Gotta make some dressing and all you’ve got in that fridge of yours is a jar of unopened Mayonnaise from the late 90s, that’s ok, you can still use it!* I know this thanks to Real Simple’s handy guide of expiration dates, taking data from experts and manufacturers, those daring folk have compiled a list of expiration dates that may shock you in more ways than one. For instance, a soft drink in a plastic bottle is best if consumed 3 months from it’s “best by” date, but once opened, it doesn’t really spoil, just tastes like crap.

(* at your own risk)

Read more: Surprising expiration dates

As I said news services LOVE this type of stuff towards the end of the year. What the hell, we love them too. PELE hates his nickname, 200 million dead blogs (dlogs?), people actually suffer from Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiacs (the fear of the term 666)!? What is the world coming to, I tell ya.

Read more: 100 things we know now that we didn’t last year (Thanks Jurie)

As is common at the end of every year, newspapers are starting their yearly lists of stuff. From the top 50 things we know now to the 10 under reported stories of the year, lists are always handy to fill up space and draw in readers. Today, the Tampa Tribune listed the top 50 things we know now that we didn’t this time last year and man it’s fun. I for one am glad to know that life expectancy in the U.S. is now up to 77.9 years old and that scientists at the University of Manchester have managed to induce teeth growth in normal chickens by activating a gene that has lain dormant for 80 million years. It’s only a matter of time before we have a new feathered predator on our hands here folks.

Read more: 50 things we know now that we didn’t this time last year

While many see shopping as a normal, everyday activity, there are many who understand that sometimes it’s a bit more sinister than that. Many stores today utilize various psychological tricks in order to coerce the potential buyer into parting with their hard-earned cash, often times in exchange for something they weren’t really interested in purchasing in the first place. Known as Architectural Psychology, companies are spending millions in order to design their stores utilizing tricks to make you spend more money. Thankfully, a group of consumer-advocates have put together a small A-Z list of architectural tricks that stores use, so you, the consumer can learn a little more about the ways your favorite electronics or grocery store may be trying to manipulate you.

Read more: Architectural Tricks to Control Consumers

Converting to a Mac was one of the best computing choices I’ve ever made, the beauty and simplicity of the OS X operating system is astonishing and always a pleasure to work with, making me cringe when I even have to think of turning my PC on to play Eve Online. Freeware on the Mac is a thing of beauty, with large amounts of freeware applications spread throughout the internet enhancing user experience and productivity in more ways than one can count. Today we’re going to list more of our favorite OS X freeware, applications we find crucial to our daily use and crucial in our obsessive need to be on the cutting edge.

Shrook – RSS feed reader
Vienna – RSS feed feader
Both are solid and free RSS readers with features on both sides which give them an edge. Vienna features a nice mini-browser, smart folders and flagged articles. Shrook however wins me over. It’s a bit more lightweight, going for simplicity, which is always admirable for application design. One of Shrooks major features is it’s sync abilities, allowing users to signup to Shrook.com (for a small fee) and then use Shrook over multiple Macs without having to carry your RSS feeds anywhere, open Shrook, log-in and bam, your RSS feeds are there waiting for you.

Deer Park web browser (Optimized Firefox 1.5.0.6 for G4, G5, and Intel Macs)
The official Firefox for Mac drives me insane. I want so badly to use it, but, the performance is so sluggish and unusable that it almost makes me miss IE 5.0. Thankfully there are Mac OS X hackers who’ve had enough and have begun distributing Firefox updates in a Mac-friendly form, under the name Deer Park. Deer Park isn’t a perfect solution but it’s a step in the right direction that’s for sure, taking the usual Firefox updates and puting a little more effort into optimizing them to run more smoothly on G4, G5 and Intel Macs, without the Firefox branding of course as it’s not an official Mozilla product. Switching to Deer Park is easy, you won’t lose any of your bookmarks or other user settings and I haven’t found an extension yet that hasn’t worked with the Park.

Dashalytics – Google Analytics Dashboard widget
A highly recommended Dashboard widget for any obsessive compulsive blog owners who leave a Google Analytics tab open at all time. Dashalytics is a handy little freeware widget which gives you a quick and clean overview of your site’s day, week, monthly and yearly page visits and page views, supporting multiple sites as long as you have them setup with Google’s Analytics service.

