Sue

A Passing of the Torch

Robert Quigley — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 21:15:41 +0000

Though it might not appear to be so to the casual reader, should he or she bother to wonder where these neatly wrapped daily blog posts come from, running a site like this is a full-time job. Since Geekosystem launched a year and a half ago, I have written 2,716 posts, some of which are works of analysis and reportage that I’m quite happy with, some of which may mildly embarrass me should they come up when someone is Googling me a few years down the road, and some of which appear to consist of little more than thinly repackaged cat videos. Note that there is little if any overlap between these last two groups.

But all good things must come to an end, and as I prepare to head back to school this coming fall, this is my last post as managing editor of Geekosystem. That duty will pass along to James Plafke, in whom I have the utmost confidence not to crush and ruin the site that I have poured my time and energy into since its birth. (In truth, James is great and the site is in capable hands.) I have learned so much from running Geekosystem, and I am grateful to Dan Abrams, the site’s publisher, for having faith in me and giving me a chance when I was an untested recent college grad.

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Spanish Police Reportedly Arrest 3 Men Suspected of PSN Hack

Robert Quigley — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:53:58 +0000

According to the New York Times, Spanish police have detained three men “suspected of computer hacking in connection with recent cyberattacks on Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as corporate and government Web sites around the world.” Sony’s PSN woes have been the tech security fiasco of the year to this point, with the online gaming network brought down for more than a month following a breach that may left “customer names, addresses, usernames, passwords and as many as 2.2 million credit card numbers” exposed.

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Challenge Accepted: NYC Bicyclist Only Rides in Bike Lanes, Crashes into Everything

Robert Quigley — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:38:50 +0000

When filmmaker and bicyclist Casey Neistat received a $50 fine for riding outside of a bike lane in New York City despite his protestations that the bike lane is often unsafe, he made this video in which he attempts to reduce the law to absurdity. So Neistat religiously sticks within the boundaries of the bike lane, even if they’re blocked by trash, taxi, or trucks — and if there’s no way around them, he simply crashes spectacularly into them.

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Freedom of Information Request Reveals U.K. City Is Unprepared for Zombie Attack

Robert Quigley — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:32:46 +0000

Here’s an occasion for political alarm if ever their was one: One citizen’s Freedom of Information request to the city council of Leicester, England revealed that the city is woefully unprepared for a zombie attack. According to the “concerned citizen” who filed the request, a man by the name of Robert Ainsley, “Having watched several films it is clear that preparation for such an event is poor and one that councils throughout the kingdom must prepare for.”

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Playground Toy Looks Somewhat Unsafe [Video]

Robert Quigley — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:40:36 +0000

This type of violently whirling playground toy was apparently more common stateside in the old days, but it’s pretty obvious why it wouldn’t cut muster today. (The Daily What refers to it as a “spinning lawsuit factory.”) The kids in the video do look like they’re having fun, though. This video was taken at Skånegläntan Park in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Geekolinks: 6/9

Robert Quigley — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:36:27 +0000

Apple’s iCloud brings previously purchased apps back from the dead (Engadget)

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In Honor of Les Paul’s Birthday, Google Logo Is a Playable, Recordable Guitar

Robert Quigley — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:50:56 +0000

The folks over at Google are becoming ever more ambitious with their famous Google doodles. Today’s honors the birthday of Les Paul, often credited as the father of the solid body electric guitar. Paul, who would have been 97 this year, has his birthday marked with a fully-strummable Google logo.

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Netherlands to Become First European Country to Enact Net Neutrality as Law

Robert Quigley — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:18:30 +0000

Telecom companies in The Netherlands must be kicking themselves now as the small European country, home to 16.7 million people, prepares to enact net neutrality principles into law. Yesterday, the Dutch Parliament agreed in a nearly unanimous vote that going forward, carriers must equally guarantee access to all web content and applications.

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Tron Guy Auditions on America’s Got Talent, It Does Not Go Well [Video]

Robert Quigley — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:39:13 +0000

Before YouTube and Twitter, Jay Maynard, a.k.a. Tron Guy, was one of the first people to achieve Internet stardom of a sort after a somewhat unflattering series of pictures of him in a skintight Tron costume spread from Slashdot to the other recesses of the Internet. But when he recently tried to take his act to America’s Got Talent, clad in his Tron outfit and all, he ran into a wall of hostility from the judges and audience that can only be described as bizarre, as seen in the video above. It feels like a Tim & Eric skit or a Neil Hamburger routine, but it seems to be real.

