Waxy.org: Links Archives: March 2005

George Hotelling redesigns his blog for 1991 (this neat April Fool's gag gave me a wash of nostalgia)

Boring Boring (also: Gakker)

eWeek on the Wordpress spam issue (fair and neutral; contrast with The Register's article)

Slashdot on the Wordpress controversy (my first Slashdotting; the server's being crushed, but still responsive)

Consumating (Adam Mathes and Ben Brown's hilarious dating site with tagging support) [via]

Google prefetching first search result for Firefox users (this seems really dumb to me; hitting unrequested pages wastes bandwidth and screws up server stats) [via]

Sin City comparisons of movie to comic (nice visual design, and surprisingly positive early reviews)

Followup on Laura Krishna, Internet plagiarist ("just a dumb kid with a nice mom") [via]

Howto read RSS feeds on your PSP (using a launch page and the Bloglines mobile site)

Y Combinator (Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell's unusual angel fund for very early startups) [via]

Del.icio.us gets funding, Joshua goes full-time (this makes me so very happy) [via]

Google acquires Urchin (are they getting into free web analytics and metrics?)

Microstructure in the Long Tail (is every long tail composed of many smaller tails?)

Terri Schiavo's Blog (so very wrong) [via]

TiVo popup ads in the wild (I found three screenshots (1, 2, 3))

Laura K. Pahl is a plagiarist (comedy writer messes around with a student trying to pay for a term paper, then turns her in) [via]

Yahoo 360 beta launches (invite-only for now; Jeff Veen points out a nice UI touch)

Jon Udell followup on Upcoming.org and open services (data lock-in is bad)

Surftp, web-based FTP client (insecure, but so is FTP) [via]

Since U Been Gone, Annual Report 2005 (Matt and Merlin get corporate with a pop song)

~~8.2~~ 8.7 Quake strikes off Indonesian coast (along same fault line, but no reports of tsunami activity yet) [via]

Big changes over at Upcoming.org (a full API, tagging, e-mail/SMS reminders, and support for personal events! I hope everyone likes the changes)

Buy a fully-assembled Nintendo DS passthrough ($20 cheap; used for loading homebrew demos and code onto the DS) [via]

Flickr's Clock Works project (clock face photos for every minute of the hour) [via]

Pop songs as outliner lists (reminds me of this classic McSweeney's list) [via]

IRS may label eBay sales as taxable income (this makes sense for serious sellers)

Om Malik on Yahoo getting cool again (they're making very smart moves, and they're wooing the geek crowd back)

Surfing the web on the PSP (there've been more promising PSP hacks in the first three days than four years of the GBA)

Donovan Freberg's blog (who? he was the kid from the Encyclopedia Britannica commercials)

Bits on Wheels, Mac BitTorrent client (but with a real-time 3D visualization of your swarm) [via]

Netdisaster (destroy any website with various disasters; Waxy attacked by martians)

List of sources scraped from Google News (919, at last count) [via]

The Pez MP3 Project (blogging the product creation lifecycle of a Pez-authorized MP3 player)

First look at Yahoo 360 (anyone else notice the two "screenshots" are just mockups? (hint: look at the mix of aliased and anti-aliased type)) [via]

Network analysis of the Flickr population (some gorgeous charts and visualizations)

Howto: copy Tivo To Go videos onto the PSP (the rest of the guides are great, too) [via]

Smoking Gun on school shooter's Flash animations (disturbing, but fascinating) [via]

"Where are they now?" A-list blogger photo from SXSW 2000 (also, the three Blogger co-founders from this year's ETech) [via]

Curtis Poe tracks down his credit card thieves (his detective footwork led to their on-site arrest yesterday; great story) [via]

School administrators blocking BitTorrent as "illegal" (corporate firewalls do the same thing; it's just a protocol, people!)

Wired News reporter cites suspicious sources (could be a big controversy brewing) [via]

Fedora's new wobbly windows (watch the videos to see the crazy effects) [via]

Scientists find soft tissue in T-Rex fossil (Jurassic Park, anyone?) [via]

Video: Japanese girls watching "The Ring" (by the end, some of them are crying from sheer fright)

Amazon A9 driver caught in photo (very funny) [via]

Zug's Credit Card Prank II (the first part was an instant classic) [via]

Dr. Who leak culprit identified and fired (I guess it wasn't a deliberate promotional leak, after all)

Siam Waxy (I'm thinking of using this as my new logo and mascot)

Glassdog's rant on Boing Boing ads (I adore Boing Boing, but he has a point)

Del.icio.us linkbacks bookmarklet (someone needs to make a combined one that grabs referers from Technorati, Bloglines, and so on)

