Waxy.org: Links Archives: December 2004

Garry's Half-Life 2 Mod (the screenshots are amusing)

Big Heads of 2004 ("giant head" photo cliche on Yahoo News) [via]

Boing Boing has screenshots of the Exeem beta (they've registered a company offshore)

Theme from Blog (every blog needs a theme song) [via]

Video: Darth Vader/Weirdo (completely inexplicable) [via]

eBay ends Microsoft Passport support (they lost Monster in October; eBay was their last big supporter) [via]

KFC Knockoffs, presidential edition (don't miss the states, also) [via]

"Life's Greatest Trip" by Arthur Blessit ("naturally stoned on Jesus") [via]

passPod, Disneyland schedule for the iPod (for extreme Disney nerds only)

ABC News' "Person of the Year" is bloggers (get used to it, Jennings) [via]

AtariVox speech synthesizer for the Atari 2600 (completely new, from the homebrew 2600 scene) [via]

LokiTorrent fighting the MPAA lawsuits (they're setting up a legal defense fund)

Wired Magazine on the piracy scene (MaTinE posted a public response)

Carl Steadman requests donations for Plastic hosting (Ready Steadman Go!)

The Long Tail effect on Magnatune (also, how much money each country chose to pay for music on Magnatune)

Rumor: Apple to introduce sub-$500 Mac at Expo (designed to further lure PC owners who were tempted with iPods) [via]

Business Week on video blogging (vog, vlog, and vidblog all sound awkward to me, but so did "blog") [via]

Creative Commons for Science (promote open sharing of information in the academic world) [via]

Cat and Girl on moral consumption (I also liked this wordless comic) [via]

Final chapter of the Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Love Story ("Alicia" found the site and contacted Rob)

Temporary signage at the new Seattle Library (temporary signs usually indicate larger usability problems) [via]

Ricky Gervais to write for the Simpsons (Matt Groening is a big fan of The Office) [via]

Audio: Hank Handy's Beatles Mashup Medley (mixes 40 different Beatles songs, well worth the download)

Lycos' Top 100 search terms of 2004 (with previous year's rankings in parentheses)

Tornado warning in Southern California (the end times are near)

Wired profile on Bram Cohen and BitTorrent (long overview, with some good quotes from Bram)

Point-Counterpoint: Animal Adoption (some compelling points on both sides of the issue) [via]

Bickr, photo contests powered by Flickr (smart use of the Flickr API, discussed by Clay) [via]

Autocomplete CPAN Search (a la Google Suggest) [via]

Lost Hitchhiker's Guide computer game from 1998 (the concept art is nice, but the screenshots look like Leisure Suit Larry) [via]

Blockbuster may attempt hostile takeover of Hollywood Video (fun prediction of the day: video rental stores will be gone in ten years)

Sickening headline: "Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays" (note that CNN is the only outlet to use that headline for the AP wire article)

Grey Album is Entertainment Weekly's Album of the Year (funny, I liked the Kleptones album better) [via]

How to fix Mom's computer (excellent primer for cleaning and securing any tainted Windows box) [via]

Anti-Walmart book for sale on Walmart.com [via]

Suprnova preparing December 30 announcement (probably announcing the first Exeem release)

Review of Linux for the iPod (new games and picture viewing, and it supports Ogg at 80% speed) [via]

Spam Stopgap Extreme for Wordpress (stops comment spam by requiring Javascript to send back a computed MD5 hash) [via]

NYT on first-person blog coverage of tsunami disaster (Xeni's roundups of first-person coverage have been very good)

WaPo on the Kings of Chaos web game (the article doesn't mention the web-based game rewards link spamming) [via]

Search Google's Adwords (search only the text of sponsored links) [via]

Wikipedia's new images gallery (comic books, old men, and other random fun) [via]

Ask Mefi on the phonetic spelling of Homer's drool sound (this would be a good one to pitch to Google Answers)

FutureFeature (feature requests in the style of 43things)

ccPublisher 1.0 released (CC license your work and optionally upload it to the Internet Archive!)

