Waxy.org: Links Archives: September 2004

Mount St. Helens' insect overloads (mmm, underground sugar caves)

Why I'm not posting many links (their crappy rooms have no Internet access; light posting until Friday)

Top 10 Secrets about the Presidential Debates (both parties are to blame for this comspiracy to suppress real debate) [via]

Tribe.net goes local (for example, here's Los Angeles)

Cachelogic's survey of P2P network traffic (BitTorrent by far the biggest; P2P traffic far outpaces web traffic)

Girlhacker has a baby! (welcome, little Babyhacker) [via]

Cockeyed's TGI Fridays menu prank (one Bacon Churner and an Atkinz Soda, please)

The Internet's Most Accurate English-to-English Dictionary (now with support for three new languages!) [via]

Ask Mefi on skitter scatters, ghosts, and auras (very odd thread about a 6-year-old girl who sees strange things) [via]

University professors gathering students in Second Life (I highly recommend the free trial)

Boogah interviews Eric Kleptone (the Waxy shout-out left me blushing)

HR 4077 bill passed the House (bill proposes up to 5 years of jail for sharing 1,000 songs or one unreleased album)

Invisible Train, multiplayer augmented reality game for the PocketPC (watch the video to see the virtual trains running on real tracks)

Bloglines announces web services, sync support for other feedreaders (huge news; FeedDemon now supports it and NetNewsWire support is coming soon) [via]

Sony PSP to retail for $349? (update: it was a hoax)

Flickr slideshow of U2's "Vertigo" (wait for the images and hold the spacebar to flipall the frames)

Escher for Real (3D printed models of Escher artwork) [via]

Tomas on the crazy juice in his hometown (take me to the river, drop me in the water)

Evil JPEG virus in the wild (tons of info, including the FTP site it connects to and the image itself)

Jeremy on new My Yahoo beta (very well designed, with RSS everywhere) [via]

Flash charts with PHP (easier than working with GD::Graph, and sexier too) [via]

Audio: Engadget has the breast-enhancing ringtone MP3 (it sounds very butt rock) [via]

Bontago, multiplayer Jenga-ish strategy game (it was a winner in last year's IGF) [via]

Conan to replace Leno on The Tonight Show (...in the year 2009) [via]

Lindows office building letters on eBay (looks like a job for the Anagram Server) [via]

Cornelius is Joi Ito's second cousin (lovely photo of them on Flickr)

Rex's thoughts on game culture intersecting with other media

MTV2's "Video Mods," music videos portrayed by video games (machinima goes mainstream, watch the clips) [via]

Black Magic, virtual reality pop-up books (the handheld viewers look like a modern take on stereoscopes) [via]

Dance Dance Revolution fan fiction (the rest of the Games category at FanFiction.net is fascinating, too) [via]

Image: Star Wars Battlefront game lets you kill Jar-Jar Binks (and the Ewoks, too)

Annotated recipes on Flickr (like Cooking for Engineers, a new approach to an old genre) [via]

Del.icio.us extension for Firefox (two great tastes that go great together) [via]

Annenberg survey finds Daily Show viewers far more politically aware (also: of the 83 jokes surveyed, he targeted Bush and Kerry equally) [via]

George draws parallels between the Kryptonite lock scandal and the DMCA (this is an excellent read)

Esther Dyson invests in Flickr (great to see them get the support) [via]

Technorati passes 4 million blogs (I wonder how many of those are from Livejournal's 1.8M active sites)

First screenshots of Wario Ware 2 [via]

Theo Jansen's Strandbeest, huge walking kinetic sculptures (the videos are unbelievable, like a real-life Sodaplay) [via]

CBS adventure race contestant killed by 300-pound boulder (the first reality show fatality?) [via]

Bootable Goatse rescue floppy (make copies and put them in Best Buy PCs) [via]

Fable's first-week game sales beat Sky Captain's box office (it sold 375,000 games for an $18.7 million gross) [via]

Fascinating article on Second Life's economy and entrepreneurs by a Linden Labs VP (a must-read for both the uninitiated and experienced users) [via]

TiddlyWiki (neat UI, but a novelty until saving changes is fixed) [via]

MIT creating a spinach-powered computer [via]

OJR on political coverage on Google News and Yahoo News (they claim Google's system favors conservative sources) [via]

Image: Sim playing "The Sims" in "The Sims 2" (very meta) [via]

MetaVNC, a window-aware VNC client (as in the screenshot, makes your remote Linux desktop transparent within Windows XP/2000) [via]

Image: Nice hat! (Google Images is great for serendipity)

Emusic relaunches ($9.99/month for 40 DRM-free MP3s) [via]

Video: C-Mon and Kypski, "Shitty Bum" (excellent music video, with great Space Invaders sequence)