Doogie Howser, the first blogger

Video: Sims-style anti-pregnancy commercial for teen girls (accurate look and feel from the Belgian public health dept.) [via]

Flickr photoset of RFID hand self-implant (insane, if true) [via]

Adam Mathes on playing Harvest Moon (I love this kind of writing about games; also, part 2 and 3)

Transparent Screens (very clever fun with desktop wallpaper)

UK guerilla artist Banksy installs own pictures in four museums (it took them several days to notice and remove the beautiful works)

Sony PSP 101 (excellent roundup of info about the PSP)

Anil Dash's tribute to Suck.com (I wrote Suck their first fan letter, almost ten years ago (as "Flyp Doink"))

Fun with high powered projectors ("weiter" means next) [via]

Video: House of Cosbys (I'm Curiosity Cosby, you see)

Robocop logos (obsessive fandom; the entire site is very thorough) [via]

Wired on the Decemberists use of BitTorrent for new video (here's the torrent)

Backpack, 37signal's new app (but what does it do? Writeboard is still brewing, too)

"White pride" news site in Google News (news sources are still hand-picked by Google Editors, right?)

Nazi forum posts by Minnesota school shooter Jeff Weise (he killed nine yesterday before killing himself; here's his Livejournal, too) [via]

New version of Ruby on Rails supports Ajax natively (don't miss Curt Hibbs' beginner's tutorials)

iPod Shuffle knock-off was a publicity stunt (Apple and the blog world fell for it, too)

Coudal's Crash Ballet 2 winners (Joshua Allen's entry is my favorite)

Friendster movie in development (Harold Ramis directing, so it can't be all bad) [via]

Video: Darkon, a documentary about LARPers (live action role-players, that is) [via]

The PC Forum Long Tail drinking game (I would've slipped into an alcohol-induced coma by day 2 of ETech)

Video: Grandaddy on "The Secret to Songwriting" (very enlightening)

Nintendo DS charging dock built from Legos (including game and stylus storage) [via]

Jon Udell's inspiring comments on Upcoming.org (read my response; I've committed to making some big changes by next Monday)

Using the Powerbook motion sensor to control Neverball and Google Maps (an extension of this article, don't miss the three videos) [via]

Rejected e-mails from the Snopes inbox (extremely gullible people ask Snopes to verify the truthfulness of jokes)

Slashdot redesigning with XHTML and CSS (don't worry, it'll still be just as ugly to look at) [via]

The Rhys-Davies Episode III Hoax (how a prank e-mail became fact, reported in the online and offline media) [via]

Flash: Kristan Horton remade Dr. Strangelove with household objects (here's an interview with the artist; warning, audio)

PSP Video 9 (download, convert and copy video to your PSP using BitTorrent and RSS) [via]

Ourmedia alpha launches (partnered with Archive.org, free tool to host and discuss grassroots media)

Image: No One Is Thirsty (courtesy of the new PBF homepage)

Video: The Secret of Bananas (a better-kept secret than the Yahoo/Flickr deal)

Barry Diller's Interactive Corp. buying Ask Jeeves for $2 billion (ridiculously overpriced)

PBS.org quietly enables trackback (but appears to only be using the ping info internally)

Yahoo buys Flickr! (it's official! more thoughts from Caterina and Jeremy)

Katamari Damacy coming to the Nintendo DS! (yay!)

How many 5-year-olds could you fight at once? (I love the Internet)

Gmail going public on April 1 (also: people have been exchanging Gmail invites for positive feedback on eBay) [via]

Video: Firefox TV commercial (gorgeous, but should probably mention the URL and what Firefox is) [via]

Hacking Google Desktop Search (remotely monitor other computers on your LAN) [via]

Audio: Google Autolink debate with Doctorow, Scoble, and Schwimmer (I'm still siding with Google on this issue) [via]

Livejournal added tags, too (update: it's just a new view of a very old feature) [via]

GoogleX mirrors (still no word on why Google removed it from their site)

French news agency sues Google News for infringement (in response, Google should change their pagerank to zero) [via]

Wikipedia hits 500,000 articles (and that doesn't count the multilingual editions or the other Wikimedia projects) [via]

Experimental Gameplay Project (Tower of Goo and Darwin Hill are great) [via]

Bla-Bla List recodes Ta-Da Lists in Java (it's devolving into a language war, but an entertaining one)

The Online Video Game Atlas (huge combined screenshots of video game maps) [via]

Livejournal adds podcasting support (this could be huge)

Funky Winkerbean character arrested for selling adult comic books (ripped from the headlines)

PyMusique, buy DRM-free songs from iTunes Music Store (DVD Jon strikes again) [via]

