March 24, 2005

Del.icio.us linkbacks bookmarklet — someone needs to make a combined one that grabs referers from Technorati, Bloglines, and so on #

March 23, 2005

Video: Sims-style anti-pregnancy commercial for teen girls — accurate look and feel from the Belgian public health dept. (via) #

Flickr photoset of RFID hand self-implant — insane, if true (via) #

Adam Mathes on playing Harvest Moon — I love this kind of writing about games; also, part 2 and 3 #

Transparent Screens — very clever fun with desktop wallpaper #

UK guerilla artist Banksy installs own pictures in four museums — it took them several days to notice and remove the beautiful works #

Sony PSP 101 — excellent roundup of info about the PSP #

Anil Dash's tribute to Suck.com — I wrote Suck their first fan letter, almost ten years ago (as "Flyp Doink") #

Fun with high powered projectors — "weiter" means next (via) #

Video: House of Cosbys — I'm Curiosity Cosby, you see #

Robocop logos — obsessive fandom; the entire site is very thorough (via) #

Wired on the Decemberists use of BitTorrent for new video — here's the torrent #

March 22, 2005

Backpack, 37signal's new app — but what does it do? Writeboard is still brewing, too #

"White pride" news site in Google News — news sources are still hand-picked by Google Editors, right? #

Nazi forum posts by Minnesota school shooter Jeff Weise — he killed nine yesterday before killing himself; here's his Livejournal, too (via) #

New version of Ruby on Rails supports Ajax natively — don't miss Curt Hibbs' beginner's tutorials #

iPod Shuffle knock-off was a publicity stunt — Apple and the blog world fell for it, too #

Coudal's Crash Ballet 2 winners — Joshua Allen's entry is my favorite #

Friendster movie in development — Harold Ramis directing, so it can't be all bad (via) #

March 21, 2005

Video: Darkon, a documentary about LARPers — live action role-players, that is (via) #

The PC Forum Long Tail drinking game — I would've slipped into an alcohol-induced coma by day 2 of ETech #

Video: Grandaddy on "The Secret to Songwriting" — very enlightening #

Nintendo DS charging dock built from Legos — including game and stylus storage (via) #

Jon Udell's inspiring comments on Upcoming.org — read my response; I've committed to making some big changes by next Monday #

Using the Powerbook motion sensor to control Neverball and Google Maps — an extension of this article, don't miss the three videos (via) #

Rejected e-mails from the Snopes inbox — extremely gullible people ask Snopes to verify the truthfulness of jokes #

Slashdot redesigning with XHTML and CSS — don't worry, it'll still be just as ugly to look at (via) #

The Rhys-Davies Episode III Hoax — how a prank e-mail became fact, reported in the online and offline media (via) #

Flash: Kristan Horton remade Dr. Strangelove with household objects — here's an interview with the artist; warning, audio #

PSP Video 9 — download, convert and copy video to your PSP using BitTorrent and RSS (via) #

Ourmedia alpha launches — partnered with Archive.org, free tool to host and discuss grassroots media #

Image: No One Is Thirsty — courtesy of the new PBF homepage #

March 20, 2005

Video: The Secret of Bananas — a better-kept secret than the Yahoo/Flickr deal #

Star Wars Kid TV Tribute Roundup

Posted March 20, 2005 by Andy Baio

It’s been almost two years since the Star Wars Kid video, but the tributes keep coming.

Tonight, “Arrested Development” featured an obvious SWK homage. In a flashback, the family stumbles on a tape-recording of George Michael, the teenage son of Jason Bateman’s character, doing his lightsaber moves. (Thank to Matt for the video.)

Video: swk_arrested_development.mpg (10MB, MPEG2)

While I’m at it, here’s a video clip I’ve been sitting on since late last year from the Cartoon Network’s “Venture Brothers.” From Episode 106, a winged henchman tries to fight Brock with a junk lightsaber. Before he does, he performs some very familiar fighting moves…

Video: swk_venture_brothers.mov (5MB, Quicktime)

And, for the completists out there, episodes of two other shows were entirely based on the Star Wars Kid ordeal. In Episode 76 of “Ed,” aired December 2003, an overweight high school student recorded himself doing a dance. After the video is stolen, leaked online, and remixed into a catwalk-style fashion video, he asks Ed to help seek damages in civil court. In the end, he decides to drop the charges and embraces his geekiness by repeating the dance moves in the high school halls. The fifth episode of “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends,” aired September 2004, was full of geek in-jokes and SWK parallels. The TV Tome description rounds it up nicely.

Finally, because I get asked occasionally, I have no new Star Wars Kid news. He’s never tried to contact me, and I haven’t tried to follow up in any way. I don’t know the outcome of the lawsuits or what Ghyslain is up to. If anyone out there knows, I’d love to know how he’s doing.

June 26, 2006: Here’s a clip from the September 25, 2005 episode of “American Dad.”

Barry Diller's Interactive Corp. buying Ask Jeeves for $2 billion — ridiculously overpriced #

PBS.org quietly enables trackback — but appears to only be using the ping info internally #

Yahoo buys Flickr! — it's official! more thoughts from Caterina and Jeremy #

Katamari Damacy coming to the Nintendo DS! — yay! #

How many 5-year-olds could you fight at once? — I love the Internet #

March 19, 2005

Gmail going public on April 1 — also: people have been exchanging Gmail invites for positive feedback on eBay (via) #

Video: Firefox TV commercial — gorgeous, but should probably mention the URL and what Firefox is (via) #

Hacking Google Desktop Search — remotely monitor other computers on your LAN (via) #

Audio: Google Autolink debate with Doctorow, Scoble, and Schwimmer — I'm still siding with Google on this issue (via) #

Livejournal added tags, too — update: it's just a new view of a very old feature (via) #

GoogleX mirrors — still no word on why Google removed it from their site #

French news agency sues Google News for infringement — in response, Google should change their pagerank to zero (via) #

Wikipedia hits 500,000 articles — and that doesn't count the multilingual editions or the other Wikimedia projects (via) #

Experimental Gameplay Project — Tower of Goo and Darwin Hill are great (via) #

Bla-Bla List recodes Ta-Da Lists in Java — it's devolving into a language war, but an entertaining one #