Waxy.org: Links Archives: April 2005

Der Spiegel grills Tom Cruise about his Scientology beliefs (Steven Spielberg catches some heat, too) [via]

Flickr's Creative Commons photo browser (another great source for free and legal photos)

Designline, design timeline (animated GIF of every step of the contruction of a new CSS-based blog design) [via]

Flash: Smart Stick Adventure, maze of death (perfect Friday Flash fun) [via]

Goatse shirt, now for sale (safe for work)

Amazon redesigns, down to only two tabs (if you're not seeing it, here's a screenshot)

Bush signs law cracking down on prerelease file sharing (anyone sharing even one copy of an unreleased film, software program, or music file could be sentenced to up to three years in prison) [via]

No Internet Explorer bundled with new Apple OS (if you're so inclined, Ars Technica has a massive 20-page Tiger review)

Apple sued over "Tiger" name, injunction could prevent launch (questionable timing on Tiger Direct's part)

Fan remixes of NIN's Garage Band track (274 remixes, but none of them as good as The Ghost That Feeds) [via]

Wal-Mart uses DMCA against parody website (they cited copyright infringement against the Carnegie Mellon student)

The Hype Machine (a well-executed MP3 blog aggregator) [via]

GBA homebrew game contest winners, pre-order the cartridge for only $12 (this is a steal; the list of 10 winning games is in the Jan 23 news update)

Rare mixes, bootlegs, and pirate radio from the mid-1980s (transferred from mix tapes into MP3 format for download) [via]

1970s concert photos on Flickr (some of these are outstanding) [via]

Marc Hedlund on "bud vase" features (creating passionate users with small personal touches) [via]

Mystery of the Mario Paint Song (a strange tune that appears in Nintendo games from 1992 on, with MP3s and a backstory) [via]

Art group installs viewing platforms at L.A. gated communities (hilarious; I bet they're removed by tomorrow) [via]

Infinity launching listener-produced commercial radio station (submit audio files online, they review and play them on AM radio) [via]

Matt's Recumbent Bike (silliest Flickr pool ever; the original image) [via]

IHT redesigns to 1024 pixels wide (following WaPo's 1024px redesign, but both only have ads in the right-hand area) [via]

Slashdot adds ads to their RSS feeds (blecch)

Kottke on "A Whole New Internet" (expanding on Andre's original thoughts)

Disney developing Pirates of the Carribean MMO (I'm still waiting for Disneyland in Half-Life 2)

Rosie O'Donnell's Flickr photos (she also moved her Blogspot blog to her own domain)

Pixel mural from Masters of Magic for MS-DOS (creative, retro, and obscure; I love this kind of thing)

Make a ring out of a coin (technically illegal, or is it?) [via]

How big is Jesus? (JWZ runs the numbers) [via]

MP3: Audio from Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Lessig's "Who Owns Culture?" presentation (45 MB of goodness) [via]

Retro-style RPG based on Columbine massacre (extremely offensive; don't shoot the messenger) [via]

UC Berkeley professor exaggerated laptop scary story (shocking!) [via]

TVTorrents closed down (they make reference to a costly settlement) [via]

Chris Ware to self-publish future work (including new issues of Acme Novelty Library!) [via]

Photos from "I Am 8-bit" gallery exhibition (looks like photos of every artwork) [via]

Comparing blog links to major newspapers (as a percentage of their print circulation, Christian Science Monitor is the most blog-friendly) [via]

Edward Tufte closing "Ask E.T." forum (for someone so brilliant at information design, the design of the forums is lacking; whoops, this was from 2004)

Dangerous Hacker! (too good to be true, but I'm hoping) [via]

Adrian's Greasemonkey compiler (turn any Greasemonkey script into a standalone Firefox extension)

Matt finds video of a TV networks' emergency drill (an entire terrorist black plague scenario, with experts, eyewitnesses, and reporters in the field)