Fortune on the marketing force of bloggers (mentions the fake Mazda blog that I helped unravel)

Suprnova's eXeem beta review with screenshots (decentralized .torrent file distribution) [via]

The Parking Lot Note Anti-Prank (leaving nice notes to good parkers in Houston) [via]

Image: Anti-Aids Drive 2004 (what's wrong with this picture?) [via]

Del.icio.us gets Slashdotted (generally positive comments, but they're stunned by the lack of porn/spam)

Inconsistent numbers with Google's library scanning project (at their best rate, it'll take 43 years to scan all pages) [via]

Video: Tsunami wave hitting Phuket beach, RealVideo format (also: six minutes of raw flooding footage)

Photo sequence of tsunami flooding in Phuket resort (intense) [via]

First-hand photos of the tsunami damage in Phuket (another gallery, found from these forums)

Flickr as a MMO [via]

Blizzard trying to end Warcraft auctions on eBay (they should be fostering economy, not trying to kill it) [via]

Headphone Headshots (what New Yorkers are listening to on their headphones, and what they ate for breakfast)

Overclocking the NES (the demo videos compare before and after) [via]

Child's Play II (more kids making fun of old video games) [via]

Stereogum's Top 14 Albums of 2004 (with b-side MP3s for every one)

LABlogs's Notable Blogs of 2004 (a great list of other Los Angeles bloggers)

Activision buys the cover of Electronic Gaming Monthly (Variety does this too, but EGM's case is more deceitful)

Dylan Verdi, 11-year-old videoblogger (kids like this will soon kick the asses of all the old-timers) [via]

Fresh Patents (RSS-enabled directory of new patent applications) [via]

Musical Pi (assign numbers to notes, and play the first 10,000 digits of pi as music) [via]

Full albums of "Dragnet: The Christmas Story" from 1953 and "Non-Stop Christmas Disco" from 1979 (more great Christmas rarities: FaLaLaLaLa.com, Oddio Overplay) [via]

D.C. Comics superhero Christmas album from 1977 ("Exciting Christmas Stories" with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman ) [via]

Technology Review on Amazon's web services (high-profile mention of Alan's excellent Amazon Light) [via]

Background of the Apple Graphing Calculator (sneaking onto Apple's campus for six months of unpaid work in hiding) [via]

pb's Radio Dials photographs (this one has an insane UI) [via]

Monkey Donkey Gift Guide (web lunacy with Google image search and speech synthesis) [via]

First Nintendo DS ROM successfully dumped (Darkfader posted the file listing for Metroid Prime: Hunters)

Mark Pesce on the MPAA's attack on BitTorrent ("Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers?") [via]

Massive list of substantial non-infringing uses of P2P technology (an attempt to support the defense in MGM v. Grokster) [via]

WFMU's On the Download (monthly collection of oddball recordings published in the station's newsletter) [via]

Rex Sorgatz' Blogs of the Year (holy crap! I made #4 on the list, and #3 on Kottke's list!?)

Google Suggest Poetry Generator (here's how it works) [via]

Podcasting audio with Skype (co-workers could record Skype conference calls and subscribe to the MP3s) [via]

Final release of Dolphin, the best Gamecube emulator (the screenshots are stunning; Paper Mario 2, Animal Crossing, Zelda Four Swords, and more)

Rands on tool cruft (are you using obsolete tools just because they're comfortable?)

Stipple Portrait Illustration by Noli Novak (as seen in the Wall Street Journal hedcuts) [via]

eBay: Original engraving plate of Wally Wood's "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" (the infamous X-rated Disney spoof originally ran in The Realist in 1967)

Manybooks.net (amazingly well-designed free eBook site, try the recommendations) [via]

Prodigem (free BitTorrent tracker for open, CC-licensed content) [via]

USPS website fails for non-IE6 users (in an extremely aggravating (and illegal?) way, too)

The Long Tail blog and book (Wired editor Chris Anderson's original article got him a book deal) [via]

If Internet Explorer was your girlfriend (spyware and popups as STDs and annoying children) [via]

Virtual virii in Second Life (red wings with a porn payload, and self-replicating swarming objects)

Staccato Music (downloadable music show of legal Creative Commons-licensed songs) [via]

The Clueless Top 20 of Google ("i'm confused" has 575k results)

Debunking the myth that video games are bigger than Hollywood (this recent SF Chronicle article perpetuates the myth) [via]

Unofficial Suprnova closure FAQ (includes a torrent link to an audio interview with Suprnova's creator; currently offline) [via]

BitTorrent 3.9.0 beta released (supports multiple torrents now, but a very awkward UI)

FCC photos of the DS (try searching for other wireless products, like Apple's Airport Express)

Anil nominates me for Wired News editor-in-chief (this link brought to you by Digerati™ Zeitgeist©)

Aaron Swartz on the Google Library (best roundup I've seen)

SwitchProxy extension for Mozilla (a really well-designed extension for bypassing censorware)

Wrong side of the road (Cameron's brain is playing tricks with him) [via]

Photos of Nintendo DS TV interference (leaky RF, or future Nintendo plans?) [via]

Scott McMullan's thoughts on semantic event aggregation (sums up all the current work, with ideas for the future)