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game, redesigned with graphics (here's some technical information about the redesign) [via]

New California law requires disclosing valid e-mail address for filesharing (I'm absolutely furious about this MPAA-sponsored law, here's some of the reasons why) [via]

The Last Starfighter, the Musical (more information about this terrible idea)

Nick's update on Blog Torrent, and call for help (they need people with NSIS, ActiveX, and Moz plugin experience)

Commercial ultrasound services growing popular (we tried FetalFotos, and got our money's worth)

Sony to support MP3 on their portables (apparently, ATRAC never really took off) [via]

Record companies double royalties while online music sites lose money (Apple makes only $.04 per song, while the labels take $.62 or more) [via]

Brian's roundup of new social-network local listing services

Video: Watermelon Love (seducing the online consumer)

SpamAssassin 3.0 released! (also: a new logo, better performance, and a better plugin model)

Star Wars DVD released on Usenet two weeks ago (here's the Star Wars NFO file from Sept. 11)

Archive.org's Sabucat vintage movie trailers collection (not public yet, but here's the growing index) [via]

Navy sailor crushes son to death while playing Gameboy (reminiscent of the Everquest neglect death) [via]

Change Mac desktop images based on CPU load (reminds me of the Ambient Devices line of aware devices) [via]

Botball organizer buys 350 Gameboy Advances ($40 for a pre-owned (non-SP) GBA is dirt cheap) [via]

Guitar 101's cover songs forum (like karaoke for guitars, but with an extremely supportive audience) [via]

Us Weekly says Britney faked her wedding

Dowser, interesting client-side search tool (privately tracks your local search history across multiple search engines) [via]

Flickr gets positive review in Sun-Times (they deserve all praise) [via]

Cat Stevens diverts DC-bound plane to Maine (he was on the federal watch list)

Nellie McKay is lying about her age (and the White Stripes weren't really siblings; does anyone care?) [via]

Life Lessons from Super Mario Bros. games (also: life lessons from the SMB1 instruction bookley)

Pongmechanik, outstanding mechanical tabletop version of Pong (check out the photos, or watch the video for gameplay)

Dave Chappelle reunites the Fugees in a massive Brooklyn block party (it was directed by Michel Gondry for a likely DVD release; Gothamist has first-person accounts) [via]

Changing page layout for different resolutions (check out the demo)

Gameboy DS set for $149 on Nov. 21 (also: the tiny PStwo set for $149 on Nov. 1) [via]

First Nintendo DS commercial in Japan (also: nice wallpaper and a nice shot of the Developers Hardware) [via]

"I Found Some of Your Life" is gone (I suspect it's partly because of this excellent net research)

Emulation and the Video Game Industry, A White Paper [via]

Wired on Kahle vs Ashcroft (saving orphaned works still under copyright) [via]

Projecting Middle-Earth onto a map of Europe [via]

Slate dissects how Ali G keeps conning his famous guests (vague memos, fake websites, and fake companies) [via]

CoolGov (new blog of interesting info culled from official US government sites) [via]

Wikipedia hits 1 million articles (very impressive) [via]

Katamari Damacy for sale starting Tuesday (and at only $20, it's a steal)

Doom III demo released (461 megs seems excessive for a trial version of anything)

The Kleptones, "A Night at the Hip-Hopera" (one of the best mashups ever created, local mirror) [via]

Visual history of one user's spam (excellent charts from 1997 to present) [via]

Jon Udell's badass bookmarklet to search library books via Amazon (Santa Monica people can use Sirsi and this base URL)

Paul Smith's Typewriter Art (some of the earliest ASCII art, I bet) [via]

Instant Replay Binocular (brilliant idea, if a flawed implementation) [via]

Video: Pepsi Can Fu (from this very good TV commercial blog) [via]

Google Answers on nerds in pop culture (from Woody Allen to Ken Jennings)

Torrone's howto on tagging photos with GPS coordinates (another step in documenting your every move)

Video: Willful Infringement, Mickey and Me (documentary of a video store owner's copyright battle against Disney, and many other similar stories) [via]

Screenshots of "Wanda and the Collossus," the Ico pseudo-sequel (IGN has more details about the game) [via]

Sony launching smaller PS2 next week [via]

Spread Firefox campaign passes 720,000 downloads, with 7 days left (G4TechTV has the lead with over 17k referred downloads) [via]

Galactic Conquest, amazing Star Wars mod for Battlefield 1942 (look at those screenshots!) [via]

Ask Mefi thread about the history of scientific discovery (some very thought-provoking comments) [via]

Rat Haus Reality, odd rat-sized houses (rodents of unusual size) [via]

I Found Some of Your Life (blogger finds digicam memory card, posts photos online with fictional narration) [via]

