Link Archives
Ads via The Deck
February 9, 2010
Mirror Scare Supercut (related: SNL's The Mirror) [via]
Tiny Speck announces Glitch, Flash MMO coming later this year (CNET has the exclusive behind-the-scenes and in-depth preview of the game)
February 8, 2010
ChatRoulette, videochat with a random person (like Omegle with a webcam, randomly NSFW; YouTube has some great video captures) [via]
Recursive webcast on Justin.tv (turn your radio down)
Penn & Teller's Invisible Thread (1987 short film finally digitized by a fan; cameos by James Randi, Andy Warhol, and Whodini)
We love xkcd (geek all-star remake of the comic on the Discovery Channel ad)
February 6, 2010
Choire Sicha interviews Paul Ford, Harper's web editor ("YOU ARE THE STUPIDEST WEBSITE IN STUPIDTOWN BECAUSE I WANT EVERYTHING FREE RIGHT NOW!")
Record Tripping (turntablist-inspired game samples Alice in Wonderland and music by Gorillaz, Beck, Death Cab for Cutie, and Spoon) [via]
February 5, 2010
Patrick Stewart on Twitter, the Internet, iPhone, and games (simplicity, not brevity)
Help Giant Robot (raising money for another year of publication)
February 3, 2010
Shutup, disable comments on popular websites (related: Engadget disables comments and the Macheist team adds them to Daring Fireball)
February 2, 2010
Where We Remain (you might also like Beulah & the Hundred Birds, also built on Flixel)
Loudon Wainwright III on the Sound of Young America (very personal interview and great performances inspired by Charlie Poole)
February 1, 2010
Google Chrome 4 adds support for native Greasemonkey scripts (yay!)
Greg Knauss time-travels to visit his 1990 self (everything is amazing, nobody's happy)
Gnilley, indie game where you kill enemies by screaming (see also: Racing Pitch)
Ze Frank's Pain Pack (songs built from samples of people in emotional distress)
January 31, 2010
HacKey, chart popular keys in your Last.fm favorites (38% of my favorite songs are in C) [via]
Kate Beaton illustrates the Gorey book covers (so good)
January 30, 2010
Echo Nest previews new APIs (the search_tracks method sounds amazing)
Bram Cohen takes on Freenode (even if the policy's dumb, this isn't the way to handle it)
January 29, 2010
How to Report the News (from Charlie Brooker's News Wipe) [via]
The Virtual Piano (way more fun than it should be) [via]
Alaska Nanooks 2010 Hockey Intro (true to the spirit of the original, though more polished)
Comedian asks New Yorkers to carry him across Manhattan (155 people carried him 9.4 miles in below freezing temperatures) [via]
January 28, 2010
Steven Frank on the iPad and a generational shift in computing (the single smartest essay I've read about the iPad yet)
xkcd's Spirit (NASA's own WALL-E)
Brandon Boyer asks indie game all-stars about the iPad (new music apps, cocktail-style gaming, and more complex game genres)
J. D. Salinger, dead at 91 ("Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.")
Rafe Colburn on the iPad and the closed future of consumer computing (I'm concerned it'll shift creation to consumption; even the iPhone was better on that count)
January 27, 2010
The Prisoner's Dilemma recreated in Mechanical Turk (gauging altruism and how priming changes behavior)
Anil Dash on geek attention on the iPad vs. tonight's State of the Union (a little perspective)
Apple iPad official promo video (starts at $499, unlimited AT&T 3G for $30/month; see Gizmodo's roundup and hands-on)
January 26, 2010
Nieman Lab's interactive calculator for estimating effects of newspaper paywalls (uses some best guesses from the NYT as an example, though 60% seems insanely optimistic)
David Cole on metagaming and boundaries in reading the web (thoughtful and cleverly designed) [via]
If Global Warming Is Real, Then Why Is It Cold? (cliche watch from editorial cartoons and the funny pages)
Directed Edge opens up recommendations API for free non-commercial use (the first recommendations service worth using)
Roman Cortes' 3D coke can in pure CSS (view the source and the can label)
App.itize.us (the iPhone app blog I've been waiting for, carefully curating underrated gems from the App Store)
Lookwell (new-to-me 1991 pilot starring Adam West, created by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel)
Bandcamp starts record "unlabel" with first vinyl release (no ownership over music, just recouping costs and splitting profits with the artists)
Wisconsin jail bans Dungeons & Dragons (the inmate was serving time for killing a man with a sledgehammer; a new trend?)