RSS Reader Market Share (in a limited sample, Bloglines beating out every other client combined)

Legal threats against The Pirate Bay, another torrent tracker (the Suprnova admins were wimps compared to these guys)

Best of CG Talk's 3D forums (this animated short is particularly good)

Image: Calvin (The ADD Remix) (originally created by Jordan Fish for the Wesleyan Argus)

Cockeyed Airmail by Helium Balloon (one balloon traveled 521 miles in 7 days)

Traffic conditions added to Yahoo Maps (now, can they modify Driving Directions to take traffic into account?) [via]

Torrentbits and Suprnova shut down! (worth noting that Suprnova didn't host torrents) [via]

Official Sponsor of the Big Bang (Shell apparently invented hydrogen)

The Edge of Orkut (Joi reaches the hard limit of 1,024 friends) [via]

Spam Karma plugin for Wordpress (MT badly needs something like this; the battery of tests is impressive)

White paper on measuring BitTorrent activity (tons of interesting charts)

Video: Honda's Asimo robot can now run! (bringing the uncanny valley into the real world; more videos and info) [via]

The Best Webcomics of 2004 (Keaner and Copper are my favorites of the list) [via]

Creative Commons' CCMixter (project to support remixing, with contests to appear on the new Chuck D album)

Blogs 4 Xmas (e-mail delivery of blogs as Christmas gifts for newbies, including mine!)

Flickr Sucks!

Nethack is 20 years old today (maybe the oldest game still being played today, without irony?)

AllofMP3 doubles rates to $.02/MB (still a ridiculous steal, at around $1 for an entire album) [via]

Excerpts from Game Developer's post-mortem on Katamari Damacy (also, there's a nice 8-bit Katamari mockup for download)

Greg Storey knew the Crystal Cathedral gunman (the nine-hour standoff ended in suicide; Greg provides some background)

Forbes on the Apple iPhone rumors (it sounds like this may actually happen)

Indeed.com, job search crawler (supports RSS and sorting by date) [via]

Playboy's iBod (cheesecake photos for the iPod Photo, NSFW) [via]

Mr. Bungle officially disband (their debut was brilliant, produced by John Zorn) [via]

Mozilla Firefox two-page ad in today's New York Times (paid for entirely by donations, unprecedented for an open-source project)

Yahoo Video Search (impressive, they found several on my server)

Kiddie Records Weekly (every week in 2005, a new vintage children's record for download) [via]

Too much of a good thing? (supply exceeds attention demand for digital photos, music, and movies) [via]

Mappr (geomapping of tagged images on Flickr) [via]

White paper on emulation and the video game industry (exhibit 3a and 3b were interesting) [via]

First screenshots of Katamari Damacy 2 (also, some weird Katamari papercraft) [via]

Homer Simpson uses tabbed browsing (looks like Safari on an old Mac) [via]

CSS reference guide on the iPod (really geeky; maybe a Klingon-English dictionary next?) [via]

Image: Nintendo DS vs. the PSP (this made me laugh)

Japanese anime studio threatens fansub creators (they're suing their biggest fans, even though they only translate unlicensed videos)

New iPod firmware locks out RealNetworks music (another move in the ongoing battle) [via]

NYT Crossword Puzzle from Election Day 1996 (predicted Clinton's win before polls opened, or did it?)

Beatles fan club Christmas records (download them before EMI crushes them) [via]

NFL sells exclusive gaming rights to EA Games (basically kills all competition in football video games) [via]

Secret codes of drugstores (letter substitution to disguise retail markup costs)

Disney working on Jungle Cruise movie (I hope they make my other ideas next) [via]

Flash: Podfolio (portfolio site in the style of an iPod)

Blockbuster drops late fees (if later than a week, you buy it) [via]

Scott Upton's incredible Javascript slideshow (who needs Flash?) [via]

A Cleaner, Safer America (the rest of Asher's comics are good, also) [via]

Newsweek on "A-list" bloggers (funny, none of those people are on my A-list) [via]

NYT's Year in Ideas (great snapshot of the entire year) [via]

Shopping for games in Osaka (it makes EB Games look pretty pathetic) [via]

PubSub's LinkRanks (blog popularity tracking; waxy.org is #215 today) [via]

C-Span's Digital Future series (Brewster Kahle is on tomorrow, Lessig and others coming up)

Wal-Mart sued over Evanescence CD lyrics (when you start moderating content, you become liable for it)

Found box of vintage film from 1958 (purchased at an estate sale, and posted on Flickr)