Japanese Pepsi promotion with tape rolls of Super Mario Brothers levels (and a lovely collection of bottlecaps; or buy the tapes and caps on eBay) [via]

Bastard Tetris for Linux console (algorithmically chooses the worst possible bricks as you play)

Neat idea for combining Google Maps satellite view with A9's storefront view (someone please do this) [via]

Flash: Guess-the-Google (wonderful game based on Google Images collages) [via]

Congress confuses file sharing with manslaughter (explosive headline, but these draconian lawmakers are in the industry's pocket and they need to be stopped) [via]

The New Pope condemns rock music (he hates the Eagles, so he can't be all bad; original Times UK article from 1996)

Katamari Damacy 2 co-op play (plus, a much better split-screen mode) [via]

RIAA's open extortion, assisted by Comcast ("we obtained your personal data without consent, now give us $4,500 or we'll sue you!")

Greasemonkey: Amazon Free Music helper (convert Amazon's MP3 links to direct downloads) [via]

Adaptive Path on the New Internet (things are getting exciting again; also, I'm honored Upcoming.org made the short list of highlighted examples)

BBC interview with Steve Meretzky about Infocom's Hitchhikers Guide text adventure (one of the best, but hardest, games they ever made) [via]

Jason Scott's Last Straw collection (a small collection of "last post" messages written by fed-up project maintainers) [via]

Video: Katie Couric interviews Rogers Cadenhead, Popesquatter (brilliant and funny, especially the ending)

Emulate a Texas Instruments calculator on your Nintendo DS (brilliant early hack, with an innovative use of the touchscreen) [via]

Podscope, full-text search engine for podcast audio (works surprisingly well, though only for words in its dictionary; plastic returns results, but not blog) [via]

Image: Meanwhile, Back at UCB (pixel comic about the Berkeley laptop thief) [via]

Evan Williams to blame for Google's recent problems (if you don't know why this is hilarious, read the comments) [via]

Google Maps on TiVo (nice HME hack by the founder/CTO of Strangeberry)

Processing 1.0 beta released (very neat programming language for designers and artists) [via]

Yahoo Images search for "O'Reilly Radar" (are the O'Reilly folks big M*A*S*H fans?) [via]

Wired's Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart (for some perspective, try Fast Company's article on Wal-Mart's business practices) [via]

LiveJournal usage statistics by state (4.5% of Massachusetts has a LiveJournal account) [via]

Firms paid Today show tech editor to promote products on-air ($15,000 each from Apple, Sony, HP, Epson, and Creative) [via]

Prison terms on tap for 'prerelease' pirates (Congress approved bill allowing three years of prison for sharing one prerelease movie, program, or song)

Aaron Swartz accepted into Paul Graham's Summer Founders Program (Y Combinator is funding startups over a summer period)

Pointment (online meeting scheduler, but some screenshots would be nice) [via]

Surplus project names (silly, but a surprisingly good way to think of API remix ideas) [via]

Video: Psychos (overlay of Hitchcock's shower scene with Gus van Sant's remake) [via]

O'Reilly Radar, new O'Reilly blog on tech trends (here's a great transcript from last year discussing some of the trends they observe) [via]

Tom DeLay criticizes Supreme Court Justice for doing Internet research (a very strange comment, considering most lawyers and judges do the same)

Google Labs' My Search History (I'm sure this will raise the paranoia flag with the usual suspects)

Peter Hirschberg's home arcade gameroom (the best home arcade I've ever seen)

MP3: Louis Armstrong's "Oops! I Did It Again" [via]

Google mMaim (open-source Google code for monitoring and analyzing MySQL servers) [via]

Station Exchange, Sony's marketplace for Everquest goods (Wired has more details)

Rogers Cadenhead bought BenedictXVI.com weeks ago (he hedged his bets by buying six domains, and guessed correctly)

Goonies' 20th Anniversary Celebration (they should do the tour on kids' BMX bikes)

Trackerbt, a distributed BitTorrent tracker (redundant trackers all aware of peers participating in the download) [via]