Six Apart's Power Tools (like Google Code, I love the trend of companies open-sourcing their internal tools) [via]

MP3: Shaun Inman's "What's the Word?" (lovely geek folk song, the guy is multi-talented) [via]

Five Questions to Verify if an Entity is a Robot (a low-tech Turing test)

Comic: The Warhol Factory Outlet Store (famous for 1500 people) [via]

Microsoft previews new screen fonts shipping with Longhorn (surprisingly tasteful, but how do they look at 9px aliased?) [via]

WSJ article on the history of yelling Free Bird at concerts (with accompanying audience clips from various concerts)

Defective Yeti's least hot followups (this made me laugh, repeatedly)

Photo tour of the Pixar offices (animators are encouraged to heavily mod their workspaces)

Chinese iPod Mini knockoff (first the fake Shuffle and now this; a sign of Apple's design influence overseas)

Make previews Odeo podcasting service (looks outstanding from the screenshots) [via]

Tag-o-Vision combines 50 Flickr photos into one average image per tag (the Python source is available, too) [via]

Google Code (just announced, centralizes their open-source projects and APIs)

Podshanking, kludge to direct copy audio from one iPod to another (using an iTalk, so slow and without metadata, but I love the spirit behind it) [via]

George wants a Firefox extension turning all popups into click fraud (evil idea of the day)

Pimp my Shuffle (hacking an iPod shuffle into a pair of headphones) [via]

Code v2.0 wiki (collaborative effort to update Lessig's essential Code book) [via]

Toyota launches record label (the music industry, flailing to find a way to survive) [via]

Washington Post on Creative Commons (some unlikely mainstream media coverage) [via]

BoingBoing Butler (Greasemonkey script to remove all non-content from BB) [via]

NYT on newspapers closing their archives (the irony is thick; they argue for pay archives throughout) [via]

Goombah (Mac app to provide music recommendations by comparing available iTunes shares; uses BitTorrent to transfer profile info around) [via]

New Dr. Who leaked online deliberately to build buzz (someone "leaked" a TV pilot recently by sending me a DV tape in an unmarked envelope)

Screenshots of Will Wright's Spore game (insanely expansive scope, simulating every scale from amoeba to galaxies) [via]

Game Gardens (build and host your own multiplayer games with a Java toolkit! from the brilliant people behind Puzzle Pirates) [via]

Comcast and TiVo finally team up (good for TiVo, but great for Comcast customers because their PVRs suck)

Hand-powered iPod shuffle (useful, if you're stranded on a deserted isle)

Flickr Postcard Browser (beautiful way of browsing images)

Butler Firefox extension rewrites Google (Mark Pilgrim's Greasemonkey add-in comments on the autolink controversy; I contend both uses are perfectly legit)

Clocky (an alarm clock that hides from you every day after hitting snooze) [via]

Yahoo 360° beta (Yahoo's entry into the blog and social networking market, without Flickr or Six Apart?) [via]

GoogleX (Google's silly little tribute to OS X) [via]

SXSW revokes press passes for Chunklet and others (for drawing attention away from SXSW with popular day parties)

Yahoo Research's Tech Buzz Game (fantasy prediction market for high-tech trends) [via]

Apple developing 2-button mouse (finally seeing the light, and making Macs even more attractive to PC users) [via]

Google Local adds business registration tools (makes perfect sense; "manage your own damn info!") [via]

Beatallica suit dropped, band coming back (thanks to Lars Ulrich, of all people)

A9's OpenSearch (add in any third-party search service into A9)

Amaztype, generates words from Amazon thumbnails (for example, hacks) [via]

Sifry updates his blog stats (Technorati tracks 7.8 million blogs, with 30-40k new blogs created every day)

Flickr version of the Web of Letters (edit the URL to change the letters)

AIM's new Terms of Service waives right to privacy (and grants AOL the unconditional right to use your conversations any way they want) [via]

Video: High-quality Legend of Zelda trailer (some of the best graphics I've ever seen) [via]

Web of Letters (generates an alphabet using Yahoo's image search API)

Video: The Contraption (excellent Rube Goldberg chain reaction, in the style of Honda's Cog commercial) [via]

A Century of Candy Bars (thesis on the history of candy bar wrapper design) [via]

Kasparov retires from chess (tired of getting beat by computers, maybe)

Japanese gallery of art in psychiatric advertisements (the surreal Serenace ads are the best) [via]

Flickr to add photo printing through EZ Prints (Ofoto and Shutterfly, watch your backs) [via]

The long tail of software (not just search engines, books, and music; also, user-written software) [via]