Clickable Culture on the Marqui pay-for-blogging campaign (mixing advertising with content is always bad, even for individuals)

Programmers dissect Dice.com's bad advertising pseudocode (compare to these billboards by EA Canada and Google) [via]

Kamiel Proost's money art (painting on $1 bills, more here)

First letter suggestions for Google Suggest (typing "p" returns "paris hilton") [via]

What's That Song?, infinite music quiz (brilliant use of the Amazon API; they also made Amazon Card Wars) [via]

Dan Gillmor leaves the San Jose Mercury News (to work on a grassroots journalist project)

Google Suggest beta (real-time autocompletion of search keywords as you type) [via]

Google's secret data center in Georgia (or: how to turn "no comment" into 650 words)

Video: New "Willy Wonka" trailer (most unnecessary remake since Gus van Sant's Psycho) [via]

John Romero posts early Daikatana history (including a free ROM of the unreleased Gameboy Color version) [via]

Sensory and Motor Homunculus (models of the male body distorted in proportion to brain activity) [via]

Apple breaks ties with Netscape (Apple switches the default Netscape for Mac homepage) [via]

GTK-Wimp (make GTK apps look like native Windows programs) [via]

Wired News on Flickr (nothing new here, but I got quoted a couple times)

Former Pantera guitarist killed on stage (Dimebag Darrell was gruesomely murdered)

The Onion's Best Albums of 2004 [via]

Marvel sues City of Heroes (Fred von Lohmann on the copyright infringement case)

Blog the Caveman, comic book character from a 1959 issue of "Lois Lane" (brilliant find; Joey has a download of the entire book) [via]

Customize your iPod graphics (including a gorgeous dump of all fonts and images on the iPod) [via]

Feds raid D.C. gaming stores for modded Xbox consoles (flagrant stupidity got them shut down; Boing Boing has reader comments about it) [via]

Google auto-corrects the Jews (I expect someone to call Google anti-semitic any minute) [via]

Abandoned baby advocate wins $27m lottery (the last few paragraphs of this story are heartbreaking) [via]

DJ Riko's "Whistler's Delight" mashup and contest (22-song mashup of songs with whistling; I could only name eight of them) [via]

Jazz, Funk, Soul, Disco joints sampled in House, Hip-hop, and others (MP3 clips of each; their plundered covers page is great, too) [via]

PVR Blog interviews TiVo's director of user experience (as Matt said, don't just read the news, make it)

Flickr Flashlight Challenge (dot the i)

Disney's War Against the Counterculture (history of the Air Pirates Funnies Mickey Mouse copyright case) [via]

The Haugheys are having a baby girl! (Greg Knauss should donate Metababy.com to them)

Engadget howto on podcasting random web videos to a Portable Media Center (using iPodder, Blogdigger, and WMP10 or Doppler)

Lik-Sang's Sony PSP hands-on review (load times are awful, but the memory stick may make homebrew gaming easy)

The 6 Myths of Creativity (fear, money, competition, and deadlines all stifle creativity) [via]

Thunderbird 1.0 released (it felt clunky last time I tried; time to try again, I guess) [via]

Re-Ment's miniature Japanese foods (their official site is great too, but in Japanese)

Sushi Pillows (may you dream of raw fish)

Engadget on iPod Flash rumor (there's a realistic mockup, but it feels like a fake to me)

Sony PSP tunneling works great (unlike the Gameboy DS, the PSP uses open standards for wireless networking!) [via]

Video: Science World's "Boardroom Kissing" commercial (more about the campaign)

Massive hands-on review of the Playstation Portable (with tons of videos and photos) [via]

Half-Life Saga Story Guide (some outstanding speculation and research here for any fan of the series)

Mashing for Beginners (mash-up tutorial with Tracktion, but applies to other software too) [via]

Interview with Nicholas Reville on Downhill Battle’s Blog Torrent initiative (I like the last answer about the project's potential audience) [via]

Google Adsense adds URL channels for tracking stats (track clickthrough traffic from individual webpages)

Generate Sparklines in PHP (I'm sure I'll find a use for this someday) [via]

Ask Mefi's top albums of 2004 (a good list that points to this Mefi member's great list; see also)

Wired on Pew Internet's poll of musician opinions on digital music (the 3,600 musicians surveyed embrace the Web and 36% support legalizing P2P; view the full report) [via]

Google blocking new groups with "blogger" in the name/e-mail (are they trying to lay claim to the generic term "blogger"?) [via]

Five Mistakes Band & Label Sites Make (Merlin designed the very nice site for the Long Winters) [via]

American Mr. Driller DS missing Japanese features (crippled multiplayer mode requires a US game cart for every player) [via]

Half-Life 2 speed run in under 3 hours (spoiler-rich 660MB download) [via]

Flash: Visual explanation of Coltrane's "Giant Steps" (look at all the pretty lights!)