The Jig Is Up

Rock stacking street art

Baby names for bloggers (these are almost as bad as the LOTR baby names)

Homeless use Internet to stay connected (I like that the ex-con geek has "LYNX" tattooed across his knuckles) [via]

Rave parties in City of Heroes MMORPG (I love the idea of superheroes dancing in abandoned warehouses)

Update on the underground Parisian movie theatres (an interview with the group behind the catacomb hacks) [via]

Imvu, Will Harvey from There.com's new avatar-based instant messenger (with hundreds of accessories for sale, naturally) [via]

9/11 tributes in Second Life virtual world (including this unusual recreation)

Downhill Battle's "Three Notes and Runnin'" remix contest (get creative to protest the insanely dumb recent court ruling on samples) [via]

Nicholas Stedman’s robotic Blanket sculpture (creepy hack) [via]

Google Labs Aptitude Test (Michael scanned in the whole thing)

SIPshare, true P2P app over SIP (building a Skype alternative with open standards) [via]

Half-Life 2 release candidate sent to Vivendi (it's going gold any day now)

Popover ads in newspapers

Antigeist on the definition of chivalry (reminds me of this classic first date net.lore) [via]

Suprnova blocks external links to torrents (plus, they're blindly blocking requests without a referer) [via]

Atari ST emulated on the Dreamcast

Bic pens illegal under DMCA (what if the DMCA applied to analog devices?)

Video: ASCII Bush (Bush Jr. and Sr.'s State of the Union speeches rendered in ASCII and robot voice)

European cigarette commercials by American directors (David Lynch, the Coen brothers, Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders, and Robert Altman)

Video: Slowtron's "How to BBQ A Man" (end of summer silliness courtesy of Coudal)

New U.S. nickel design (heads on money are getting bigger and bigger) [via]

Google's 1999 hardware (how quaint!) [via]

Virtual Window project (fake LCD windows, a la Back to the Future 2) [via]

Video: Greenskeepers' "Lotion" (great pop song inspired by Silence of the Lambs)

Gamespot's hugely improved reviews index (for example, PC games sorted by rating in the last year)

Oprah gives a new Pontiac to every audience member (they go ballistic for free soap, so this must have led to several deaths) [via]

Romanian photo gallery decays with every pageview (artsy, but clever) [via]

Adbusters files lawsuits against Canadian broadcasters (they won't air their ads)

Cameron's Foo Camp hack (also: here's why I wasn't updating my links for the last few days)

Trailers for Everyday Life [via]

Image: Spam origin map [via]

Firefox.com owner donates the domain to Mozilla foundation (an unselfish act, props to Kevin)

Gmail invite spooler (automated Gmail invite giveaways) [via]

"Godfather" horse head pillow (catching up on links I missed over the weekend) [via]

Megnut leaves tech to cook full time (I think this is wonderful, and so do others)

Video: Sin City preview trailer (a stylish comic book conversion, but the acting looks bad)

Quake IV preview scans (Raven's title will use the Doom 3 engine)

Waxy Links "via" Meta Aggregator (apparently, I have my own cult)

Cooking for Engineers (great recipe info design) [via]

Guardian UK on Dropcash (plus, some developers are using Dropcash to sponsor software features)

Diarists more likely to suffer from various ailments (well, that explains Livejournal) [via]

Snopes on the Big Burger (for people who refuse to heed Kliban's advice)

The Adventures of Superpup (obscure Superman spinoff from 1958) [via]

Artist turns Scrambler ride into giant Spirograph (also: she uses pinball machines to make kinetic paintings) [via]

Meetup launches new site (better design, message boards, more flexibility for venues) [via]

Cincinnati Court rules all musical samples must be paid for ("Get a license or do not sample," they ruled) [via]

Gameboy Advance console mod [via]

Save Betamax (call-in day to oppose the Induce Act)

Comment spam forged to appear from legit companies? (one theory: companies are spamming to get their competitors blacklisted from Google)

Kempa on Snerdles (robots that make superhero mosaics out of Nerds for nerds)

Audio: President Bush covers U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (this is a masterpiece of digital editing and public domain audio)

Unix on the Gameboy Advance (this is a hugely geeky hack) [via]

Huge Ken Jennings Jeopardy spoiler (how many games he won, and his grand total)

Flash: Not My Type IV (animated typography, see the Flash storyboard way down the page) [via]

Register to vote via P2P (Bearshare adds voter registration to their P2P client)

FlashBlock Mozilla extension uninstalled by Macromedia? (update: this turned out to be false) [via]

Image: Should I Rip This? flowchart [via]

Joel on the social aspect of UI design (as always, a great read) [via]