Snap search engine statistics (they're extremely transparent, listing their revenue, advertisers, and more) [via]

Tag clouds are the new mullets (I'm convinced there are better ways of displaying top tags than this)

Taiwanglish phrases on scooters (scroll down to view them all) [via]

Cake, PHP framework based on Rails (sounds promising) [via]

Blogger adds Captcha for new blog creation (hopefully, this will slow the mass creation of spam blogs) [via]

Tetris shelves ($7,000, cheap!) [via]

McDonald's employee hassles McCafe photographer (there are even more McCafe photos on Flickr; here's a review of the first store in 2003) [via]

Flickr upgrades free accounts, drops price of Pro accounts (and they gave me another year of Pro service and two extra Pro invites for free)

Kottke rounds up blog responses to the Adobe-Macromedia deal (some great thoughts from Om Malik, Dave Shea, and others)

Chicago transit map overlay on Google Maps (a brilliant hack; I'd love to see this for all major metros)

Jokes with Realistic Endings ("What's worse than finding a worm in your apple? The Holocaust.")

MovableType 3.16 released (a big point release with hundreds of bug fixes and tweaks, including removing the nav-commenters.gif)

Upcoming.org libraries for Perl, PHP, and Drupal (also: 43 Things' neat Upcoming integration, and some groups switching from Meetup)

More details on Will Wright's Spore game (very drool-worthy playspace for gamers with a God complex) [via]

Classic arcade pegboard kits (I had this idea years ago, glad it's finally baked) [via]

TiVo in talks with Yahoo, Google (maybe for recording web-based video searches, but also some buyout rumors) [via]

Gamestop buys Electronics Boutique (another huge merger, for $1.4 billion in cash and stock) [via]

Adobe buys Macromedia! (all-stock buyout for $3.4 billion)

1up's roundup of nextgen console details (what we know, so far, about each upcoming console) [via]

Flickr network analysis, March 2005 (continuing his amazing work; I'm curious about the United Arab Emirates' insular adoption of the site) [via]

Knowspam shutting down in June? (anyone know the backstory here? I thought they were doing well)

Pretty in Pink sequel was an April 1 hoax (this one fooled the blog world, including me) [via]

PlaceSite (location-specific social network websites, only viewable by people within range of a single wifi access point)

Freetag, an open-source tagging/folksonomy framework for PHP/MySQL (we use it on Upcoming.org, and I designed the logo; read more about its creation)

Rojo feedreader goes out of beta (I'd been beta-testing it, but their features aren't notably better than Bloglines) [via]

Skinning Del.icio.us with Safari's PithHelmet extension (kinda like Greasemonkey for Safari)

Marc Hedlund's notes on building CodeZoo (essential read with great advice for building a web app with a small team) [via]

The Freesound Project (like Flickr for audio clips, all with waveforms and CC licenses)

FM Publishing, John Battelle's new blog publishing company (Boing Boing will be its first property) [via]

Yankees' Gary Sheffield scuffles with Boston fan (even better: first-person cameraphone photos of the fight, from the guy in this photo)

HTTP in tha House (generate a freestyle flow from the text of any webpage) [via]

Metafilter user passes away (Matt comments that Eric Osterhoudt is the first death he's aware of)

Video: Frogger-themed Jeep commercial (very clever) [via]

Binary Search Engine tracking (unusual visualization of search engine crawling; compare to their original approach for URIs)

MP3: NWA's "Straight Outta Compton," with everything except profanities removed (also: the edited version of Fuck Tha Police is a long 42 seconds) [via]

Michael Buffington working on a secret project with Adaptive Path (using Ruby on Rails, too; this should be interesting) [via]

MP3: Kleptones, "Bo Rhap" (from last Christmas, their massive mashup of Bohemian Rhapsody covers)

Great tutorial to wirelessly load homebrew code onto your Nintendo DS (requires a GBA flash cart and specific wireless cart; this is the start of the homebrew DS scene) [via]

