On September 30, I spent a geektastic day at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. I arrived early and got a look at many booths before they opened (later, they would be swarmed by thousands of attendees). For much of the day I was one of several referees for the Classic Tetris World Championship. The whole day was a joy -- a convention hall filled with classic games, from Atari to Zelda, with pinball in between. And, this being a Portland event, there were game-themed crafts everywhere. The expo organizers... READ ON

Charles Babbage designed a fully functional mechanical computer called the Analytical Engine in 1837. It used gigantic stacks of cogs for memory (capable of storing 1,000 numbers to 40 decimal places), a CPU-like computing engine developed using gears and wheels, a printer (numbers only), a plotter (for graphics...ish), and even a programming language (Ada Lovelace wrote the first program, and the system used punched cards for program input). The Analytical Engine was the first Turing complete design for... READ ON

Apple uses secret internal code names for many of its products before they're released. Over the years, they've come up with some really weird ones -- including one that led to multiple lawsuits. 1. "Carl Sagan"/"Butt-Head Astronomer" - Power Macintosh... READ ON

In this fourteen-minute TEDxBoston Talk, uber-geeks Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel talk about what they've learned from processing 5 million books (or 500 billion words) via the Google Ngram Viewer. This tool uses text scanned from books to find specific terms and phrases, so you can figure out historical patterns of language usage. This may sound really geeky, and it is, but it's presented in a really sweet way. On stage we have two guys who are like us -- geeks -- sharing some fun... READ ON