Waxy.org: Links Archives: February 2005

Church Sign Generator gets lawsuit threat (a very funny misunderstanding) [via]

Yahoo announces Web Services (outstanding; pb wrote up a quick tour and an example utility)

Florida Project, free vintage Walt Disney World font (several more free Disney fonts, and a comprehensive font list) [via]

Video: Chris Landreth's "Ryan" (this year's Oscar winner for animated short; a surreal biography)

Dave Winer's worst nightmare (handy bookmarklet to rewrite Scripting.com in the spirit of Google AutoLink) [via]

Phil's roundup of niche product forums (there are many, many more, but these are some of the best)

Greg Knauss' damp pants (oh, and bundt cake; I miss EOD)

Image: First Person Shooter (very clever) [via]

Video: Chris Ware on French documentary series about comic artists (Kempa went to huge efforts to get the episode online)

Halle Berry attended Razzies ceremony to accept her award ("I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit") [via]

Jef Raskin, Mac visionary and interface pioneer, dead at 61 (read some stories about Jef) [via]

Gameboy emulation on MP3 players (runs on Archos, iRiver, and Gmini players) [via]

Scene.org Awards 2004 nominees announced (the cutting-edge of algorithmic PC demoscene art)

Seattle radio playing new Fiona Apple tracks (you can download them here and here; let me know if these disappear and I'll mirror them)

Jason Scott from Textfiles.com is archiving every podcast he can find (so far, about 7,500 different files taking up 75 GB) [via]

Numa Numa Gary resenting his web fame (hmm, this sounds strangely familiar)

Flickr's new logo (very cute response to all the buyout rumors)

Nevada Girl, Japanese murder becomes Internet meme (from last year, but new to me; don't miss the three pages of fanart depicting the murder)

Google Maps now works with Safari and Opera (we knew about Safari yesterday, but Opera is new)

GeoURL 2.0 beta launches (now managed by Ask instead of Joshua)

Michael's tribute to Another World (one of my favorite games of all time)

Appcasting (great idea for using RSS 2.0 enclosures to deliver software updates) [via]

Blinfolded Pianist's Mario Fantasy (free album of NES videogame themes on classical piano; the Super Mario World I theme is my favorite)

Wall Street Journal growing irrelevant because of its online strategy (they'll survive off of subscriptions, but will lose influence over time) [via]

Simon thinks Wikinews isn't very good (I agree with all of this; as much as I adore Wikipedia, broadly covering daily news is a very different beast) [via]

Hiring the A-Team through Craig's List (some of the responses are classic, and scary) [via]

Blink-O-Rama, TV screenshots of people blinking (also: Flickr's blink tag) [via]

Glassdog responds to Dave Winer's criticism of Evan Williams and Odeo (to be fair, Dave's site is non-commercial so he can get away with no design)

Blog of a Comedy Central intern (the daily churn of fetching coffee and editing jokes for the Daily Show) [via]

Nathan Torkington compares local search engines (Yahoo and Google were the best, A9 and MSN the worst)

Tony Butcher's obsessive collection of collections (he has no shortage of shelf space) [via]

Flash: Nanaca Crash (some instructions and tips in English) [via]

flicReplacr bookmarklet (highlight a word, click bookmarklet, and it displays a Flickr image tagged with that word)

Why Anil Dash is a Kottke.org micropatron (this sums up my reasons for contributing, too)

Ev Williams on Odeo, his new podcasting startup (the NYT wrote about them this morning)

Beatallica shut down by ISP?! (it's not even infringing material! has the world gone insane?)