Confessions of a Book Pirate (a voracious reader, each book takes him at least 5 hours to scan, OCR, and proofread)
January 25, 2010
Weird Al directing his first feature film for Cartoon Network (he's writing and directing in the live-action movie, but will only cameo) [via]
Gnop (control the ball) [via]
Robin Sloan on telling stories with interfaces (riffing off the Google Search Stories ads)
Vanishing Point (I'm waiting for real-time music visualizations like this) [via]
January 23, 2010
VVVVVV (Terry Cavanagh's brilliant new platformer built around a single game mechanic)
CNN's 360° video of Port-au-Prince (don't miss the second and third videos) [via]
January 22, 2010
YouTube's Music Discovery Project (Pandora-style playlists based around an artist)
January 21, 2010
Caleb Larsen's sculpture perpetually sells itself on eBay (here's the currently active auction) [via]
OK Cupid's myths of profile pictures (more amazing data diving)
Zeldman on posthumous hosting and the fragility of the creative web (maybe a nonprofit focused on archiving individual authors? Archive.org's wonderful, but it's darkweb)
Joseph Ducreux, 18th century French artist turned 4chan meme ("I've acquired 99 predicaments, but a wench is not one of them") [via]
Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are engaged (that's a celebrity couple I can get behind)
The Sixty One undergoes major redesign (compare with the old version; some beautiful, risky decisions)
January 20, 2010
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers (Wu Tang vocals with beats built from Beatles samples)
Lukas Ketner's retro style artwork for GET LAMP (from the artist behind the Panic Atari 2600 boxes)
New York Times to charge for frequent access next year (subscribers get unlimited access, everyone else can view a set number of articles per month)
January 19, 2010
Charting the Beatles (gorgeous work visualizing collaboration, song keys, work schedule by month, and more) [via]
General Larry Platt's "Pants on the Ground" (I can't get this out of my head, so you'll suffer too; the General was a crusader in the Atlanta civil rights movement)
Caterina Fake on participatory media (a rebuttal to Jaron Lanier's paranoid WSJ op-ed)
GameSetWatch's Best of the 2009 Demoscene (if you have a PC that can handle it, watch it real-time instead of the videos)
January 18, 2010
OK Go explains why their new YouTube video can't be embedded (a microcosm of the current state of the music industry) [via]
WSJ writer follows a man trying to rescue his family in Haiti (the story's being updated in real-time on Facebook)
Baratunde Thurston speculates how MLK might have used Twitter ("I just became mayor of The Albany Jail on @foursquare!")
ASCIImeo, Vimeo videos in text (the block mode is my favorite)
Visual timeline of Crayola color changes from 1903-2010 (Crayola's Law: "The number of colors doubles every 28 years")
January 17, 2010
2010: Living in the Future (1972 futurism for kids)
Frank Cifaldi's annotated Mr. Gimmick playthrough (obscure NES gem I'd never heard of, the annotations are expertly done) [via]
Google Australia censors Encyclopedia Dramatica in search results (offending someone is a really low bar)
January 15, 2010
Oink founder cleared of fraud charges (still amazed he was pulling in over $200k in donations a year)
January 14, 2010
Acme Novelty Library in Chinese (beautiful, well-integrated translations) [via]
Nick Montfort on the origins of the word "Zork" (zork the fweep)
Retro Sabotage's Jumping
Dispersion of sound waves in ice sheets (when nature acts artificial)
January 13, 2010
Gordon, an open-source Flash runtime in Javascript (SWF v1 support only, with no sound or video naturally, but still) [via]
January 12, 2010
Google to stop censoring Chinese search results or close China office (they imply the Chinese government intercepted Gmail accounts of activists)
John Kricfalusi's 1998 illustrated letter to a young cartoonist (he's answering questions over on Reddit) [via]
The Kickstarter Awards: Best in Show (fourth and final installment, highlighting the best of Kickstarter so far)
January 11, 2010
Al Gore requests a typeface tweak (the VP has an eye for type usability) [via]
January 10, 2010
What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google (the answers match up nicely) [via]
January 8, 2010
Maciej Ceglowski on six months of Pinboard (by charging a small fee, he's earned enough to work on it full-time) [via]
100 Games Cupcakes (here they all are in one image) [via]
Gumby creator Art Clokey dies (don't miss Gumbasia, his pioneering Claymation film from 1953 that predated Gumby)
Python script takes a webcam snapshot when code commits fail (and posts your frustrated face to Twitter)
Russell Davies on RIG's dataviz Christmas ornaments (the more Twitter followers, the larger the snowman's head)
Newspaper Club announces prices for custom-printed papers (UK-only for now, includes delivery; examples: Last.fm's newspaper charts and Rev. Dan Catt's photo paper)
January 7, 2010
Zach Gage's Antagonistic Books (from the creator of temporary.cc, a book that burns itself when opened and another that can't be closed) [via]
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (Wherefore the nihilist weeps and cries for 'fair'?)
The Third & The Seventh (a nicely shot, but otherwise unexciting short film, until you realize it's 100% CGI)
Roger Ebert on losing the ability to eat, drink, and speak (his journal's been consistently great lately)
January 6, 2010
Blink-182's Tom DeLonge tries to sell Vampire Weekend a social network ("call it a space cam")
Boing Boing's guide to the IGF 2010 finalists (videos and descriptions for all 20)
Project 880, summary of James Cameron's original Avatar treatment (more backstory, new characters, and more depth)
January 5, 2010
Vintage Ad Browser (Philipp Lenssen collected and categorized over 120,000 images from online and offline sources)
The Kickstarter Awards, Part 1 (highlighting the most successful, popular, and prolific projects from our first eight months)
Metafilter community on the tragic death of Brad Graham (I still can't believe he's gone)
January 4, 2010
Rex's 30 Best Blogs of 2009 (thoughtful list following some interesting trends)
Volker Shreiner's Counter, short film from 2004 (found footage from classic films counts down from 266, mostly using door numbers) [via]
One Frame of Fame (crowdsourced music video, judged by Mechanical Turk and rendered with new frames hourly)
January 3, 2010
15,740 self-proclaimed social media gurus on Twitter (gurus, ninjas, and experts) [via]
January 2, 2010
Daniel Raffel's favorite new geek projects of 2009 (an unusually great list) [via]
Spam Assassin scores any email in 2010 as spammy (they hardcoded a regex for 2010-2099 as "grossly in the future")
December 30, 2009
Adam Parrish on The Joking Computer (a bot that can make up bad puns)
Anil Dash on the perceived vs. actual value of Twitter's suggested user list (most new users aren't active or engaged, so clickthroughs and replies don't change with the influx)
December 29, 2009
Demo of Proswitcher, multitasking for jailbroken iPhones (the only thing that makes me jealous of the Pre) [via]
DJ Earworm's United State of Pop 2009 (mashing up Billboard's Top 25 of 2009 into a completely new song)
PVRBlog's The Decade of DVR (Matt Haughey gets some help from web superstars for his last post before the transition)
December 28, 2009
Tuper Tario Tros. (Mario meets Tetris mashup, with a challenging ending)
December 27, 2009
Robin Sloan's Annabel Scheme (brilliant novella about quantum computing and the digital occult)
Slate on Sweden's Christmas Eve tradition of watching a Disney clip show (in 1997, over half the country watched the animated special, first aired in 1958) [via]
December 23, 2009
CrowdsMachine (find popular links across all your feeds, and surface a new feed of the results)
Reverse engineering Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton (someone do DJ Shadow and the Avalanches next!)
Alma (haunting short film by a Pixar animator, only viewable for a short time) [via]
4chan founder to speak at TED (I fully expect Anonymous to show up)
December 22, 2009
Yahoo! to close MyBlogLog next month (what a waste)
Fimoculous's List of Lists 2009 (related: Kottke's best of the decade lists)
Jonathan Zittrain's "Minds for Sale" (great talk on crowdsourcing and the fine line between volunteering and exploitation)
December 21, 2009
Metaplace closing January 1 (horrible shutdown procedure: ten days' notice during the holidays to save everything manually)
Wired on the Duke Nukem Forever saga (like the Phantom Menace, the lack of constraints can lead to disaster)
HP's face-tracking software is racist (in their official response, they blame "insufficient foreground lighting") [via]
Every day the same dream (think outside the box) [via]
Ed Piskor releases Wizzywig Volume 1 and 2 for free download (fictional comic history about the hacking/phreaking scene; I bought both and am anxiously awaiting Volume 3) [via]
December 20, 2009
Chris Dixon's anatomy of a bad search result (great followup to Paul Kedrosky's original post about trouble in the Google ecosystem)
December 19, 2009
Multiplayer Basketball (even a simple basketball game becomes compelling with multiple realtime players)
_why's Estate (an archive of artist/coder _why the lucky stiff's known works) [via]
December 18, 2009
Swedish Pirate Party launches public Etherpad service (using the newly open-sourced code base)
Pomplamoose, "Always in the Season" (a new Christmas carol, with Anton Patzner on violin and Zoe Keating on cello)
Browser Pong (only works in modern browsers, uses HTML5 audio)
Matt Haughey defends the use of Twitter during personal tragedy (I wonder how much of the criticism stems from perceptions of Twitter as frivolous)
70-minute video review of the Phantom Menace (more than half the length of the film itself)
Dresden Codak's Lantern Season (every one of Aaron Diaz's comics are fantastic; don't miss The Sleepwalkers and Fabulous Prizes) [via]
Michael Johansson's obsessive-compulsive sculpture (packing feats and ordinary objects reassembled to look like model toys)
Kleptones to release new album for free on January 1 at midnight (so exciting; I still think Night at the Hip-Hopera is the best mashup album ever)
Google Maps India evolves driving directions to use local landmarks (street names are often unknown, so they just describe what you'll pass by)
December 17, 2009
Reddit community forms largest Secret Santa gift exchange ever (4,500 members spent $115k on gifts; here's an interview with the founder)
Mag+, digital magazine UI design concept (the most thoughtful and realistic I've seen)
OK To Go (a collage of hyperspace scenes in film) [via]
Facebook Data team releases study on user ethnicity (they compare it to the demographics of the Internet and United States)
Google Browser Size (this would be great for Analytics, to view your community's actual screen sizes)
Let's Enhance (montage of zoom in and enhance scenes; I blame Ridley Scott) [via]
December 16, 2009
Plotter Drawings from the 1960s (from the Digital Art Museum) [via]
Desaturated Santa (she should hang out with pixelated girl and polygon guy)
Nifflas releases Saira (PC exploration game, like the Knytt series with a more elaborate storyline and gameplay)
Craigslist unblocks Yahoo! Pipes (good to hear, thanks Jeremy)
Colbert joins Alicia Keys on New York State of Mind ("I own this town from 41st to 47th")
The LOST Underground Art Show (from the gallery that started Crazy 4 Cult 3-D)
Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins of "Friendster" Civilization (they were acquired last week for $26M by a Malaysian company; the pre-IPO Google offer could've been worth $1B today) [via]
Brandon Boyer's top 10 indie and iPhone games of 2009 (my top 10 would be virtually identical; I haven't played Saira yet, but soon)
Bygone Bureau on the best new blogs of 2009 (they asked several people, including me, for our favorites)
December 15, 2009
Capitol Records sues Vimeo over lip dubs (mind-numbingly stupid, the videos are free viral ads for their catalog; related: ASCAP demanding fees for Guitar Hero parties)
How MC Frontalot quit smoking with Dungeons & Dragons (roll a D20 saving throw whenever the GM tries to poison you (i.e. when you feel like smoking)) [via]
Todd McHatton's Christmas Songs (my brother-in-law's free holiday EP, for fans of Van Dyke Parks and Nilsson)
December 14, 2009
Christmas Light Hero (former Disney Imagineer wires his house to play "Cliffs of Dover," with a Wii and 21,268 lights) [via]
Health insurers paying Facebook gamers virtual currency to oppose health care reform (strangely, the writer quotes a Gmail error as an official response) [via]
December 11, 2009
Nelson Boles' "This one time..." (otherworldly hand-drawn animation; mood feels like Kevin Huizenga meets Grickle)
Gina Trapani on Dan Bricklin's Note Taker for the iPhone ("30 years after VisiCalc shipped: Another app from me that starts out on Apple hardware")
Matt Haughey selling PVRBlog.com on eBay (180,000 RSS subscribers, no reserve! )
Interactive Fiction Competition 2009 winners announced (several are playable online, but not the winner)
Teux Deux (elegantly-designed to-do list by Swiss Miss and Fictive Kin) [via]
SMBC on the future of generational prejudice
December 10, 2009
Super Pork and Beans All-Stars (fanmade megamontage of ten years of web memes)
GET LAMP now available for preorder for 25% off until December 31 (an unbelievable deal, the text adventure documentary will be released on two DVDs in March)
Brandon Boyer's top 10 console/handheld games of the year (skewing heavily towards the innovative, quirky, and otherwise underappreciated)
NYT's 9th Annual Year in Ideas (Kickstarter made the cut!)
Kotaku profiles a young mom addicted to Xbox achievements (she's addicted to grinding through terrible games for the ranking)
TW1TT3R ART (ASCII art in 140 characters) [via]
Jason Louv argues that 4chan is the future of human consciousness (a dystopic take, but there's some truth in here, especially related to attention)
December 9, 2009
The Web Is Large (very funny mashup of tech digerati quotes out of context)
Facebook's new privacy controls default to publicly viewable (expect a large-scale userbase freakout and real-world repercussions)
Pixeljam's Mountain Maniac (it's like an angry, bearded pachinko for the Atari 2600)
December 8, 2009
Norman Rockwell's photographic inspiration (I never knew his illustrations were drawn from staged photos) [via]
The Manhattan Tongue Project (funny, these look older than 1998 to me)
"Mysterious letters" flood Pennsylvania town (the art project frightened some residents, reminiscent of Boston and Ohio)
Panic's lost applications for the Atari 2600 (incredible retro artwork and game boxes; I've seen these in person and they're ridiculously accurate)
Target point-of-sale system uses game mechanics to speed checkout times (cashiers have informal speed contests and sometimes cheat using a "suspend" function) [via]
SiON, Flash 10 software synthesizer (chippy music and sound effects without samples, uses MML for describing music; try it out here) [via]
Google Chrome launches Mac/Linux betas and support for extensions (how long before an ad blocker tops the charts?)
December 7, 2009
Virgin Galactic unveils first commercial spaceship ($200,000, cheap! don't miss Branson's introductory video) [via]
Crunchpad renamed to JooJoo, goes on sale Friday for $499 (Fusion Garage claims no contract with Arrington existed at all; note that TechCrunch isn't covering the news at all)
Dean Allen elaborates on why he shut down Favrd (a peek into the dark and needy side of social media; I just wish he'd left the archives online)
WPA Cracker, cloud-based WPA cracking service (400 CPU cluster runs a network capture through 135 million words in 20 minutes ) [via]
Google tests real-time search from Twitter, Facebook, news sources (try it here; it's like a live, expanded version of this Greasemonkey script I love) [via]
Beatles 3000 (reminds me of Idiocracy's Time Masheen (amazingly, not on YouTube))
December 6, 2009
Dean Allen shuts down Favrd without notice (good discussion on Zeldman's entry)
Effect Games (web-based toolkit for making and sharing hosted JS games; see the platformer tutorial for an example)
December 4, 2009
Phoenix on La Blogotheque's Take Away Shows (directed by Vincent Moon in Paris)
December 3, 2009
Michael Jackson anonymously co-wrote music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (a gaming urban legend confirmed; here's some audio samples)
Paul Spinrad's unpublished 1988 Ayn Rand "interview" for Wired (culled entirely from quotes from her published work, interviews, and marginalia)
Said the Gramaphone's 75 Favorite Songs of 2009 (great list, wonderful writing, and a 315MB download)
Sports Illustrated's design concept for a tablet-based magazine (also, the NYT's Article Skimmer is a more practical experimental UI for online news)
Google launches Public DNS service (lookups are permanently logged but not shared inside Google; 8.8.8.8 is a great IP)
December 2, 2009
CutCopyPasteGnome (other games I've enjoyed recently: The Next Floor, Saut, and Continuity)
Too Much Joy's Tim Quirk details a Warner Bros. royalty statement (is the lack of transparent accounting due to malice, stupidity, or both?) [via]
Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson no longer identifies with right-wing (feels more like he shifted his own priorities, from foreign policy to science)
December 1, 2009
Craigslist blocks Yahoo! Pipes (Pipes makes it hard for them to stop commercial use of the feeds, but this is excessive) [via]
Mark Coleran's portfolio of fake interface design for films (I liked his comments on designing the Bourne Identity UIs)
Google Zeitgeist 2009 (Paranormal Activity was the fastest-rising U.S. query this quarter!?)
Khoi Vinh on the design of Basic Maths, his new Wordpress theme (I love seeing his design process)
November 30, 2009
Hollywood vs. New York (scenes of NYC getting destroyed in film, set to Rhapsody in Blue) [via]
Internal disputes kill the CrunchPad (Arrington claims Fusion Garage decided to sell it without them; I'd like to hear their story)
November 29, 2009
Automatic Mario cover of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" (the amount of work here just hurts my brain) [via]
November 27, 2009
Roger Avary taken off work furlough, back in prison after Twitter notoriety (too bad, it was shaping up to be a great read)
November 25, 2009
David McCandless visualizes the safety/efficacy of the H1N1 vaccine (a ton of research boiled down into simple charts; see also: Kottke's explanation of how it's made)
A Life Well Wasted episode 5: "Help" (the best gaming podcast interviews Desert Bus for Hope, plus a lovely Olly Moss poster)
Waze turns crowdsourced mapping into a game (agree with the commenter, it's unfortunate they're not contributing to OpenStreetMap)
27b/6's David Thorne responds to a client about spec work (he's on Twitter)
Wikileaks releases 573,000 private pager messages from 9/11 (a massive privacy breach, Declan McCullagh's trying to find the source; Reddit users are discussing the interesting ones)
Quake 1 ported to Flash with Alchemy (ported by Michael Rennie, source is on Github)
Neven Mrgan's Pie Guy, impressive web game for the iPhone (installed from a webpage, swipe controls, and works offline; 3GS only, older iPhones are too slow)
An academic history of chiptunes (related: 8bitcollective visits CSIRAC, a digital computer that made music in 1951)
Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young singing the Fresh Prince theme (was hoping for Neil himself, but this is a great impression)
November 24, 2009
Director/screenwriter Roger Avary's tweeting his experience of life in jail (he's on a work furlough, tweeting during the day and serving his sentence at night)
Bioshock cosplay at the Georgia Aquarium (the drill actually works, and the costume's for sale on eBay; how it was built)
November 23, 2009
McSweeney's: Has Bell Invented the "Telegraph Killer"? (Gizmodo circa 1876)
Simon Willison on Node.js (best explanation I've seen of why it's exciting and how it works)
November 22, 2009
Nicovideo Redirector (search or watch Nicovideo without registration) [via]
Back to the Future DeLorean mod for Crysis (including support for time travel and flaming tire tracks)
November 20, 2009
Regretsy gets a book deal (the anonymous author turned out to be April Winchell, collector of audio oddities)
Google Chrome OS Demo (a world without a local filesystem and apps; also, the Chrome UI concept video) [via]
Patrick Moberg's Internet Vices (funny, Tumblr feels more like beer than wine to me)
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's "Heaven Can Wait" (Keith Schofield's surreal video and insane treatment were inspired by FFFFOUND and Reddit, but maybe too explicitly) [via]
November 19, 2009
YouTube adds machine-translated automatic captions (starting with some partner channels, but auto-timing is available to everyone today)
Microsoft tries to patent Edward Tufte's sparklines (they were recently added to Excel)
Leonard Lin's Retweet Avatars for Greasemonkey (a subtle change, but a big improvement)
Web-ops god John Allspaw leaves Flickr to join Etsy (he's the last of the original Ludicorp team to go) [via]
November 18, 2009
Laptop Steering Wheel Desk (don't miss the product photos)
Interview with Ralph Eggleston, Pixar's production designer on WALL-E (from last February, but new to me; I didn't know the Axiom had three passenger classes)
NSFW: Animated pixel-art video for Flair's "Trucker's Delight" (warning: very offensive and sexist, but the attention to 16-bit detail by director Jérémie Perin is incredible)
NY Observer on Anil Dash's new government 2.0 incubator project (Expert Labs debuted at Web 2.0 today, funded with a $500k grant from the MacArthur Foundation)
November 17, 2009
Google's Dan Morrill explains how the Droid autofocus breaks every 24.5 days (this gets second-place for quirkiest Android bug) [via]
Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter on Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns (his style of comedy usually makes me uncomfortable, but this made me laugh)
The Pirate Bay shuts down their tracker for good (they're switching to DHT instead)
November 16, 2009
How Darren at Link Machine Go found Belle de Jour's identity five years ago (Brooke was part of the early UK blog scene)
ICU64, real-time visualization of Commodore 64 memory (the developer also posted videos of Paradroid and Boulder Dash) [via]
Russell Davies on pretending and "barely games" (his SAP prototype looks like great ambient fun) [via]
NYT Magazine on the indie gaming movement (nothing new here, but good overview with a wonderful closing anecdote from Cactus)
Tim O'Reilly on the pending War for the Web ("more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform")
November 14, 2009
Jason Scott rounds up Geocities' top 10 most popular MIDI files (along with a torrent with 51,000 MIDIs rescued by Archive Team)
Matt Haughey on the discovery of his brain tumor, treatment, and the Internet's response (there were about 1,000 #mathowielove tweets in 24 hours)
Belle de Jour reveals herself after six year of anonymity (only six people in the world knew, she only told her parents yesterday) [via]
Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd (great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from) [via]
November 13, 2009
Rogue Amoeba stops iPhone app development after App Store idiocy (I'm with Marco, the only fix is allowing external apps, but it's unlikely) [via]
Numb3rs on IRC ("Luckily, I speak l33t.")
Prank War 8: The Skydiving Prank (hard to say if life-threatening situations are funnier than public humiliation)
301 Works, Internet Archive works to preserve URL shortener data (the shorteners will provide regular backups and hand over data on closure, though TinyURL's conspicuously missing)
November 12, 2009
Quizipedia (simple game with trivia scraped from Wikipedia entries)
Kill Screen, funding a new art magazine about videogames (sounds like the English analogue of Amusement I was hoping for)
November 11, 2009
Auto-Tune the News on Kanye, Charlie Bit Me, and Balloon Boy (if you're in NYC next week, go see them perform live)
EyeWriter (F.A.T./Graffiti Research Lab project lets paralyzed artists draw with their eyes)
Know Your Meme on the Autotune meme (special appearance by guest memeologist, Dr. Al Yankovic) [via]
Nicholas Felton's visualization of 13 years of CNN.com traffic (the three biggest days, in order, were the 2004 election, 9/11, and the 2008 election) [via]
November 10, 2009
Christian Swinehart's epic Choose Your Own Adventure visualizations (everything here is amazing, from the animations to the playable visualization of Meretzky's Zork: The Cavern of Doom)
Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer (like the Two of Us short film, Beatles alternate-history fiction inspired by this SNL sketch)
Typekit launches (huge embeddable font collection, reasonably priced, and very well executed)
November 9, 2009
The Big Pictr (Flickr photos in the style of The Big Picture) [via]
Twitter's new Trends API will use Yahoo's WOE for locations (also used by Flickr, this cements the CC-licensed WOE data as the web's placename database) [via]
The Beatles Never Broke Up (mashup of Beatles solo albums with a backstory; related: Stephen Baxter's short story, The Twelfth Album) [via]
Paul Rogers draws Name That Movie ("Six drawings per movie, in sequence, no movie stars") [via]
November 8, 2009
NYT on confusion over how Kiva loans work (nonprofits carefully balancing effective marketing and donor expectations)
November 7, 2009
Microsoft COFEE, digital forensics tool for police, leaks online (available where you'd expect; sounds like common Windows network utilities with a simple interface)
NYT visualizes the unemployment rate for different demographics (48.5% of young black men without a high school degree; 3.6% of college-educated white women over 25)
November 6, 2009
Another World level ported to Javascript (in other emulation news, a NES and Gameboy emulator in JS and SNES9x ported to Flash) [via]
Blocktronics' ANSI art tribute to RaDMaN (powered by Viewtronics, Peter Nitsch's gorgeous new Flash 10 ANSI viewer) [via]
Aaron Straup-Cope leaves Flickr, joins Stamen Design (one of my favorite geeks joins one of my favorite companies)
Unreal Engine 3 development kit now free for non-commercial use (huge announcement, along with the recent free release of Unity Indie)
The Big Picture's series on Martian landscapes (Kai's Power Tools in real-life) [via]
November 5, 2009
Preview of McSweeney's Panorama, their one-shot newspaper (as expected, looks incredibly great) [via]
The Grant-Pattishall Award (congrats, Kellan!) [via]
Birdhouse for Your Soul (Greg Knauss finds one small piece of the historical web)
Google open-sources Closure Tools (JS compiler, along with Google's huge widget library) [via]
Video montage of actors speaking the movie's title (great comments with some missed opportunities; "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to The Taxi Driver?")
The Morning News' Cloud of Atlases (impossible to guess, but look at all the pretty colors)
American Airlines fires UX designer for explaining why their UX isn't great (a lapse of judgment from both American Airlines and an employee who cared too much)
November 4, 2009
Overheating, photo series of gadgets thrown through walls (from issue 6 of Amusement, the incredible French gaming culture magazine) [via]
Ricardo Autobahn's The Golden Age of Video (insane pop culture video mashup)
November 3, 2009
The Last Days of Gourmet (sad photo series, reminds me of the dot-com carnage photos)
Put This On (first episode of Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor's Kickstarter-funded video series on clothing)
Jono Bacon's The Art of Community released for free download under CC license (looks fantastic and worth buying) [via]
Eric Testroete's papercraft portrait Halloween costume (incredibly creepy, like videogames leaking into the real world) [via]
November 2, 2009
Mark Pilgrim's history of the IMG element (told through annotated conversations from 1993) [via]
Every vandalism edit to Nickelback's Wikipedia page (I wonder which edits managed to stay in the longest without detection)
November 1, 2009
Mike Pusateri's Halloween costume data collection (for the fifth year, he's collected every costume name; this year, "nothing" spiked to #2)
XKCD's movie narrative charts (here's a more serious attempt at Primer's timeline)
October 30, 2009
GameCity Squared's 15-Pixel Megamix (extremely minimalist interpretations of 12 different games)
October 29, 2009
Lauren McCarthy's Happiness Hat (it measures your smile and stabs you if you're not smiling sufficiently) [via]
October 28, 2009
Auto Tune de Nieuws (needs an angry Dutch gorilla)
Facebook prank memorializes living person (the Facebook team should allow an email veto, or at least require better documentation) [via]
2D Boy's pay-what-you-like World of Goo results wrapup (don't miss the breakdown by OS and country) [via]
FreeForm's short film on the Open Internet (impressive set of interviewees, directed by Jesse Dylan of Yes We Can fame)
Using Flickr as a paintbrush (coloring overhead maps based on the dominant colors of photos taken on the ground) [via]
October 27, 2009
Football Hero, three-story-tall Guitar Hero controlled with soccer balls (they used pressure pads with Arduino boards wired up to Frets on Fire) [via]
Chris Ware's Halloween cover and comic for the New Yorker (the masks that grown-ups wear)
Interactive Fiction Competition 2009 (14 of the 24 nominees are playable online; Emily Short has a list of reviewers, as well as her own)
John Resig on the serious spam issues with Google Groups lists (if you want to know which areas of big companies are being ignore, watch for spam taking over)
October 26, 2009
Amazon launches Relational Database Service (MySQL 5.1 with automated backups)
Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer's "A Piece of My Mind" (new to me, love the sound; if you like that, try his chap-hop medley) [via]
Graphic history of newspaper circulations from 1990-2009 (related: the Christian Science Monitor is finding success after killing their print edition) [via]
Facebook games analyzed by an MMO player (interesting, though cynical, perspective of the underlying mechanics)