Letterbox – Widescreen plugin for Mail.app
Widescreen is the future of computing (and gaming!), you can take that to the bank. As more and more users switch to widescreen resolutions, the need for widescreen support in many applications will be a must. For instance, Mail.app, OS X’s ultra-powerful email application included with every version of Apple’s operating system. It’s not so friendly for a widescreen resolution, especially for those of us with multiple email accounts and thousands upon thousands of emails. But there’s hope in the form of a simple little Mail.app plugin named Letterbox. By rearranging the Mail.app interface into 3 vertical columns, Letterbox instantly transforms Mail into a widescreen users email heaven, allowing the user more vertical space for mailboxes as well as a large preview pane.

QuickName – File utility for renaming large amounts of files
QuickName is a program that I need only a few times a year, but still an important little tool to have. QuickName is as straight-forward as it gets, a small utility that allows you to quickly change the naming conventions of large amounts of files. For instance, you have 275 images in your blog that you were given the suffix .JPG, but you want them to be .jpg. Launch good old QuickName and let her rip, renaming said files in a matter of seconds.

Ventrilo – Group VOIP for OS X
TeamSpeex – TeamSpeak for OS X
VOIP is a godsend for gamers and businesses alike. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are the standards for group-chat functions in the gaming world, with clans from Counter Strike to World of Warcraft to Eve Online using the applications to communicate during group activities in-game (and out). It took awhile, but there are finally stable OS X builds for both applications, bringing Mac gamers (or those of us who use their Mac for Ventrilo while playing on their PC) into the world of group VOIP communication.

Read more: 10 favorite applications for OS X

An interesting tool launched a few days ago via the German Wikimedia Toolserver which tracks the 100 most popular Wikipedia pages by visit count, charting them on a monthly basis. The Wikicharts tool allows a user to filter Wikipedia’s access statistics per month, giving us quite a bit of insight into Wikipedia usage patterns. Wikipedia’s top 10 pages accessed in August were:

1. Main Page
2. Wikipedia
3. United States
4. JonBenét Ramsey
5. List of big-bust models and performers
6. Irukandji jellyfish
7. Hurricane Katrina
8. Pluto
9. Wiki
10. Jeff Hardy

Read more: Top 100 Wikipedia articles per month

Wikiepedia needs no introduction, so I’ll skip all that mess and get down to the dirt. Over at Wikipedia, there is an ever disputed page of worst video games ever, featuring the bad and the ugly of our favorite past-time here at Nerds-central. A bit light on culprits, I think there have to be more horrible games than just those listed. What do you think were the worst video games ever made and why? If you can answer those two questions, you can add those up to the list of worst video games ever made.

For example:

KISS Pinball (2001, PlayStation, PC) is a pinball game based on the rock band KISS. Many reviewers claimed that it wasn’t even worth its $10 budget price. Most notably, it contains none of KISS’s music. Electronic Gaming Monthly put the game (which received a 1.0 / 10 in Issue 144) at #6 in its “Top 10 Worst Reviewed Games” countdown and wrote in their review, “…we want our $10 back.” GameSpot, which gave the game a 1.3 / 10 (abysmal), said that “KISS fans will be disappointed by the distinct lack of KISS, and pinball fans will be disappointed by the distinct lack of pinball.”

Read more: List of worst games ever made @ Wikipedia

Not that you needed to be reminded of this, but Google is definitely the powerhouse search engine of the interweb. Google clogs my tubes with email, search results, newsfeeds and even desktop searches on a daily basis, so it only makes sense to try and harness the true power of the Google monster and make it work more efficiently for me. So I’ve put together a short list with a few of my favorite advanced Google search operators that help make my research using Google that much more efficient and less time-consuming..

All in URL
Starting your query with allinurl: will result in google restricting your search term to only returning results within the site URL. For instance, searching for all URLs with the term “nerds” in the title:

allinurl: nerds

Cache
Displays Google’s cached version of the web page you are searching within.

cache:bunchofnerds.com

Domain search
One of the more basic operators, but still awfully handy for large sites, especially blogs. Google can search only within one specific site by stating your keyword plust “site:” and domain and TLD of the site you are searching within. For instance, searching for the term “nerds” within bunchofnerds.com:

nerds site:bunchofnerds.com

Define
Google dictionary? Google can profide definitions of words, acronyms and phrases.

define:nerds

Stocks
Quickly search for stock information by merely knowing the stock ticker symbol. For instance, watching once-mighty video games publisher Take-Two’s slow crash and burn:

stock: ttwo

Synonym search
Conduct a search not only for your term, but for it’s synonyms as well(great for researching domain names) by placing a tilde sign in front of your search term:

~nerds

Weather
Get the local weather forcasts for a given location based on zip code, city, or state:

weather vienna, austria

Are you a search nerd and don’t see your favorite oprators listed? Post a comment and let us know some the ways you target your search results.