Harmon Leon goes to dinner at Applebee's with white supremacists (also: Mister Pants' Harmon Leon archive and his other SF Weekly columns)

Video: This Place Sucks (Justice League meets Office Space mashup) [via]

The Gates in Second Life (and much cheaper than the real thing) [via]

Eric Ward e-mails Yahoo's Jerry Yang in 1994 (patient zero of the SEO plague)

Flickr, Yahoo deal rumored (I've been hearing these rumblings, as well)

Google Movies vs. Keanu Reeves (some creative queries with the Google's new movie support)

Hints of a Google Calendar? (though they haven't started crawling Upcoming.org's iCal feeds yet) [via]

Disney to re-release Song of the South in 2006!? (wow, I came about *this* close to posting the whole thing for free download last month) [via]

Insanely huge man-made ice wall (pipes spewing water non-stop for three months forms a 132-foot tall sculpture) [via]

Airbag interviews Kottke (I can't get enough blogger navel-gazing)

KCRW to offer original programming as podcasts (but no music because of copyright laws) [via]

NYT on Craig's List Missed Connection (two strangers later found each other through the site and fell in love) [via]

Bluetooth Stereo Cassette (now if only the iPod supported Bluetooth without an adapter)

Google adds movie searching and reviews (not a category killer, yet, but some very handy uses)

Shinkuro (secure, cross-platform file sharing, screen sharing, and chat for private groups) [via]

ExplorerXP adds tabs to Windows Explorer (freeware utility for Win2k/XP) [via]

Doonesbury on file-sharing (Trudeau's covering the topic all week)

WTF OMG (from the Found Objects group on Livejournal)

Creative Commies t-shirt in Maxim (very weird context for the illustration)

Banned Books in the Year 2191 [via]

Author's father leaves bad reviews of son's book on Amazon (the only review less than 4 stars) [via]

WhatIsMyIP.com sells for $386k on eBay (time to start using ipchicken.com) [via]

How Paris Hilton got hacked? (weak security question, but also a weak security system) [via]

Feedbeep, RSS to SMS notifications (this could work well with Upcoming.org feeds) [via]

Paypal Fee Calculator (a neat little utility) [via]

Gorilla Cover Gallery (500+ comic book covers featuring gorillas) [via]

AllofMP3.com facing criminal copyright investigation by Russian police (well, there goes the best pseudo-legal source of DRM-free music online) [via]

The Jayhawks break up (or maybe not; to me, they broke up when Mark left the band) [via]

Every Calvin & Hobbes comic (if you like these, please pre-order The Complete Calvin & Hobbes) [via]

Kottke.org as a full-time job (Jason quit his day job and will rely on donations to support himself; I donated)

Video: 238 miles of Abba's "Dancing Queen" (sweet, delicious torture)

Paris Made Me Change My Number t-shirt (from meme to t-shirt in 24 hours) [via]

Vimeo (Kottke calls it "like Flickr for video clips") [via]

Katamari Damacy in Play-doh (also: more cosplay) [via]

Jorn Barger is posting to Robot Wisdom again! (the man who coined the term "weblog" is back after a long hiatus)

Earthstation 5 calls it quits (sums up the history of the supposedly Palestinian P2P software that formally declared war on the RIAA and MPAA)

GreaseMonkey user scripts (for use with the GreaseMonkey Firefox extension to rewrite websites to your whim)

Parents Television Council's "Worst of the Week" (convenient clips of the best TV every week) [via]

How to Destroy the Earth (a sensible alternative to paving the Earth)

Jane's Animal Crossing world misses Justin (what happens when games start reminiscing about your ex?)

Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression (brand new book on copyright idiocy and sampling culture, CC licensed and available for free download!) [via]

Magnatune signs digital distribution deal with CDBaby (all artists will now appear in iTunes, among others) [via]

Copyright Criminals (outstanding trailer for a CC-licensed documentary on sampling culture) [via]

Shaun McCormack interviews Jack Thompson (e-mail dialogue with the asshat lawyer prosecuting the $300m lawsuit against Grand Theft Auto's developers and retailers) [via]

Adaptive Path on the Ajax approach to developing web applications (in other words, web apps doing neat stuff without leaving the page) [via]

SF Chronicle on Justin Hall's blog farewell (with a roundup of other prominent blog quitters) [via]