Obsessive collection of telephone book covers (strangely, I remember this creepy 1984 phone book) [via]

James Duncan is building a 3D chocolate printer (here's a video of it printing, sans chocolate)

Simon's new details of the Half-Life 2 code theft (including the IRC log that led to an arrest)

Slashdot launches Politics section (following the lead of Sensible Election) [via]

Wikialong, Wiki extension for Firefox (collectively doodling in the margins of the web) [via]

Gallina, Gmail-based blogging tool (a bizarre proof of concept) [via]

Turn your NES controller into a PC joystick (yet another great Torrone hack)

College textbooks available on BitTorrent [via]

Hot or Not's $200,000 voter drive contest (a brilliant idea, and I get $100k if you sign up from that link and we win) [via]

Why Adam doesn't recommend Firefox for normal users (I commented about my uncle's weekend upgrade experience) [via]

TargetAlert, Firefox extension to show icons next to non-HTML links (PDF icons next to PDF links, and so on) [via]

Japanese novelty and party goods store (OD finds some of the best items in the store) [via]

TiVo and Netflix team up to offer movie downloads (more in the Newsweek article) [via]

Merlin Mann's 43 Folders (Merlin's new site full of nifty productivity and software hacks)

10 real-life inventions that came from science fiction ($20 gets you a lot on Google Answers)

A Livejournal Grammar Lesson

Simon Carless on O'Reilly's Gaming Hacks (I've read the draft, and it's excellent)

Detailed account of rock climber's infamous self amputation (cute book title) [via]

Data Fountain (international currency rates displayed with a Net-enabled water fountain) [via]

Jish quits blogging (now who will I get to mediate between me and Ghyslain?) [via]

New version of MyTunes, the easy iTunes copying software (the nag screen is only shown once now; thanks, Bill!) [via]

Darkguest, free and clean alternative to Evite

NYT on the World Rock Scissors Paper Championships (their FAQ is very entertaining) [via]

PBS special on the Video Game Revolution (plus a nice site supporting the show) [via]

Grand Theft Auto for the GBA confirmed (top-down perspective sounds more like the original) [via]

Fraud Frond (gallery of cellphone towers disguised as fake trees) [via]

Star Wars, the Not-So-Special edition (sarcastic and informative!) [via]

Jesus was a Jedi (a Christian journal's unusual cover story)

Adam Kalsey's new license plate

Titanic, the Animated Movie (a musical, with a kid-friendly ending) [via]

gmail copy, Perl script to copy files to/from Gmail (easy alternative to gmailFS) [via]

Brilliant method of linking to excerpts of a large MP3 (with the Python source) [via]

Archie Does Revelations (1970s comics adaptation of a religious tract)

Image: Google Blog Google?

Waxy.org 'Via' Links Aggregator (very meta! read his justification for the hack) [via]

How to view and control your TiVo over the web (with video and audio over Quicktime streaming server) [via]

Ed Felten fact chects Wikipedia (including the entry on himself)

Ico sequel announcement next week? (the Japanese Sony site is counting down) [via]

Bigha's Jasper laser (incidentally, it's one of the cleanest retail sites I've seen) [via]

MP3.com on Microsoft's four new digital music initiatives [via]

What's wrong with digital music stores? [via]

Cher's Hexadecimal Clock [via]

Baby name ideas from the Lord of the Rings (Treebeard, Wormtongue, and Farmer Maggot are all nice) [via]

Software group falsely accuses Interactive Fiction archive of pirating Doom 3 (doom3.zip is a 114kb freeware DOS game from 1988) [via]

Image: The Words Republican and Democratic speakers used (lovely chart design from the NYT)

37signals web design tips for Christmas retailers (good usability tips) [via]

PVR Blog on XM Radio and Time Trax (XM walks away from a huge opportunity)

Apache rejects Sender ID spec

Creative Commons search beta [via]

Paul Ford's "Screenscraping the Senate" (converting the government to RDF ) [via]

The Omegathon Collection gaming contest at PAX (to win, you need to win rounds of DDR, Halo, Doom, Mario Kart, and more)

Hostess Twinkies Sushi (also: Twinkie-misu, Twinkie Tacos, and Twinkie Kebobs) [via]

Second Life's in-world tribute to Burning Man (including a massive player piano)

"The Apprentice 2" profiles on Friendster (more fake Friendster marketing, since their profiles don't have any real friends)

MSN Music beta preview (sneak a peek at Microsoft's answer to iTunes) [via]

Smoking Gun takes on Photostamps (Milosevic and Kaczynski now on official U.S. postage) [via]

Banner Ads Invade Gamespace (including automatic downloads of new ads) [via]

Kick Ass Kung-Fu (EyeToy-like game installation, with a great video demo) [via]