WordPress is a very powerful system, almost too powerful for the free pricetag it comes with (free as in beer). We’re more than happy with WordPress though, unfortunately we find quite a few things about the system lacking in various ways. No internal stats system, no ‘advanced’ control over category visibility, the pinging control is dismal (sometimes you have to edit a post several times, this shouldn’t ping the services every time), and the list goes on. Here are some of the plugins we’re using with WordPress here on Bunch of Nerds that make our lives a little bit easier…

6. EmailShroud
We hate spam and most definitely spambots spidering our site searching out email addresses to add to their lists of poker or porn spam. That’s why we installed EmailShroud from OddThinking. EmailShroud is an anti-spambot plugin which uses JavaScript to obfuscate email addresses linked (mailto:) or simply typed into the contents of WordPress pages, posts, excerpts, RSS feeds and comments. There are some drawbacks, such as basing the plugin on the fact that most browsers support JavaScript or are not trying to be strict XHTML1.0 compliant (a bug which will be fixed in coming updates), but the plugin does try and handle non-JavaScript browsers gracefully, by giving the user several options for rewriting the email address or bouncing a user to a page describing their lack of JavaScript support. Naturally this isn’t a total solution to spam harvesting, but it’s certainly a powerful tool that works together with other such anti-harvesting methods.

5. WP Tiger Administration
The default administration theme for WordPress is a bit, eh, for lack of a better term. Don’t get me wrong, it’s usable, but, I found myself wondering if it couldn’t look better. Well, naturally it can, this is the internet after all! There are several admin themes which have been created to turn your administration panel into a hot designer-friendly machine and one of the best is the Tiger Administration panel from Ordered List. Tiger unfortunately is no longer being updated as a new variant is currently in production, we look forward to it!

4. WPStats Beta
WPStats is a full-featured stats logging system with an iconic display, IP cloud by country, and much more. It’s very much in a beta state, but still has a pretty bright future if the developers can keep up with adding new features. Usage is extremely simple, with the system only requiring one statement into the header.php file of WordPress. It’s no Google Analytics, but, it’s an extremely easy solution for those wanting basic statistic reporting for their WordPress systems.

3. Category Visibility
A WP 2.0+ only plugin, this is a very handy plug to have when you want to limit certain categories visibility throughout your site and/or feeds. In our case, we use it to create feed-only posts, where only users subscribed to our newfeed see feed-only post, articles and announcements. Naturally there are some issues with other plugins, but, those are easy to overlook and easy to fix with a little elbow grease.

2. Smart Update Pinger
Ping services are a great way for promoting your blog, by ‘pinging’ an update service which updates search engines of your recent blog posts and changes. WordPress’ built-in ping functionality is sufficient, but unfortunately pings these services for every edit you do to a post, which is not only wasted bandwidth but also inefficient and could possibly get you banned by these services for pingspamming. That’s all fixed by Smart Update Pinger, an extension to the WordPress ping function which only pings services on new post entries, rendering edits silent. Smart Update Pinger also keeps a status log, easily viewable by the administrator to track error messages and ping status to the various ping services.

1. AutoMeta
Technorati is the premier weblogs search engine, so any blog worthy of the term is smart to design with Technorati in mind. AutoMeta helps you in several ways, first by automatically creating HTML meta tags based on the content of your posts and second by converting those meta tags automatically into Technorati Tags. Although it’s highly recommended you not rely 100% on the tags auto-created, AutoMeta gives you an easy and handy field to enter your custom tags per post. There is also functionality to output a Technorati tag cloud anywhere you’d like on your WordPress system, making it that much easier to turn your blog into a lean-mean Technorati-loving machine.

There are of course hundreds, if not thousands of plugins for WordPress and these are but a few of the ones we use behind the scenes here at Bunch of Nerds, see the WordPress list of plugins for more which may suit your particular needs.

Those fashionable cats over at retroCRUSH have compiled a list of the top 30 greatest game show hosts of all time. When I was a kid I was addicted to these things, Press Your Luck, The Price is Right, I would go nuts thinking of visiting the sets and being in the crowd during a taping. Pretty much all of game show history is represented here, from The Price is Right to Press Your Luck, to Win Ben Stein’s Money. What I would do for a whammy plush doll….

[The greatest game show hosts of all time | The Press Your Luck scandal]