GONY’s signing off early for the weekend to celebrate the anniversary of an old document being sent off to the printer. I imagine your weekend is already full of plans—eating fried dough, setting off M80s, seeing what happens if you set off M80s in a mound of fried dough, heading to the emergency room for severe fried-dough burns, and so on. Enjoy it with my best wishes.

Of course, every holiday weekend has its lulls, so I’m cleaning out the old Geek Out New York bookmarks bin to ensure you’re not without some timekillers in between hot-dog-eating contests this weekend. In other words, the following links normally wouldn’t be good enough for the main page, but they’ll do just fine when I’m trying to get the hell outta Dodge for the Fourth. Enjoy!

Take care of the 4oJ obligatories. Check the schedule for Friday’s fireworks show and find a good viewing perch if you’re in the city (and if you’re not, rest assured that NBC will be airing a live Salute to Fireworks from New York). Damien Franco has a nice tipsheet up to help you take some decent fireworks photos instead of the blurry crap you throw up on your Flickr page every year.

Track birds. OK, technically, they’re satellites, but I learned from my satellite TV message boards that if you want to sound cool, you call them “birds.” It’s true. Watch the following sentence just ooze coolness: At n2yo.com you can track the flight path of countless birds, including military birds, TV birds, weather birds, and other bird varieties. How many top-secret spy satellites (i.e., spy birds) are over your head right now? More than you think.

Make a marble adding machine. Clack, clack, clack! That’s the sound of math!

Feel tiny. You think that picture’s intimidating? In the last image of the Size of Our World series, the Sun barely registers as a single pixel. Warning: This page kinda makes your local fireworks “spectacular” seem a little less so.

Cheese. Nothing, however, can dampen the spectacle of “Major Boobage“—not even a behind-the-scenes look from South Park Studios at the 3-D modeling and rotoscoping of said boobage.

Sound smart. Ever wonder where I get some of those marvelous quotes that appear at the beginning of each “Do Something This Weekend” post? No? You don’t even read this site? You accidentally typed in the address when you meant to visit “Geek Out Newark”? Fine. I don’t think you really deserve this link, but let’s move on.

Launch hedgehogs. Jason Kottke got me hooked on the Flash game Hedgehog Launch, and I will not forgive him until I match his record of achieving hedgehog space orbit in just 4 days.

Typecast yourself. Lean back from that gibberish text above, courtesy of ASCII-o-matic, and you can almost see me wishing you a happy Fourth.