Amazon adds keyword frequency and text stats for books (someone at Amazon has tag-envy)

NYT on Amazon's expansion into on-demand book printing (not true on-demand like the Bookmobile, though)

Downhill Battle's new DTV and Broadcast Machine projects (they're trying to develop an open-source platform for painlessly distributing and watching high-quality video online, built on Blog Torrent) [via]

Google Video Upload Program (just launched minutes ago; read more about the video program and Windows uploader) [via]

Robot Co-Op adds Upcoming.org support on 43 Things (also, Whedonesque just switched to Upcoming because of Meetup's new fees)

Fingerprint Maze (art installation that scans your fingerprint and turns it into a 3D maze) [via]

MFX's Aether, amazing PC graphic demo (if you have a fast PC and a good video card, try this; it just blew my mind)

Meetup to begin charging monthly fee (event organizers will pay $19/month to arrange meetups) [via]

Britney Spears pregnant (Stereogum offers up some composite predictions)

Sproutliner (sharable online outlines, like OmniOutliner for the web) [via]

Chris Anderson on the mainstream media meltdown (music, TV, radio, newspaper sales all down; movies, videogames, web all up) [via]

Ben Heckendorn's homebrew N64 portable (cute comparison between the N64p and the DS) [via]

Buzztracker (visualizing frequency and relationships between locations in Google News international) [via]

Greasemonkey User Script Repository (it's getting massive; read Jeremy's long update about moving it to Userscript.org)

Archive.org's public domain Superman cartoons (from their vintage cartoons collection) [via]

JSimpleton, a Z-machine bot for the Idle Thumbs message boards (I'd love to see someone adapt this to phpBB)

Psychonauts demo released (from the creator of Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and co-creator of Day of the Tentacle)

Perl on Rails (I'd love to see a language-agnostic Rails, but this feels wrong) [via]

Maciej quit his job, too (working on a secretive startup, which should be interesting)

MetaWishlist (is it just me, or are all new web apps borrowing heavily from Flickr?)

Idaho passes resolution praising Napolean Dynamite (unanimously, too) [via]

1UP's feature on cartoons based on video games (tons of obscure ones I've never heard of) [via]

Embedding images in HTML source (I had no idea this was possible) [via]

Video: Tiger Woods' mind-blowing shot at the 16th hole of the US Masters (this is not fake; I have the video mirrored locally)

Overlapping satellite images in Google Maps (very weird; is Keyhole stitching together images by intelligently cutting around buildings?)

Googlest, top paying Adsense keywords (a curious list of search terms, but mind the ads and popups) [via]

DS hacker built wireless multiboot hack (send a wi-fi signal from your PC to the DS to trick it into running homebrew code off the GBA slot)

Del.icio.us investors (it's a VC dream team and Joshua maintains a majority stake, to boot!) [via]

Grove Street memory maps (Grand Theft Auto-inspired silliness) [via]

Eyebeam's Contagious Media Showdown (design a virulent meme website, win thousands of dollars)

Meme tracking with Greasemonkey (listing Bloglines and Del.icio.us citations inline on every page; brilliant, but raises some questions on etiquette)

Long Line mosaics on Flickr (including these lovely cube printouts) [via]

Jason Kottke's micropatron followup (it worked well enough this year, but it's a difficult road)

StorTroopers returns (I made one a couple years ago) [via]

L.A. Times's long profile of Xeni Jardin (when I dined with the Boing Boing crew at ETech, Xeni's embedded reporter came with us)

"Luecke" in Google Maps (the scale is insane, try zooming in to see the Texas landmark) [via]

Lickr, Flickr without the Flash (Greasemonkey add-on gives a DHTML and Javascript equivalent for viewing and annotating photos) [via]

Douglas Adams fan site reviews hates on new Hitchhiker's film (in a very detailed review, they tear it to shreds) [via]

Upload progress with Ruby on Rails and Ajax (I'm sure adding on a visual progress bar would be trivial) [via]

