June 25, 2004

Video: Heat Vision and Jack — I'm hosting the infamous Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Owen Wilson TV pilot #

Senate passes toughened copyright laws — including the anti-camcorder law #

Waxy's Bandwidth Blowout #1: Heat Vision and Jack

Posted June 25, 2004 by Andy Baio

Starting this month, I’ll be burning through all my leftover bandwidth by posting large videos and audio on my site toward the end of every month. It’s Waxy.org’s Bandwidth Blowout!!

First up, the best TV pilot you’ve never seen: Ben Stiller’s Heat Vision and Jack from 1999. Jack Black stars as Jack Austin, an astronaut on the run from NASA after a solar accident makes him the smartest man in the universe. Owen Wilson plays his talking motorcycle. Produced by Stiller, who also appears in the introduction and as a strip club DJ.

Download it quick, before I change my mind.

BitTorrent: Heat_Vision_and_Jack (.MPEG, 301.25 MB)

Knowledge is power… for real.

June 27, 2004: Courtesy of Drew, here’s an early and later draft of the script.

June 28, 2004: Well, my bandwidth was blown. My server can’t handle the load, so I’m moving this to my BitTorrent tracker. It’s seeded locally, so it should be very fast. I’m looking into upgrading to a 100MBps uplink, so I don’t have to deal with this next month.

Continue reading “Waxy's Bandwidth Blowout #1: Heat Vision and Jack” →

Glassdog diagnoses Dave Winer — sociopath, or at least empathy-deficient #

Today's two NYT op-eds on file-sharing — here's the other one, both advocate blanket licensing (via) #

Nationmaster's Mortality statistics — the rest of the site's stats are amazing (via) #

Flash: Swinger game — left and right to move, space to jump (via) #

Flash: The Animal Alphabet — you know, for kids! (via) #

1000 Characters — obsessive doodling (via) #

Flash: J. Otto's "Alice in Wonderland" — more about the pop-up book (via) #

Bill Gates may start blogging (via) #

Bearskinrug Compositionals — the submissions are nice (via) #

Update on the Plain Layne hoax — including the confession, inspired by Kaycee Nicole #

June 24, 2004

EFF's Prelude to a Fake Complaint — Induce Act makes the iPod illegal #

Wired News on the "Inducing of Copyright Infringement Act" — it's inducing me to vomit #

Half Life 2 may arrive in August too? — Valve reacts to Doom III ship date (via) #

New Bjork album is entirely acapella (via) #

Video conferencing at 35,000 feet — Kottke's worried about security (via) #

Mayday Mystery texts — read about the history of the weirdness (via) #

CMP blocks Google News referers — when corporate paranoia affects your readership (via) #

Flash: Die Wagenschenke game — try not to fall over while stumbling home drunk (via) #

June 23, 2004

Moblogging within Second Life — take "photos" within the virtual world and post them to your blog #

Drunk Driving Rampage — amazing gallery of destruction #

Election Night Drink Specials — get your local barkeeps added to the site #

Webcam Music Box — Lego webcam reads printed barcodes for playing MP3 albums (via) #

MP3: Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine," title track off her shelved new album — local mirror here #

AV Club interviews Nellie McKay (via) #

Screen-scraping with PHP 5 — scrape any poorly-formed HTML using loadHTMLFile #

The Onion's Guide to Celebrity Weblogs — what, no Wil Wheaton? (via) #

GBAX 2004, Gameboy Advance coding competition results — the winner is an excellent TurboGrafx 16 emulator #

Comdex 2004 is cancelled — maybe they can team up with Lollapalooza #

Induce Act draws key support in Senate — the Act makes me physically ill (via) #

Get notified when Googlebot indexes your pages — neat and simple idea #

Spamassassin Beats CRM-114 in anti-spam shootout — here's a good summary of the results #

ASCII art conversion of "Deep Throat" — 55 minutes of text-based smut (via) #

Early Xbox 2 spec leaked — could be fake, but appears legit (via) #

Google Pagerank Checksum Algorithm — if you want to port this to Perl or PHP, please contact me ASAP #

Kempa on more vinyl oddities — laser turntables, album scanning, human groove recognition, and DIY album pressing #

Dave Winer Remix Contest Winners

Posted June 22, 2004 by Andy Baio

After serious deliberation with a secret cabal of expert judges, we’ve reached a consensus. And now, the winners of the Dave Winer Remix Contest!

Grand Prize: Ralph Brandi, “Smoking Weblogs”. Catchy beat, good musicianship, great samples. The “D-W-I-N-E-R” chorus is brilliant, and I can’t get it out of my head. Plus, cowbell!

2nd Place: Scott Mulligan’s “Goofin’ On Dave Winer”. Musically, the best of the bunch. The instrumental breakdown might be a bit too long, though.

3rd Place: Matt Canale’s “This Is Not A Morning Coffee Note”. ~~The only one to use Dave’s voice as percussion.~~ I was wrong; Exsend’s “Hi, It’s Dave Here” used exclusively Winer samples for all percussion. Therefore, a tie!

So, that’s it. Thanks for playing! I’ll contact the winners about your prizes, the increasingly-worthless currency of the web.

June 22, 2004

Punctuation errors in "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" — copy editing the copy editors (via) #

Rivers Cuomo's Myspace profile — it's real, he posts new MP3s like "Tomorrow" from Annie (via) #

Doom 3 release date set for August 3 — I can't believe it's going to beat Half-Life 2 to market #

T-Mobile Sidekick 2 preview — what, no Sidetalking? #

Image: Rob Conger's "Marshall McLuhan," anamorphous hook-rug portrait — view his entire rug portfolio and a short film about him (via) #

Lollapalooza 2004 cancels all dates — poor ticket sales, but I blame the String Cheese Incident (via) #

Zelda Classic — Zelda clone with better graphics and a mapmaking community (via) #

Google plans to reveal some of its code — also, they're tripling their staff in the next year (via) #

Spam forces blind users to give up on e-mail — they listen to subject lines one at a time #

NYT on David Huffman's curved paper structures — here's a nice gallery of modern origami (via) #