Flash: A New Bunny (very offensive language, but very funny commentary on the new Bugs Bunny) [via]

Luxpro Super Shuffle (or: how to get sued by Apple in five minutes flat)

Paul Graham on how to start a startup (only five references to Lisp this time)

Firefox extension uses phone numbers to find driving directions in Google Maps (clever hack) [via]

Microsoft buys Groove Network (Ray Ozzie becomes Microsoft's new CTO) [via]

Blockland (massively multiplayer Lego building game) [via]

PVRBlog interview with Lanovision's creator (already getting popular in the Yale dorms)

Start.com, Microsoft's web-based feed reader (a very early sandbox version, with no Firefox support) [via]

Video: Wonder Showzen teaser (remember the Kids Show pilot? this is the final product airing on MTV2)

Video: Spike Jonze commercial for Adidas (dreamy) [via]

Algorithmic colorization of photos and videos (amazing and elegant technique) [via]

German Spiegel plagiarizes Wikipedia article (I hope they catch Encarta next)

Linus Torvalds switches to Apple (not what you think; he's still running Linux, but now on a dual G5) [via]

MP3: Ted Leo covering Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" (don't miss the acoustic performance videos on UGO, as well)

Tim Bray on why blogging is good for your career (counteracting the trend of fired for blogging stories) [via]

Make a portable NES for under $75 (using those crazy bootleg NES joysticks from mall kiosks) [via]

Dot-Con Job (Seattle Times' amazing expose on the lies behind Infospace.com) [via]

Technical analysis of Google Print (has anyone made software to crawl Amazon's Search Inside?) [via]

Gamespy reveals details of the Xbox Next (three 3.0 GHz PowerPC CPUs and standard DVD media) [via]

Lan-o-Vision Beta (stream video to anyone on your LAN; like iTunes for video) [via]

Yahoo! Publisher Network (eh, I was pretty close) [via]

Arizona teen first to be convicted under state laws for illegal downloading (in the last sentence, they mention he sold the downloaded movies; that's a huge distinction)

Video: Katamari Damacy speedruns (the first ones ever, AFAIK; they're at the bottom of the page)

Zopa, like eBay for loans (UK only and a fascinating market experiment) [via]

BitTorrent 4.0 released (here's a list of the recent changes)

My mom fights to save community college journalism (in case you don't read my main weblog, a free speech issue that hits home)

Mac Genius Livejournal deleted (anyone know why? the entries are still cached on Bloglines)

Blogspot being systematically exploited by spammers (I'm sure they're working on this as we speak)

Technorati censoring employee blogs (they want to review individual entries?)

White House approves daily pass for blogger (reading about the experience is better than the briefing itself)

Blog Torrent adds support for server-side seeding (guarantees your torrents will always be available, at a bandwidth cost) [via]

Fiona Apple's new album leaked online in its entirety (you'd think Sony would learn from the recent past)

How to snatch an expiring domain (a small glimpse into the expiration process and the services competing for drops) [via]

Wall-sized whiteboards for $13 (this is a steal) [via]

Jon Udell screencast on the on-demand blogosphere (the inevitable future of RSS requires tools for managing a social network of feeds)

MP3: We Built This Starbucks (terrible Starbucks corporate version of "We Built This City"; other corporate anthems)

AllofMP3.com escapes criminal lawsuit with legal loophole (Russian criminal law only applies to physical goods) [via]

Video: Bram Cohen lecture at Stanford (covers benchmarking BitTorrent with an Internet simulation) [via]

Video: Still Seeing Breen (a Half-Life 2 machinima music video with a lip-syncing G-man) [via]

SXSW on your iPod (2.6GB torrent of free songs by showcasing bands at SXSW) [via]

Video: Robot dinosaurs (life-size walking robot dinosaurs built for World Expo 2005) [via]

Veerle's lovely CSS calendars (expect to see this on Upcoming.org very soon; also for reference, PHP Calendar) [via]

MPAA tracks a DVD pirate to a Shanghai penthouse (exactly what they should be doing, instead of suing their fans) [via]

Build your own PBX with Asterisk ($13 for a complete PBX, minus the phones) [via]

Battelle on new Google Desktop Search (includes a floating search bar and an API for plugging Google search into any Windows app)

NYT Magazine profile of Beck (he discusses Scientology about half-way through) [via]

Livejournal of an anonymous Apple Store "Mac Genius" (insiders say Apple is furiously searching for the identity of this guy)

Coherent essay on the Google Autolink controversy (it's about a fear of Google) [via]

Dualis, a new Nintendo DS emulator (no commercial games yet, but plays the existing homebrew demos) [via]

CSS Zen Garden screenshots (visually browse the garden) [via]