Introduction to the Becker-Posner Blog (first blog authored by either a Nobel Prize winner and a federal judge) [via]

Sony's terrible PR commenting on Sony v. Kottke (one journalist posts her phone conversation) [via]

Salon's success story with gated content and day passes (they're making $2m/year in subscriptions and $.5m/year in ad sales) [via]

NYT Magazine cover story on viral marketing (a good companion piece to watching The Persuaders) [via]

Woody Allen puts Mickey Mouse on the witness stand (silly fan fiction for the New Yorker) [via]

Adrian's Links via Feedster extension for Firefox (some innovative, but potentially litigious, new work)

Skeletal systems for cartoon characters (his other work is very good, as well; temporary local mirror)

Small firmware requests for the Nintendo DS (someone should send this great list to Nintendo)

NetZero parodies AOL's obnoxious new ad campaign (compare the AOL ads and NetZero's parodies) [via]

Red Herring on Sony's legal threats against Jason Kottke (Calacanis is calling for a Sony boycott) [via]

Le Monde offers blogs to their readers (one of the first newspapers to do so) [via]

Startup company paying prominent bloggers $800/month to blog about them (impressive roster organized by Marc Canter, but not everyone thinks this is a good idea)

eBay adds "Want It Now" feature to request items to buy (they buried it on their site, but here it is) [via]

Nintendo DS hackers tunnel Pictochat over the Internet (they managed to tunnel the Metroid DS demo, too!) [via]

Correction: Bill Gates gets 4 million spams per year, not per day (Ballmer got it wrong) [via]

The Spread of Weighted Lists (interesting visualization, but readability suffers in some cases) [via]

fi5e's Graf Analysis Project (I'd love to see an entire site dedicated to this effort) [via]

Rands interviews Joshua Schachter about Del.icio.us (not surprisingly, this is on the Delicious Most Popular) [via]

Google CFO calls ad click fraud the biggest threat to the Internet economy (it seems nearly impossible to stop completely) [via]

Guardian UK critics attack the musical greats (it's like the Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game for pretentious critics; they take on the movies, too)

Leonard's Flickrer, automatic Flickr uploading with Perl (made possible by the excellent Flickr API)

Search engines for handwritten documents (there's an explanation and demo on the UMass site) [via]

The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time (I like "A Canadian Christmas with David Cronenberg") [via]

Video: Japanese demo of Band Brothers, multiplayer music game for the Nintendo DS (jam with up to 8 people, one person per instrument) [via]

Boing Boing's web stats (13 million pageviews last month)

Smash Up Derby, live mashup cover band (clever idea, but the vocals sound too karaoke) [via]

First-hand account of a NYC subway fire (a ~~blogger~~ citizen journalist was actually on the train yesterday) [via]

The correlation between politics and OS/browser choice (visitors to liberal blogs more likely to use non-Microsoft products)

Dot-com instigator Henry Blodget writes about himself (he calls himself a short-sighted moron)

Metafilter Stats updated through Nov 2004 (November was a huge month for Mefi's growth)

Slashdot users review Flickr (and spectacularly miss the point, in endless ways)

Wired on the open-source metaverse projects (they're trying to develop an open equivalent to Second Life) [via]

"Exploding Mouse" t-shirt (can Disney sue for a deconstructed Mickey Mouse image?) [via]

Froogle wishlists added to Blogger profiles (that's synergy, people!)

Costco selling Ultracade arcade emulator cocktail tables (35 games for $2300, a lovely Christmas gift)

Abandonia, abandonware games for DOS (very well-designed site, with an RSS feed and list of most popular games) [via]

Google Blog removed an entry about Google Groups beta (possibly because someone posted a link to Yahoo Groups?)

Val Kilmer Tagging Caper (someone else figured out who's behind it) [via]

Lexis-Nexis's new AlaCarte search (excellent for research, pay only for articles retrieved) [via]

Microsoft launches Spaces, their blogging tool (here's a video demo of it) [via]

Google Groups 2 goes live (I prefer the old interface, but I'll get used to it) [via]

Suprnova moves towards decentralization (they're trying to create a network of torrent trackers)

Early Coachella 2005 lineup listing (Billboard says it's too good to be true) [via]

Largehearted Boy's Best Albums of 2004 (a great list, with legal MP3 downloads for each) [via]

Media Mammon (a stock market simulation for key words and phrases culled from Yahoo News)