December 31, 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 #

December 30, 2004

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 #

December 29, 2004

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 #

December 28, 2004

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 #

Amateur Tsunami Video Footage

Posted December 28, 2004 by Andy Baio

In addition to the extensive first-person coverage of the tsunami disaster on blogs, there have been several amateur recordings of the tsunami from camcorders. Unfortunately, the network websites aren’t making them easy to find and view. The videos are usually only available as poor-quality, streaming video like RealPlayer, and buried in popup windows and poor navigation.

Ben pointed me to downloadable versions of three clips. I’m hosting them here. (Unfortunately, I don’t have much information about the source of these videos.)

phuket.wmv (11MB) – shot from inside a restaurant, waves engulf older couple clinging to railing before flooding entire room
patong_beach.wmv (10MB) – rooftop view of two huge waves battering buildings along shore, then flooding of city streets
sri_lanka.wmv (7MB) – upper balcony view of hotel swimming pool area getting flooded as observers run away; woman asks “how high will it go?” before retreating
koh_lanta_thailand.avi (11MB) – shot on beach level; watch as first wave grows and crashes, before cameraman’s frantic retreat away from shore
penang_beach.wmv (1MB) – shot from wall above beach, three men are caught in battering waves
sri_lanka_resort.wmv (6MB) – upper level hotel balcony; restaurant, pools, and deck flooded as people cling to trees; two men narrate what they see

If you have any more first-hand video footage, or higher-quality versions of any of these videos, please let me know and I’ll add them. Most of these videos are also available as direct downloads from Cheese and Crackers, Asian Tsunami Videos, and Wave of Destruction.

December 29, 2004: Added two more videos. There is also some new footage I haven’t converted yet: BBC footage from a second-story balcony in Aceh, Indonesia.

December 30, 2004: Wow, you people used over 400GB of bandwidth in a single day! I’m now redirecting all video requests to several mirrors, courtesy of Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, Nathan Perkins, and Ask Bjorn Hansen. Thanks for the help, guys! (Sorry about the temporary downtime while I was sorting out the details.) If you can contribute a mirror and have loads of bandwidth, please e-mail me ASAP.

December 30, 2004: Archive.org is now hosting all the videos. All download links will now redirect to the Archive.org mirror. Thanks to everyone who mirrored the files overnight.

Also, a final note… If these videos touched you in any way, consider donating to the relief efforts.

December 31, 2004: Basically, we broke Archive.org! The largest repository of public-domain audio, video, and text in the world couldn’t handle the demand for these videos.

I’m now hosting all these videos on my BitTorrent tracker instead. Because of the small size of these videos, I was hoping to avoid requiring a BitTorrent client for downloading, but the demand is just too high.

January 4, 2004: Back to Archive.org, at Brewster Kahle’s request. He thinks they can handle the traffic now.

January 12, 2004: If you’re looking for newer videos, the definitive source is the questionably-named Wave of Destruction. The site is updated constantly, with videos available by BitTorrent or direct download from multiple mirrors.

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

December 27, 2004

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) #