Slated for release on October 24th, it’s the annual Technology-themed Halloween Special presented by Friends in Tech.

“It’s the Great Server Chuck and Kreg!”

Convinced that the Great Server will be making its yearly appearance, Kreg refuses to go Trick-or-Treating with the rest of the FiT gang and instead pulls an all-nighter waiting for the Great Server to “…rise up out of the server farm and brings technology to all the good geeks around the world.”

Written by Douglas E. Welch and the Members of Friends in Tech

FiT Child Safety Online Flier

A friend of mine has put together an educational flier on resources parents and caregivers can use to ensure that their children use the Internet safely. Topics range from cyber-bullying, blogging and street smarts for web surfing. There are also links to the popular free security software packages and office suites. And, last but not least, there are links to a couple of family friendly podcasts.

Link to flier

I recently bought a Garmin eTrex Vista Cx and like every new toy, I’ve got to play with it until something breaks. Until then, I’ll squeeze in some useful work. Using Robogeo to geocode the location info onto my photos, I’ve assembled a quick and dirty Google Map page. Most of these are just some shots taken from the car at various intersections to see if the location is close enough for more detailed uses.

Click here to go to map

Here’s some thumbnails of the pics I took. They link to the originals, which are rather large, especially the photostitched ones.

Marv

This may only be of interest to civil engineers and planners, but topographic maps generated by the U.S. Geological Service are public domain because tax payer monies are used to generate the maps. However, map services have charged for these maps because it costs money to print and distribute the physical copies.

This has changed somewhat recently when a collection was taken up by these guys to liberate these maps. The maps are now distributed by the Internet Archive and can be downloaded for free from this “temporary” directory. It is organized by state, and the maps are in TIF format. XML meta-data files area also available.