Attention all college students, professors, and school employees:

Google would like to offer you the Google Voice Beta. It doesn’t even look like there’s a time limit on this, but if graduation is coming up for you you might want to jump on it: you need an e-mail address that ends in .edu. The service also only works in America.

The reasons behind this, according to the Google Voice Blog:

We’ve found that Google Voice can be useful in many different ways to many different people. But one group of people that it’s especially well-suited for is students… But since Google Voice is currently only available by invite, a lot of students are still listening to voicemail and sending text messages the old-fashioned way…. So starting today, we’ll be giving priority Google Voice invites to students.

Read on...

It’s been a long week, and we’d just like to remind you that the best day of the year is close at hand. In order to sear this information into your brain, we’re going to associate it with the most awesome thing we’ve seen all day, these absolutely fabulous Marvel superhero headphones and ear-buds.

They are all up for (single tear) pre-order at BigBadToyStore.com for fifteen bucks, and tomorrow, you will be able to obtain comic books for exactly fifteen dollars less than the cost of these headphones.

Earlier this month at the Dutch Rotterdam Zoo, an eleven year old male gorilla named Bokito escaped and ran rampant through the Zoo’s food court, injuring a woman when he bit and dragged her some distance. Now, health insurance company FBTO is distributing eye-contact disguising glasses that allow zoo visitors to stare all they like, a behavior that is threatening to most of the great apes.

A boon to the shy, the voyeuristic, and anyone who wants to look pensive or, frankly, a little weird, the glasses may also be useful to anyone who goes to zoos with sketching in mind.

This is just your friendly reminder to start planning, because Free Comic Book Day is in two weeks! If you don’t know what Free Comic Book Day is, dwell in anguish no more:

Free Comic Book Day is the yearly date when you can show up at any participating store (usually one of the closest ones to you) and grab more than thirty comic issues for absolutely free. Yes, they’re put out by a great swath of the industry’s publishers. Yes, you can have as many as you want, as long as you don’t take more than one of the same title. Yes, it is awesome.

Read on...

Well, Microsoft did tell us they were going to tell us something today. And now they’ve told us. It was not, as some had speculated, the near-mythological Microsoft Courier, a tablet computer. Instead it was a new line of phones, oriented at the person who is deeply, deeply into social networking.

Says The Next Web:

Microsoft are quick to point out that this is a completely different offering from Windows Phone 7. Instead of being a smartphone with hundreds of different applications at your disposal, the Kin One and Kin Two exist to keep you in constant contact with friends whilst your on the move, sharing photos, videos and status updates on the go without an app store in sight.

I trust Christopher Nolan as a director, and with a cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, and Michael Caine, who could say no to Inception? The problem is that immediately after watching the trailer, I was overcome with two warring emotions. 1) An interest in the film. 2) The knowledge that I had been tricked into being interested in the film, because I still had no idea what it was about.

Thankfully, Geoff Boucher at The LA Times has revealed just enough about the movie’s plot to make the trailer more coherent and make me feel a little less like a victim of a Jedi mind trick.

Read on...

If you use Gmail and happen to click your way to your Google Buzz tomorrow, it will ask you to review your privacy settings. Don’t panic! This is normal. Or at least it will be tomorrow.

In response to widespread concerns over the privacy of Buzz, Google is going to ask users to review and confirm their privacy settings, so that everyone can see the changes they’ve made to the interface.

Even if you’re not a Twitter nut, astronauts are some of the most worthwhile people you can follow on Twitter. Let’s face it: while they’re interesting people in their own right, being able to send never-before-seen pictures directly from space is a pretty good way to get popular fast.

Though you could track them down yourself, we thought it’d be helpful to compile a list of astronauts on Twitter who are currently active:

So, after the overwhelming media hogwash, you’ve still forgotten that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day? Or maybe you really meant to go out and get that nice thing, but it just slipped your mind (as always, the Penny Arcade sentiment is timeless). Have no fear, Geekosystem is here.

Below the cut you will find a sampling of the best geeky Valentine cards on the Internet, just waiting for you to print them.

You’re welcome.

If, like me, you’re both a Mac user and a Google Chrome zealot, you’ll be happy to know that the latest beta release of Chrome for Mac, version 5.0.307, finally supports extensions. (Download it here.) It also adds a bookmark syncing feature, as well as a bookmark manager, a task manager, and a cookie manager.

The newest Mac Chrome isn’t perfect. It still has a few kinks, like, say, causing WordPress and Tumblr to crash repeatedly — bad news if you’re a blogger, to say the least. (Paging Google’s engineering team.) But extensions really do add value in a meaningful way: even if you’re not a total computer geek, you’ll find that they can do a lot.

You can access Chrome’s extension manager by typing chrome://extensions/ in your search bar (no HTTP prefix), and you can browse the selection of Chrome extensions at Google’s official page.

Below, a few of our favorite Mac-friendly Chrome extensions: