Waxy.org: Links Archives: December 2003

Sonata for the Unaware (commuters become generated music, watch the Quicktime demo)

2003 Year-End Google Zeitgeist (also: Yahoo's top searches for 2003)

Using the Treemap control to visualize weblogs (borrows from the Netscan Usenet mapping project)

Charting the trajectory of 2003's #1 pop singles

Security weak at social networking sites (Livejournal, LinkedIn, and Tribe.net respond)

Subtly Simpsons (subtle jokes with accompanying explanations)

Japanese corporate anthem becomes unlikely hit single (We will destroy houses! We will destroy bridges!)

Rich Girls and Silver Spoons comparison chart (yeah, but Ally Hilfiger doesn't have her own video arcade)

Real-time comment previewing with Javascript (very clever)

Elliot Smith's death may not be suicide

Kazu Kibuishi's Copper, beautiful web comics (see also: Clive and Cabbage)

TinyURL Roulette (view a random TinyURL)

The Man Behind the Motion (mockumentary about the egos of motion capture)

Tim Berners-Lee gets knighted (Sir Tim should be granted sainthood next)

BitTorrent download traffic for Return of the King

George Chen, the Internet Guy (story behind the ubiquitous clip art image)

Pirate Radio in the Barrio (hobbyists bringing sonido music to the Bay Area via microradio)

Social software ideas (Matt's full of ideas, but I like the Epinionster one best)

Ben Affleck is parking in Google's space (more photos here)

USA Today discovers weblogs, again (this story is so awful and error-ridden, I don't know where to start)

Depenguinator (remotely replaces Linux with FreeBSD; a bit scary)

Skewering indie rock's sacred cows (very funny writing)

Al Sacui's new comic thing (more inexplicable nonsense, from the Nosepilot guy)

Cartoons and Social Networks, from 2000 (Sally Forth and Family Circus take on the field of social network analysis)

Man and Dad review the year's hit singles (a lot of rhythmic banging)

Dear Neighbor letter (local kids toilet paper his house, neighbor freaks out)

Metafilter gave Matt a trip to Iceland for Christmas (over $2100 raised, with nice photos)

Detailed views of the PSX internals

Background about Chikan, the railroad groping fetish (they even have support groups and hands-on training; here's one guy's journal)

If the Library were like Amazon.com

Stark Effect's Mic in Track (setting found audio recordings to music)

Rex's Year in Review keeps growing (the number of best-of lists doubled over the weekend)

1930s-style Cartoon Violence (traumatic events retold in the style of early-1930s cartoons)

Tinygrow, grow a surreal garden (reminds me of Vector Park)

Unpopular boy makes valedictory speech ("A lot of you were jerks")

MPAA takes a softer approach to movie piracy (they give it 18 months before movie sharing becomes ubiquitous)

Interview with Soulseek's lead programmer

eventSherpa, iCal for Windows

Bill Hicks bootleg MP3 archive

Today is Free Listing Day on eBay (sorry, U.S. only)

Phillip Torrone's Option3 (he took a self-portrait every 30 minutes for three weeks)

Turn your cubicle into a house

Brooklyn cop investigated because of his weblog entries (he deleted all the posts on his Xanga site, but Google cached it)

Apple to announce mini iPods (2GB and 4GB models, starting at $100)

The Future of Adventure Games (is the genre dead?)

Chipmunks' Christmas Song slowed down to normal voices (Duff Man says, oh yeah!)

Boing Boing's traffic stats (about 20k unique visitors per day)

Monster.com adds social networking (the bubble gets bigger)

Basecamp, 37signal's project management suite (launching January, will likely be great)

Alf to get new talk show on Nick at Nite

Internet iTunes Registry (like Audioscrobbler for iTunes, with nice stats)

Howard Dean tattoo (it's good to have convictions)

The 8bits of Christmas (holiday chiptunes made on the NES, Vic-20, C-64, Atari 2600, Gameboy, and more)

Huge 6.5 earthquake hits San Simeon, CA (I felt it 200 miles away in L.A., and other people felt it in S.F.)

Neo-Nazi inventor of Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs, dead at 77 (Harold Von Braunhut was a strange man)

DVD-Jon acquitted in DeCSS retrial (all sorts of good news lately)

Dave Sim ends Cerebus (the comic started the same year I was born)

On Blogdex exploitability (don't try it, or Cameron will drop bows on your ass)

American Brandstand 2003 (the most popular brands mentioned in the Billboard Top 20 this year)

First-person account of the Saddam raid (follow the hoax debate on Metatalk)

Match.com expands into Friendster territory

365 Days Project finishing soon (MP3s will go offline on January 5th)

Mat's story of his S.F. mugging (and the death of San Francisco artist Daniel Price)

Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2003

Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools book free on Archive.org (or just read his weblog instead)

Screenshots and Movies from 1989's The Wizard (the female lead is Jenny Lewis, the lead singer of Rilo Kiley!)

Five-film Narnia series to be filmed in New Zealand (with effects by Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop)

Aggregate mood of Livejournal users over time (currently: tired, happy and amused)

Psychotic Minesweeper speed run videos (more on the speed runs homepage)

MUTE, new P2P app protects privacy (routes all search and download traffic through peers, hiding your IP address)

Maciej's essay on the Wright Brothers and their patent war (the patent system has been stifling innovation for 100 years)

Appeals court rejects Net music subpoenas (RIAA can't subpoena ISPs to reveal user info anymore)

Online gamer in China wins virtual property theft lawsuit (spent two years and $1,210 amassing virtual WMD)

Johnny Cash's Desperado, But With Monkeys (exactly what it says)

Knoxville News' Black History coloring book (don't miss MC Hammer, Arsenio, and Billy Dee)

Photos of yesterday's Wright Brothers hack at MIT (see also: other hacks on the Great Dome)

Dodgeit, free receive-only e-mail to an RSS feed

Law & Order: The Coloring Book

Livejournal adds Atom support (I'll add it to Upcoming.org and this site soon)

Turn your Gameboy Advance into an engine tuner

FluxBlog spotlights new MP3s daily (the Zooey Deschanel & Leon Redbone duet from "Elf" is lovely)

Gnewsgroups = Usenet + Gnutella (peer-to-peer mirroring of Usenet newsgroups)

Vonage goes wireless (supplanting the phone companies, one step at a time)

HugeURL (tired of TinyURL and Shorl? make a bigger URL instead)

11 minute Mario Bros 3 was fake (this seemed obvious to me, but fooled others)

PETA to distribute anti-fur flyers to kids (no longer raising awareness, they're only alienating now)

What A Crappy Present ("The company that makes this just sued my friend.")

MagicBikes, mobile wireless access points (they should mount a laptop on the handlebars)

Jack Black's Computerman (the first five episodes, but it's no Heat Vision and Jack)

Amazon: Qwert Iggle (don't miss the product manual PDF)

Gillmore excited about BitTorrent meets RSS (here are a couple torrent feeds for jam band and anime fans)

Frauenfelder on WINKSite's moblog tools for the masses (definitely worth looking into)

Amazon wishlist of stupidly expensive gifts (what's the most expensive item sold by Amazon?)

Gawker, Gizmodo, Fleshbot redesign with borrowed code (Denton responds in the comments with IM logs, you decide)

Globulos (multiplayer Flash silliness)

FolderShare, private file-sharing (new WASTE-like app from the Audiogalaxy crew)

Google Print, book searching (they're already indexing thousands of books)

Augmented Reality Quake (superimposing Quake objects in the real world)

Winamp 5 released (much better than the crappy v3.0 release)

Secret Service calls secret confession site creator (someone posted a presidential death threat on Grouphug.us)

Fun with MP3 and Perl (writing an ID3 autotagger)

KITT Saves Christmas (MP3) (also: more Star Wars Christmas cheese)

Ben Fry, amazing computer art (don't miss: organic log analyzer, Mario Soup, ZipDecode, and more)

Amazon browser for Mozilla (read more about the project)

Omar the Klingon (Apple's spokesman makes scary faces)

Playable LEGO harpsichord (everything but the piano strings is pure LEGO)

Some retailers may stop carrying PC games (I wonder how much piracy is affecting PC game sales)

Deconstructed NES emulator for Java

Creative Commons milestones (nicely done Flash animation)

Titanium Rhapsody (characters from Mega Man Titanium sing Bohemian Rhapsody)

Everquest launching in-game casino (Shirky brings up the regulation issue)

Bitzi and Jigle join to form P2PFiles.com (it's a P2P search engine, but searches are timing out for me)

Black Mirror (pretty Director animation, hover your mouse over the pieces)

Extreme Segway (Tony Hawk, eat your heart out)

WMD found (in other news: Saddam captured alive)

Spiderman 2 marketing templates to Blogger and LJ users (interesting marketing tactic, but a tiny target market)

Google automatically searching variations (similar to 37BetterGoogle's suggestions)

Media Lab's Memory Prosthesis (software to record, tag, and transcribe every conversation of your life)

NYT Year in Ideas 2003

New Google features from the future

Bad essays on weather (bizarre, but inexplicably funny)

Ben Trott on the minimizing of Mena's role in Six Apart (designers don't get the respect they deserve, and there's sexism at play too)

Virtual prostitution in The Sims Online (trading virtual and real cash for cybersex, Penny Arcade's response)

Canada deems P2P downloading legal (first gay marriage and pot, now this)

QuickTeddy, amazing free-form 3D modeling program

Guardian: We are all nerds (speak for yourself, I'm a geek)

Soundflavor, new music recommendation engine (from the ZDNet writeup, sounds like a commercial version of Audioscrobbler)

Wesley Clark on the Daily Show (he has a sense of humor)

Garfield movie trailer (boy, this looks terrible)

Jason Shiga's Fleep (a serial comic entirely in a phone booth)

We Love the SCO Information Minister ("The silent majority is behind SCO.")

How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANet (I can think of a few more people I'd like to boot)

Google opening R&D lab in India

Virginia arrests two spammers under new anti-spam law

Collage of eating contest photos (gluttony: it's the American way!)

Google testing out new look (no more tabs!?)

Geeky job posting for EA Canada (I guess that's one way of filtering out non-nerds)

Accidentally Kansas (lovely photos of natural disaster dioramas)

Pentrix, trick pen/pencil spinning videos (you'll poke your eye out)

Star Wars Kid model for Quake 1 (also: a character in last night's episode of "Ed" acted out the SWK ordeal)

Clippy for Quake III Arena ("I see you're trying to capture the enemy flag... Would you like help?")

So you'd like to... Go Completely, Irreversibly Insane (Jorn Barger writing Amazon guides under a pseudonym?)

Corey Feldman actively campaigning for Goonies sequel (come on people, he needs the work)

Gizmodo redesigns (now with more prominent ad banners!)

NPR: Codrescu's analogy of blogs as spiderwebs

"Killing is awesome," U.S. soldier clip from CNN (disturbing content, or read the unedited transcript instead)

Ask Metafilter (smarter than Pud, cheaper than Google)

Intelligent 404 pages for weblogs (very slick)

Mugging caught on audioblog entry (via Boing Boing)

Legal Torrents, legally downloadable music (5GB of complete catalogs from electronica labels)

Steering wheel-mounted laptop (takes wardriving to a new level)

Miller Lite human dominoes ad (with TiVo, I never see good commercials anymore)

Santa Yoda, Lucasfilm Christmas card from 1981 (high quality close-up from Heilemann)

AOL launching AIM-based dating service (the Love.com beta is up)

Update: Tori Amos journal sells for $10k (her fans are insane, I tell you)

Mid-Atlantic wrestling photo album, 1977 (looking good, Andre)

Aerogel, the lightest solid in the world (some amazing high-res photos and videos)

Secrets of Rankin-Bass' Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (explains Yukon Cornelius' icepick licking)

Bizarre autogenerated weblogs (all content, links, and templates are computer generated, via Andre)

SCO delivers source code on paper (one million pages, those jerks)

RIAA Radar Top 100 Indie Albums (Amazon's top-selling RIAA-safe albums)

The Onion's Least Essential Albums of 2003

Bill Clinton drops by Google (Kevin has the phonecam sighting)

Dean supporters embrace tech in revolutionary new ways (love him or hate him, this level of tech-savvy in politics is unprecedented)

Veen switches to inline links from del.icio.us (I may try using the same setup soon)

Memigo, personalized news article recommendations (based on other user ratings)

Project Looking Glass, Sun's 3D desktop prototype (watch the demo, skip to 1:50)

New generation of Trojan horses create P2P network for profit

Homeless lawyer challenging Texas over a Ten Commandments statue (may argue case to the Supreme Court, if he can get a ride to D.C.)

Spamhole, fake open mail relays to nowhere (tricks spammers into wasting time and losing money)

Jeremy Zawodny's tech predictions for 2004 (he's a smart guy)

Accusations of simulated child porn in Deus Ex 2

Fan-made trailer for Peter Jackson's The Hobbit (more background on the rumors)

My Mom gets her Master's degree in Journalism (fucking A, indeed. congrats, mom)

Rosa Parks sues Outkast (she's a public figure and it isn't libelous, so where's the case?)

Religious interpretations of Groundhog Day (the movie is popular with Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist leaders)

Highlights from the 2003 Japan National Yo-Yo Contest (insane yo-yo tricks video)

Delacour on the social dynamics of blogrolls (how the six principles of persuasion apply)

3D visualizations of Linux kernel development

Rotary Phone Dial Web Browser (builds an IP address from the numbers dialed)

Robert X. Cringely doesn't exist? (1996 WSJ article about the origins of the pseudonym)

Eurekster, social search engine (see what your friends search for)

iRate Radio, collaborative MP3 downloader (everyone rates free MP3s, the good stuff rises to the top)

Rex's fanatical collection of Best of 2003 lists (he keeps it updated, so check back)

Audioscrobbler redesign (my stats, which I haven't updated for a while)

Alterslash, the best of Slashdot posts/comments digest (good idea, but the interface needs work)

Stephen King shot John Lennon (finally, the truth comes out)

New Mad magazine illustrated by comic greats (including Jim Lee's Captain Infringement and J.S. Campbell's Scantily Clad)

2D remake of 3D Zelda game (N64's Ocarina of Time gets the SNES treatment)

KazaaLite shut down by Sharman Networks (ironically, for copyright infringement)

Little Green Footballs trying to defeat Kottke.org (I voted for Jason, even though he hates America)

Historical events in the style of classic arcade games (funny, but prepare to be offended)

Miniature iMac modeled in clay (the Japanese illustrator reminds me of Loobylu)

Psycho Pong (addictive and evil pong variations)

Marlboro Baby (I'm feeling undersmoked today)

Blogshares is up for sale (some paid subscribers are angry)

Pancake Mountain, DC's indie-rock laden kid's show (cameos by Bob Mould, Vic Chestnutt, and members of Fugazi and Bikini Kill)

3D paper airplanes (fly with arrow keys, change camera with spacebar)

Namco releasing 25th anniversary Space Invaders/Qix machines (nice pic, but 50 cents is blasphemy)

Jennicam closing after 7+ years

Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze divorce

Houston Chronicle's Build Your Own Comics page (what, no RSS? (via Steve))

Compulsive packrat forced to clean house (great reporting on an OCD-like illness)

Hotlinks, link list aggregator (with screenshot thumbnails and link popularity ranking!)

Gamespy and IGN merging (expect obnoxious clickthrough ads on Gamespy any minute now)

Mimi Smartypants, the book (sure, but will it be printed in reverse chronological order?)

Screenshots: MAME for the N-Gage (too bad you'd have to own one to play)

Payloadz, broker for selling intangible goods through eBay

Police conclude investigation into Santa Monica farmer's market tragedy (human error is the only possible cause)

Creating pixel fonts from scratch (Cal has made many)

tunA, Media Lab Europe's social Walkman (shares music with people near you)

Public domain Americana sheet music (some beautiful vintage typography)

Salon's layman's overview of RSS (doesn't point to any readers besides Bloglines, though)

Get Out on Parole (like an interactive Shawshank Redemption)

Video game endings database (pick your platform, from Arcade to Turbografx-16 )

Great profile of Earth Station 5, the Palestinian P2P app (nice work, Mat)

Penny Arcade has collected $30k in their toy drive so far (that's a whole mess of toys)

Programmers as starving artist (but unlike musicians, their day jobs pull in $80k)

Knight-Ridder and WaPo invest $6.3m in Tribe.net

Steve Gillmor on RSS predictions for 2004

c|net pulls the plug on MP3.com (as promised)

New edutainment game targets file sharing (don't miss the press release for MGI's Music Pirates)

Echinacea doesn't do anything but cause rashes (next up: Ginseng, St. John's Wort and Ginkgo Biloba!)

Wil Wheaton signs three book deal with O'Reilly

Blogshares closes down

Billie Jean bootleg remix project (with bonus Simpsons sound clip)

Jorn Barger is missing, but doesn't want to be found (he's probably just off somewhere reading Finnegan's Wake)

Godawful new Netscape Navigator screenshot (like a scene from "Winamp Skins Gone Bad")

Flavorpill Los Angeles, weekly event highlights (I didn't even know they published an L.A. version)

Analyzing Cathy's sweat beads

Rael Dornfest's Mobilewhack (weblog about nothing but mobile)

Screenshots of Cocolog, the new Typepad-powered service in Japan (created for Nifty, one of Japan's biggest ISPs)

Top 11 indie albums of 2003

SimpleQuiz discussions about semantic markup

Back of the new $20 bill (connect the dots to find the secret message)

Japanese bus advertisements

Bill Watterson still retired (tantalizing rumor of a Calvin & Hobbes movie)

Ridiculous DSL bill from New Zealand (for only 25GB, a scary glimpse into a metered future)

Slashdot trolling phenomena (Amazingly detailed Wikipedia entry, with many references)

Suggestions to improve Friendster (answers to an MIT exam question)

Acclaim's new billboards ooze fake blood (bloodvertising in the UK)

Mojo Mail vs Mojo Mail (free software forced to change name in dumb trademark dispute)

NYT predicts live and obscure downloads will be big online (it's a huge market, mostly unexploited)

Story behind Paul Ford's Harpers website (Everything is in the Taxonomy)

Digital sundial

Nine crazy ideas in science (time travel, two suns, and no big bang)

eBay: Tori Amos book of handwritten lyrics (my wife is lusting after this, the holy grail of Tori collectibles)

Amazing series on San Francisco homelessness (Mat explains the political subtext of the story's timing)

Intricate egg sculpture (pretty intense)