Hunter S. Thompson commits suicide (very sad end to a literary great)

MAME name and logo trademarked by Ultracade CEO (Foley responds, but he still has no right to the trademarks)

Flickr Picture Viewer for the TiVo (if you haven't been upgraded yet, get in the priority queue)

Paris Hilton's hacked Sidekick address book, notes, and photos (the numbers and notes were confirmed authentic by Drudge and others)

NYT on podcasts (with obligatory Adam Curry reference)

Om Malik on how to save TiVo (he was one of the first to predict its current challenges)

Napster's about-face in the courtroom (ironically, they want the court to shut down Grokster)

Jeremy Wright comments on IE7's feature list (better standards support, more secure, and tabs; yep, sounds like Firefox) [via]

Hand-cranked Nintendo DS battery charger (I want one for my iPod)

The Maoist International Movement reviews videogames (CAP Alert should start doing game reviews, too) [via]

Boogieplay beta (Blogdigger's blog video viewer; not sure how I feel about hotlinking big files without asking)

Burton and Jefferson reminisce about MTV ("they looked like Satan's eyes, man!")

The Shining's Overlook Hotel rendered in the Duke Nukem 3D engine (I'd love to see this redone with HL2's Source engine)

BlogTorrent 0.9 released (now with Mac support for the client and MySQL for the tracker)

Flash: Ball Revamped (I beat the 125 levels)

Wordpress 1.5 released (looks impressive)

43Things' Popular Goals by City (the #1 goal in Los Angeles is "work on my abs") [via]

First image posted to the web (found from this Ask Mefi thread)

Video: Dan Castellaneta and Harry Shearer on Conan o' Brien (from November 2002; also, here's the entire Inside the Actor's Studio episode with the Simpsons cast)

Google e-mails webmasters of sites blocked by robots.txt? (funny, nobody ever created the Forbidden Search Engine)

How I Saved the World from Armageddon (amazing two-year art project targets a random gamer; more info by the artists toward the bottom of the gallery page) [via]

Video: Lejo DJ [via]

Libsyn, cheap podcasting hosting (charge only for storage, not bandwidth usage) [via]

EA blanks the word "Sega" from House of Pain's "Jump Around" (removed from the NBA Street V3 soundtrack ) [via]

Flickr License Searcher (great tool for finding legal stock photos in Flickr)

NYT buying About.com for $410 million (seems overvalued to me) [via]

Python programmer catches burglar on webcam (the BBC covered the story) [via]

Sony sends a cease-and-desist to Beatallica (I'm hosting their torrents, and I won't take them down even if Sony tells me to; they're perfectly legal cover songs)

Daily Show slash fiction (I love the Internet) [via]

Hasbro releases light-up basketball hoop "with Firewire technology" (I love that they claim a trademark on Firewire)

Video: Daily Show segment on blogger journalism (brilliant coverage, here's a partial transcript)

Spid.ero.us (social bookmark comparisons, including Japanese Delicious clones!) [via]

Today Show covers the Numa Numa video (Matt Lauer dubs him the new Star Wars Kid)

Typographica's favorite fonts of 2004 (Galaxie Polaris is lovely)

Katamari Damacy hand puppet (they should make vinyl action figures, too) [via]

Parent's guide to computer slang by Microsoft (darn those "online videogame bullies"!) [via]

The return of the Kottke webcam (wait, where's the monkey?)