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Geekolinks: 6/8

Robert Quigley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:58:02 +0000

Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism? (Larry Sanger)

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Senators Want an Investigation into Bitcoins

Robert Quigley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:44:38 +0000

Since its inception, enthusiasts and watchers of virtual P2P currency Bitcoin have wondered aloud whether the government would tolerate a decentralized, difficult-to-track cryptocurrency which could in theory — and in some cases even in practice — be used to pay for illegal drugs and prostitution. As of this week, this question has become a less hypothetical one, with Senators Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin writing a letter addressed to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and DEA head Michele Leonhart expressing their concerns about Bitcoin.

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Baby Pygmy Hippo

Robert Quigley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:04:54 +0000

Adorable photo taken by zookeeper Bobby-Jo Vial at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. The pygmy hippo is an endangered species native to West Africa, and it is one of only two living species in the Hippopotamidae taxonomicfamily, the other being the more familiar common hippopotamus.

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What Happens When You Buy Things from Spam E-Mails?

Robert Quigley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:47:05 +0000

Since it’s their job to protect customers from the darkest spawn of the Web, the brave, possibly foolhardy researchers at F-Secure decided to simply buy a bunch of products advertised in spam e-mails and see what happened. Though we don’t recommend that you try this at home, the results were not what you might expect:

While doing some spam research a couple of years ago, we did a series of test purchases from spam e-mails.
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10 Kids Who Discovered Horrifying or Adorable Monsters

The Mary Sue — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:09:45 +0000

This Power Grid is dedicated to all the little kids out there that managed to befriend the gamut of alien races and improbably survive because audiences don’t much like watching little kids succumbing to the true horrors of alien related deaths in science fiction.

No, the tropes at play in these movies are much more about friendship and accepting differences in others… except when they’re not, because the whole genre is being deconstructed by Jhonen Vasquez or K.A. Applegate. Or when the movie is just awfully, unforgivably, MST3Kingly bad.

But mostly, these extraterrestrially tinged bildungsroman play it straight, giving us some of the biggest tear-jerkers in kids' sci-fi. Enjoy!

>>>List at The Mary Sue.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Steve Jobs Presents Spaceship-Shaped Apple Campus Plan to Cupertino Council

Robert Quigley — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:36:31 +0000

Now we know what Apple wants to do with some of those massive cash reserves: At a city council meeting in Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, CEO Steve Jobs presented the plans for a massive new campus that looks “a little like a spaceship landed,” to be built over the old 98-acre campus Apple purchased from HP last year.

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Geekolinks: 6/7

Robert Quigley — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:36:15 +0000

What sugar actually does to your brain and body (Lifehacker)

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Terrifying Clown Is Terrifying

Robert Quigley — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:00:38 +0000

Artist Dave Kendall painted this disturbing portrait for the cover of a Stephen King fanzine some years ago. Fun for trypophobes and coulrophobes alike.

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Watch Nintendo’s E3 Presentation [Live Video]

Robert Quigley — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 16:25:58 +0000

Nintendo’s E3 presentation is live and underway right now; though they’ve led off with small things, the two big questions on people’s mind are 1. what Project Cafe, Nintendo’s next-gen console, will be like, and 2. if there’s any new magic in store for the 3DS, which lacked strong launch titles. We’ll have a full recap later.

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Report: One Out of Four U.S. “Hackers” Is an FBI Informant

Robert Quigley — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:05:34 +0000

According to a report issued by The Guardian and backed by the publisher of hacker quarterly 2600, a whopping 25% of U.S.-based ‘hackers’ “may have been recruited by the federal authorities to be their eyes and ears.” The reason is as old as crime movies: When a cybercriminal is busted, the feds have a lot of leverage in asking him or her to go turncoat, as the alternative may be a harsh legal sentence.

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British Teen Invents Doorbell That Calls Homeowner’s Cell Phone, Spooks Burglars

Robert Quigley — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:01:49 +0000

According to the Daily Mail, a 13-year-old by the name of Laurence Rook is in for a £250,000 payday thanks to a clever bit of engineering. When competing in a mock product design competition for school, Rook came up with the Smart Bell, a doorbell with a twist: When it’s pressed, it calls up the homeowner’s mobile phone and routes it over the intercom, allowing him or her to talk to whoever is outside the door.

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