Tag: GEEK

In case you were unaware, games are everywhere these days. And we're not just talking about on your iPhone, or on Facebook, either. Everywhere you look, you're surrounded by some sort of game. As Carnegie-Mellon professor Jesse Schell pointed out in a lecture he gave back in February, everything from walking (geo-caching) to eating (Weight Watchers Points) to driving has become a game in one way ...

Maybe we haven't had enough coffee today, or maybe we're already pissed because we hear that 'The Dark Crystal' is getting re-made, but the Switched Rage Meter is about to burst over this one: Cupidtino, the dating site for Apple fanboys and girls. Don't get us wrong. We're not opposed to online dating or Apple fandom. But the seemingly sinister mix of the two makes us feel just a bit queasy. ...

We've seen some pretty nerdy marriage proposals before, but a Zynga employee might have just topped them all. According to Joystiq, Anders Howard and his friends created a video game, called 'Dinner Love and the Quest for Soup,' to help him propose to his beloved. Now, he's not the first gamer that has proposed in this manner. However, Howard set up a special event to go along with the game, which ...

As you probably know, computers were once solely the purview of nerds. Those with pocket protectors, glasses, and very few friends spent the '80s sitting in front of bulky beige boxes named PC Jr. or Apple II. 'How I Met Your Motherboard' celebrates those heady days by collecting stories and photos of people's earliest computing memories. The tales collected speak of love affairs started with now ...

There is devotion, and then there is crazy Apple fanboy devotion. Take a look at this Apple Store diorama built by Gary Katz -- a man with apparently a lot of time on his hands. Katz carefully recreated the interior of an Apple Store within a regular shoebox. By using two iPhones -- one to power the store's glowing Apple logo, and the other as a screen behind the Genius Bar -- he spent countless ...

Remember when, not too long ago, "guru" was one of those corporate words du jour? We had "Web gurus" and "customer service gurus" and inspiration-gurus-at-large. These self-styled titles were hot like UGGs, and fell out of vogue almost as quickly. [Ed. Note: Yes. Out of vogue. Dead. Kaput.] Well, now people have taken to "ninja" as the cool new nom de whatever, and it's a broad enough trend that ...

Nearly three years ago, we interviewed a man named Greg Packer. Mr. Packer got our attention for being devoted enough to camp out for three sweltering summer days -- just so he could be the first person to buy an iPhone at Apple's Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. Fast forward to the present, and guess what? Packer is at it again, staking out the first spot in line for the iPad's Saturday release. ...

There are geek t-shirts and ridiculous wearable gadgets, and then there is this, occupying some weird middle ground. This t-shirt boasts an embedded micro-controller that communicates with an Android smartphone via Bluetooth in order to alert you of incoming e-mails. The shirt has LEDs that light up, telling you exactly how many messages are currently waiting for your discerning delete finger -- ...

Share Geek weddings are nothing new to the Switched beat. Video game 'Katamari Damacy' inspired one service, and we've seen one set of marriage vows culminate in a groom updating his Facebook relationship status. In 2010, we'll supposedly see the first weddings... in spaaaaace. Today's tale of geeky nuptials comes to you from that gleaming, subterranean realm known as Manhattan's Fifth Avenue ...

Nothing warms our hearts more than a geeky marriage proposal here at Switched, but we get a bit bored of Twitter, Facebook, and even tweaked video game declarations of love. So kudos to Raleigh-Durham resident Alex Marsh, who took his girlfriend, Susan Wilkison, out to dinner at Raleigh Times Bar to propose, via Foursquare. Foursquare is a nifty little app that allows users to "check in" at ...

Pretty much anyone not named Larry Summers would agree that female engineers and computer scientists are just as capable as their male colleagues. So why do women comprise just 22-percent of all computer science graduates? And, more worrisome, why is that figure decreasing? The answer, according to one study, lies in geek culture. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis recently ...

We all know that geeks come in all shapes and sizes, but did you ever try to figure out what unifies them? What key concepts bring one to another? Is it a love for arcane knowledge? An obsessiveness with detail? Or, are they all just unified by a love of seeing Princess Leia in her metal bikini? As it turns out, it's not quite so simple, as the above chart from Ibrahim Evsan shows. Evsan is ...

Measuring, categorizing, and sorting are all important facets of scientific analysis, but geeks love to apply those techniques to non-scientific, everyday pursuits, as well. With the rapid evolution of technology, terms like "shaftment" and "carucate" frequently fade into obscurity, so keeping up with current scientific methods can be difficult. Wired's Geek Dad, though, has compiled 11 forms of ...

We're pretty sure that what Minnesota man d'Armond Speers did to his child could easily be defined as cruel and unusual punishment. For the first three years of his son's life, Speers spoke only a foreign language to him as part of a personal experiment in linguistics -- that's the cruel part. The unusual part is that he didn't even speak a real (nonetheless useful) language to him -- he spoke ...

We've seen a lot of geeky tattoos: a flaming 20-sided die, a Pac-Man maze on the rear, and, of course, the mind-boggling Born Oppenheimer Approximation. Still, if we had to choose, the award for "worst tattoo ever" would go to the above 'Shoryuken' brand. For 'Street Fighter' newbies, the Shoryuken, or 'Dragon Punch,' is an easily executed trademark move used by two characters in the game. To ...