Video: Thundercats (fan-made short film, complete with CGI effects and leather pants) [via]

Sleater-Kinney begs people to stop pirating their new unreleased album (the release date is three months away?! your biggest fans are pirating it because there's no legal alternative) [via]

MPAA cracking down on fan fiction sites (for using movie-style ratings to grade mature content in fanfic)

Acme Novelty Toy gallery (the Chris Ware cutouts actually work) [via]

American Idol blocking fast-forwards on Comcast DVRs (get ready to hear more of this)

They Might Be Giants releases second kids' album, Here Come the ABC's (buy direct online from the band, or watch the videos)

Interview with Mark Jen, the fired Google blogger (Mark confirms Google has no blogging policy) [via]

MSNFound, MSN Search's new viral web game (no matter how good the game may be, it still forces you to use MSN) [via]

NY Daily News on the "Numa Numa" lip-synching teen (the video is sent to me by e-mail and IM several times a day)

Buffington updates his asbestos blog experiment (he doesn't mention any numbers, but it was very profitable)

eBay prototype for the TiVo HME ("buy this TV show now, no reserve!") [via]

Jamie Zawinski on the Hula project (make software for users, not for managers) [via]

43 Folders' Five fast e-mail productivity tips (I'm following this advice too late, cleaning out 590 messages from my inbox) [via]

Boxer on NBC's 'The Contender' kills self (though not the first reality show suicide)

Crunching the stats on 8 years of e-mail (Slashdotted, but the Google cache works) [via]

Mapping iPod sightings in a stroll through NYC (32 iPods in a 30 minute walk)

Great study of weblog tools market share (Richard's summary of the findings are excellent; Six Apart has 40% of the market with their three tools)

Internet Explorer 7 beta due out this summer (for some reason, this reminds me of Netscape Communicator) [via]

Audio of Robin Williams ranting on Disney, Pixar, and the iPod ("don't have to work for The Mouse no more")

Fark buys 1-day rights to rename the Fleet Center (the winner, in typical Fark style)

Museum of Comic Art's Now Then! (25 comic artists compare modern works to childhood drawings) [via]

Todd Dominey's SlideShowPro (Flash slideshow works with Flickr, $20 cheep)

New popular sites in Del.icio.us (basically, Blogdex for Del.icio.us) [via]

Hula Project (nice looking open-source calendar and mail server built in PHP, initiated by Novell) [via]

Everything Tori (the best-designed official artist website I've ever seen; includes the complete songs from every album, RSS feeds, and it's valid XHTML!)

Mule Design redesigns Six Apart (looks great, runs on MovableType) [via]

Goatse t-shirt from Threadless (safe for work) [via]

Atari Cosmos for sale on eBay (prototype of a hologram-based Atari handheld from 1981) [via]

MSN searches for pizza in Redmond (the MSN marketing team should try the searches before putting them on ads)

Anil on the Eason Jordan resignation and blogger firings (he says nobody's ever been fired from blogging, only from displaying poor judgement in a public space)

Ask Mefi on life-changing childhood experiences (fascinating thread tapping into the soul of Metafilter)

Jazz Composer Nabs Grammy After Web-Only Sales (first artist to ever win a Grammy without selling in retail stores)

Del.icio.us Popular sparklines (link removed: the sparklines were killing the Delicious server) [via]

The Late Night TV Page (late night talk show lineups, with RSS feeds for each) [via]

Katamari Damacy hats for sale (now with new colors) [via]

Nintendo's V-Pocket may turn the Nintendo DS into a PDA (just a rumor for now, Games Industry is more skeptical)

WarTuning, use your Wifi enabled laptop to scan open iTunes shares while driving (wait until an iPod clone supports this! it's an idea fleshed out in Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe) [via]

LokiTorrent fined $1 million in Dallas court (even though they didn't host a single file)

Geocaching with Google Maps and Terraserver (plus: Jason wrote a great little utility for generating splitscreen views of both)

First homebrew game for the Nintendo DS! (not surprisingly, a Tetris clone)

Google Maps hacking and bookmarklets (including animating an entire route of driving directions) [via]

Katamari Damacy live-action role playing (dedicated fans) [via]

Mark Jen comments on his blog-related firing from Google (does Google have an official policy on blogs?) [via]

Sorting Del.icio.us Most Popular by most recent (Joshua should probably do this by default)

Kottke interviews David Bernal, the dancer behind the Gene Kelly VW Golf GTI commercial (don't miss the essential Kollaboration video)