Trumba (new event calendar startup from the creators of Visio; they're still in private beta, but here's a sample calendar) [via]

Dr. Demento Show fan site (95.3% of all shows online for free download) [via]

Paramount/MTV Films making biopic about Napster creator Shawn Fanning (with the screenplay written by Bill & Ted's Alex Winter) [via]

McSweeney's "Who's on First?" [via]

Bumptunes (tilt your Powerbook to control music playback) [via]

Rex's roundup of online viral marketing campaigns (plus, congrats on the NPR appearance)

Batman's Greatest Boner (from Batman #66 in 1951) [via]

Fred Durst sues Gawker over stolen sex video (worst celeb sex video ever) [via]

Twinoo, left and right brain game (though I can't play it because I'm colorblind) [via]

Google adds weather search (here's my local weather) [via]

Wired on Clear Channel's Indie 103.1 (I covered this back in December 2003) [via]

Cameron Marlow's MT-Keystrokes (comment spam MT plugin that uses keystroke counting with Javascript)

Apple wins Think Secret case?! (judge will force blogs to reveal confidential sources)

MSNBC interviews Jason Kottke (FYI, the headline refers to a complimentary Mefi comment)

Flirting via iTunes (a great story of courtship in the digital age) [via]

MP3: No One Takes Your Freedom (cohesive mashup of Beatles, Scissor Sisters, George Michael, and Aretha Franklin; more here) [via]

Flash: Michal Levy's "Giant Steps" (my mind is blown; from 2001, but still great)

NY Public Library's Digital Gallery (275,000 digital images for download) [via]

MP3: Kidz Bop's cover of Modest Mouse's "Float On" (they couldn't find a kid to sing lead vocals?) [via]

Ten great examples of New Games Journalism (some outstanding articles that set the bar for writing about games) [via]

Firefox-based Netscape 8 beta released (toolbar bevel hell and mystery meat navigation) [via]

MyBlogLog (add one line of Javascript to track your outgoing link stats over time; I'm using this for Waxy Links and loving it)

NYT may kill Circuits section (replace it with a fashion and shopping section)

PDF: Waxy.org mentioned in Free Software Foundation's amicus brief on Grokster case! (footnote on page 17; the whole brief is an inspiring read) [via]

Phosphor Alpha 4 (impressive Shockwave first-person shooter) [via]

Friendster rebrands Typepad as Friendster Blogs (but with no social network value; where are friends-only posts and group blogs?) [via]

The Powerbook Sudden Motion Sensor (now, someone needs to write a Super Monkeyball or Marble Madness clone for these laptops)

Malaysian bootleg DVD runs negative blurb on package ("SuperBabies has no redeeming qualities") [via]

SAJAX, Simple Ajax Toolkit (convenient way to do remote scripting in PHP) [via]

Copyright clearance on American Idol (I noticed this too; she was voted off, partially because they couldn't clear her song choices)

Anonymous investors pledge $3 million to save Star Trek Enterprise (oddly, they cite the reviled theme song as a primary inspiration) [via]

MSN Found "game" created by I Love Bees masterminds (no matter how good the game is, it's still a promotion for a crappy product) [via]

Wists, visual bookmarks (like Flickr meets Delicious; David Galbraith explains) [via]

Evolution of Batman logos (the late '80s were an ugly serif typeface) [via]

Lawrence Lessig on C-SPAN (I've watched several of the very good Digital Future series) [via]

Wired's excellent profile of Wikipedia (touches on the dynamics of the site, along with its founder, critics, and contributors) [via]

Collection of "Happy Slap" videos (requires Quicktime to view; I want to choke these punk kids)

blo.gs for sale (their massive blog database would be dangerous in the wrong hands) [via]

Yahoo turns 10, gives away free Baskin-Robbins cones (the 10 year "netrospective" is nice, too) [via]

syncOtunes (sync iTunes libraries between two PCs or Macs) [via]

Video: Pete Miser's "Scent of a Robot" (reminds me of Deltron 3030's "Virus")

Weblogs, Inc. enables commenting on Engadget ads (neat idea, and great feedback for any advertiser) [via]

Der Spiegel's contest to become the next web meme (it's very difficult to force a meme)

Spider-Man's Greatest Bible Stories (don't do drugs) [via]

Sparklines on the Observer blog (nice visualization of incoming links over time) [via]

Unhappy Birthday, report copyright infringements of "Happy Birthday" to ASCAP (reminds me of Send Them Back) [via]

Copyright laws keep TV shows off DVD (including my favorite example, music licensing in WKRP)

Phil Ringnalda on the Yahoo API ("Google: Yahoo just ate your lunch")