Passions, geeks and beers will blend next week at Hopmonk Tavern, where O’Reilly Media is hosting the first-ever Ignite showcase in Sonoma County. For those of you unfamiliar, Ignite is an event where people give a 5 minute presentation on basically whatever they’re passionate about. Presenters are required to use a power point presentation with 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds (You get it: 15 seconds per slide X 20 slides = 5 minutes) Two presenters have already… Read More »

Dale Dougherty is publisher of Make Magazine, a quarterly that is full of great do-it-yourself projects for geeks and non-geeks alike. He also produces the annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, which is a fantastic bizarre of homegrown projects, rides and inspiration. Dougherty is also co-founder of O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol. Web site: www.makezine.com, www.craftzine.com and www.makerfaire.com Blog: www.pillowroad.comTwitter: @dalepd and @make Questions and Answers: DailyGeek: The 4th Annual Maker Faire Bay Area is back at the San Mateo County… Read More »

Ever wanted to design your own application for the iPhone? O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol is offering a two-day workshop to show people who have some rudimentary programming skills how to write an iPhone application. The workshop is in San Francisco on May 16 and May 17, which is a Saturday and Sunday. It costs $1,200 ($999 if you register by Monday, May 4). The company is offering a 20 percent discount code for registration on its Facebook page.

Bio: Jason Davies is vice president of sales and marketing at Petaluma-based Berkeley Integrated Audio Software, known as BIAS. The company develops audio editing software for Macs, and has a top application for the iPhone. The program, called iProRecorder, sells for $2.99. The success of the iProRecorder has BIAS wondering just how deep into the mobile application market they should get, as mentioned in my story here. Web site: www.bias-inc.com Questions and Answers DailyGeek: What are your thoughts on the… Read More »

Public health officials are doing their best to curb panic during the Swine Flu outbreak — this time. It wasn’t always that way. Check out these videos where the US Public Health Service try to scare people into getting vaccinated during a 1976 outbreak of swine flu. The London Telegraph wrote about the 1976 propoganda videos here.

Jeffrey Aguilera is the James Bond of the digital world. He has a license to kill, well, spam. Ever since he founded Red Condor in Rohnert Park in 2002, he has been defending businesses from mastermind spammers. He infiltrates criminal minds and works to undermine their nefarious plans to clog the Internet with scams and viruses that double as emails. Aguilera knows the Internet isn’t a safe place (he told the Press Democrat as much.) But he’s willing to fight… Read More »

Bio: John Sullins is an assistant professor at Sonoma State University who specializes in roboethics – both the ethical quandaries facing robotic engineers and the moral dilemmas that robots will face as they become increasingly complex. Web site: http://sonoma.academia.edu/JohnSullinsTwitter: http://twitter.com/JPSullins Questions and Answers: DailyGeek: As a roboethicist, what did you think of the re-made TV show Battlestar Galactica where robots turned against their human creators?Sullins: I saw it a little differently than most people I am sure. As a roboethicist… Read More »

The “What Physicists Do” series at SSU is nearing its end. But not to fret, there are still a few left. Tonight at 4 p.m., Stanford physicist Jodi Cooley discusses the darker side of the universe: Dark Matter. North American scientists have been working to detect dark matter, which is thought to be the largest source of mass in the Universe. They conduct their heady experiments in a science dungeon buried nearly one-half a mile under the Minnesota top soil… Read More »

April 1, 2009 – The online war between Apple and PC fanboys took an unexpected turn Tuesday.The young woman featured in a Microsoft Windows commercial snubbing Apple Macbooks for being too expensive announced Tuesday she had contracted the Conficker worm on her new PC. The Los Angeles-based actress, “Lauren,” stirred up a lot of online angst between Apple and PC fans when she starred in the Microsoft commercial deriding Apple Macs as being too expensive. In the commercial, the 20-something… Read More »

Security experts discovered an easy way to detect and remove the Conficker worm Monday. Click here to download a Trend Micro program that will remove it for free. More info on the Conficker worm is available in this Q&A I did with SSU Professor George Ledin, who teaches a virus writing course to students. Also there is this Q&A written by an anti-malware firm, and this great timeline of the worm by Byron Acohido, a USA Today tech reporter. Scammers… Read More »