Flash: Son of a Peach (mildly not safe for work; what happened after Mario rescued the Princess?) [via]

Ultra Gleeper (a webpage recommendations engine using your feed list, blog, and del.icio.us; read the detailed summary)

Chameleon, a feature-rich Bloglines proxy (figures out your favorite feeds, and displays popular links in your feeds)

Google offers to host Wikipedia (Archive.org would be an even better fit, if they had the resources to spare) [via]

Whispering imps on magic posters (a recurring motif) [via]

LokiTorrent shut down by MPAA (worse, the site's creator is turning over his server logs)

Salon editor and founder David Talbot leaving the magazine (after their first profitable quarter ever) [via]

Newsburst, c|net's new web-based RSS reader (much closer to My Yahoo than Bloglines) [via]

Salon digs into Amazon's funding of 43 Things (the article borders on paranoid; check out Robot Co-op's response) [via]

New National Lampoon film to debut on DVD within four days of theatrical release (expect to see more of this, like I mentioned before) [via]

1.5 million Gmail invites available (for all practical purposes, this takes Gmail out of private beta)

Google Maps can return raw XML for parsing (the applications of this are endless, but what are the terms of service?)

Seattle Times article on Smoosh (they're touring with Mates of State, a perfect fit)

Smoosh (two sisters from Seattle, age 10 and 12, play lovely indie-pop; clips on Amazon)

Flickr Graph (neat Flash visualization of Flickr user networks and images) [via]

Lexblog, MT-hosted blogs for lawyers (I'm impressed by their design work, like Asbestos Law and Traumatic Brain Injury Blog)

Tecmo sues Dead or Alive modders for creating naked character skins (yet another example of a dumb company suing its biggest fans) [via]

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (amazing collection of 180 genres and 1,189 samples, all buried under a truly awful Flash interface)

MP3 Tunes launches (DRM-free MP3s, but their server is swamped right now) [via]

Estonian TV commercials from the 1980s (supremely weird; don't miss Kanahakkliha) [via]

Image: Card Check (originally from Modern Humorist)

Wil Wheaton to appear on CSI (Zach and Nick aside, I wish more working actors would blog) [via]

Pac-Man Must Die (collaborative wireless Pac Man game spread across shared portable displays) [via]

Smash the Tones (convert any MP3 or MIDI to a free ringtone; it's legal under fair use guidelines) [via]

Turn your Mac mini into a low-cost home studio (it ends up costing around $1000, not counting the display) [via]

O'Reilly interview with Flickr's Stewart Butterfield (growth stats, API ideas, and coming out of beta) [via]

Zawodny confirms Mark Jen was fired because of his blog (he talked to him directly)

VideoHelp, video conversion tutorials and DVD reviews (because I'm constantly losing this bookmark)

Buffington starts super-niche topical blog to capture Adwords revenue (remember, Asbestos News for all your asbestos-related needs) [via]

Superman Is A Dick (all those oddball comic covers finally given a permanent home) [via]

Taste for the Web (great parody of Paul Graham; if you get this, you're a geek) [via]

Amazon tells Alan to remove Netflix/iTunes links from Amazon Light (if you use the Amazon web services, you can't link to any other commercial website!?)

Mark Fletcher's comments on the Jeeves/Bloglines buyout (like any good geek, Bloglines' CEO is a Monty Python fan)

Baby NameVoyager (Java applet, interactive charting of baby name popularity) [via]

Firefox spoofing vulnerability fixed 12 hours later (more details on the exploit)

Google employee Mark Jen fired for blogging? (99zeroes revealed some internal info, but nothing critical)

Flickr Pipe Dream (emergent behavior emulates classic video game subgenre)

Google Maps (insanely great UI; it's only missing personalization and better URIs) [via]

Metafilter redesign contest results (the top three winners are all fantastic)

Register UK on why the new Napster will flop badly (paying $179/year to rent music you can never own; also: Gruber does the math) [via]

Burger King giving away classic Activision games in kids' meals (including my favorite Atari 2600 game, Kaboom!) [via]

List of Google acquisitions (from Deja to Keyhole) [via]

Court documents reveal Kazaa logging all user downloads (moral: don't trust closed, centralized servers that operate for profit)

iPod shuffle RAID (3.9 GB of redundant iPod lovin') [via]

Total Immersions D'Fusion's augmented reality demo (amazing video; I expect to see applications of this tech in retail gaming soon) [via]

Ask Jeeves buys Bloglines (Web 2.0 consolidation continues) [via]

The Cuddly Menace ("pair bond only with fellow Zogg") [via]

BetterSearch, Firefox plugin that adds thumbnail website previews for many sites (it even works on Del.icio.us) [via]

New Kleptones mix, "From Detroit to J.A." (download it with BitTorrent, or get the split version mirrored locally)

Image Puzzle! (frustrating fun; I'm stuck on stage 8)

CinemaNow to offer NBC shows for download ($1-3 each is an excellent price point; let the race for the iVideo Store begin)

iPod Photo Stereoscope ($1200, cheap!) [via]

MP3.com founder launching MP3tunes, DRM-free music downloads (also: Napster's case against the iPod) [via]

Fighting crime with Photoshop (Toronto police posted altered versions of crime scene photographs found in Usenet, leading to a positive ID)

Video: Make Mine Shoebox (sarcastic internal corporate video made for Hallmark Cards with a great 1950s feel) [via]

AX|BX (random art made from arcade game startup test screens) [via]

Why social software makes poor recommendations (short answer: your real-world friends have bad taste)

Rob Schneider buys full-page L.A. Times ad to defend Deuce Bigalow 2 (attacks a film critic over a snide comment) [via]

The Measure of All Things (short fiction about bioengineered living dinosaur toys; more info) [via]

College basketball player shoots 87 foot winning shot (then does it again for the local news; video clips viewable for both)

Microsoft upset about employee's iPods (quotes internal company memos on the second page)

State of the Union Parsing Tool (clever visualization of word frequency over time) [via]

The Onion interviews Will Wright and Howard Scott Warshaw (this launches the Onion's new weekly coverage of gaming) [via]

Comment spammers writing their own templating language (comment spammers are syn(hateful|jerks))

UPN officially cancels Enterprise (the only Star Trek show I've liked since ST:TNG gets canned)

Mac mini review (excellent trolling of both Mac and PC users from parody site DivisionTwo)

Behind the scenes with Alone in the Dark's original screenwriter (quotes e-mails by Uwe Boll, but consider the source) [via]

Self-amplified vinyl record from the 1950s (very clever design) [via]

Dave argues against combining feeds (or: why you'll never find daily links or Flickr photos in my main feed)

Japanese to English adult language guide from the 1980s (I feel bad for this guy) [via]

Spam zombies to trigger e-mail meltdown (the infected PCs send mail as infected users through major ISPs, bypassing all blacklists)

Brando, Caan, Duvall appear in new Godfather game (Brando recorded the voiceover last year)

UweBoll.com (some context) [via]

MSN search's retarded copyright policy for RSS feeds (you can't use them anywhere but in a personal RSS reader)

Bad review roundup of "Alone in the Dark" ("even Pong: The Movie would have been better")

Del.icio.us top gatherers of the month (wonderful analysis of who posts the most interesting links before anyone else)

Google AdSense salesman spamming bloggers (with wonderful partner program opportunities!)

Nintendo DS, dissected and annotated (Lik-Sang posted another dissection last year with many more photos) [via]

Virginia school district's screening of Eyes on the Prize shut down (the copyright holder is as clueless as the copyright laws preventing its distribution)

Wired News on folksonomies (yet another in a long line of Terdiman articles quoting people I know)

New MSN search supports web standards (XHTML 1.0 Strict and RSS feeds for search results)