Review of Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS (it's a playful music and performance toy; IGN has several videos) [via]

Paul Rademacher's fusion of Google Maps and Craiglist rentals (ingenious use of both sites, though strictly unofficial scraping) [via]

Code snippets for implementing tags with SQL (this will come in handy for Upcoming's tag support)

How many Flickr users does it take to change a lightbulb? (a novel use of the site, but it worked) [via]

Paul Boutin profiles Brewster Kahle in Slate (one of my heroes) [via]

Brad Choate's SpamLookup plugin for MovableType (I'll be installing this and MT-Moderate soon)

43things adds web services API (I feel like 43things is the spiritual cousin to Upcoming, for reasons I can't define) [via]

Columbus weekly cover story on cult web artist Drew (if you haven't seen Drew's art, you're missing out)

Google Sightseeing (blog tracking neat things spotted in Google Maps' satellite view) [via]

Wired on Blogger's recent problems (some outages and buggy behavior, but they're working on it) [via]

Best Buy customer arrested for paying with $2 bills ("it's a sign we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world") [via]

Google launches Q&A feature (a direct response to Ask Jeeves?)

Check out those display options! (option overkill as Excel, Word, PDF, Palm, e-mail, fax, and more) [via]

VideoLAN open-source video player threatened by European patents (Mplayer, Freevo, and MythTV are all built on top of VLC) [via]

Yahoo supports Wikipedia with hardware and resources (plus, Wikipedia results will show inline on Yahoo searches) [via]

Image: Google Maps, real-world remix (very funny)

Pure data noise (don't miss the wonderful audio samples buried in the Flash site)

Migrant Mother sheds her wrinkles (angry readers write in over "Popular Photography" April 1 prank)

Matt explains the amazing colored pools in Google Maps (he has a master's in soil chemistry!?)

Video: Mad Hot Ballroom trailer (adorable documentary about a children's ballroom dancing competition) [via]

Wired News on the therapeutic and educational uses of Second Life (some very interesting social experiments in the game world) [via]

EasyTree BitTorrent site shut down (unlike Suprnova and its ilk, this one hosted only commercially unavailable bootleg concerts)

Henry Blodget buys bootleg DVDs in Shanghai (a brief story about a DVD shop pretending to be a restaurant) [via]

Sploid (Gawker's new tabloid-style blog; in your face, Drudge!) [via]

Amazon redesigns book detail pages (also: Alan's much larger annotated screenshot on Flickr) [via]

Tasting Music (table that plays CDs without even opening the case) [via]

Defective Yeti reviews Doom board game (surprisingly positive review) [via]

Image: Flickrland (play "Where's Waldo" with 74,000 Flickr buddy icons)

Prodigem begins offering paid BitTorrent service (pick a price, upload your torrent, and buyers pay with Paypal to download)

Star Wars fans won't move line in protest (even though they're standing in front of a theater that won't play Episode III)

Burning Man camp on Google Maps (also: Dave!) [via]

Matt Haughey's annotated Google Map on Flickr (it inspired a new Memory Maps group)

Upcoming.org adds search, e-mail invites, and more (we've been cranking on the site; go check it out)

Maciej on Paul Graham and other blowhards (I love a spirited rant)

The Erotic Diary of George Wendt (an inspired part of TeeVee's brilliant April 1 prank, if you missed it)

Google Maps adds satellite photos! (insanely cool to switch back and forth) [via]

The Annotated New York Times (tracking NYT stories with real-time reactions from blogs) [via]

Implausible Claims Made by Vanilla Ice in "Ice Ice Baby" ("Turn off the lights and I'll glow.") [via]

Thurston Moore on the power of mix tapes (don't miss the last graf; "trying to control music sharing ... is like trying to control an affair of the heart")

Joe vs. the Volcano creator wins Pulitzer Prize (strangely, AP doesn't mention "Joe" at all)

IRC on the PSP (cute on-screen keyboard; coming soon, PSP AIM) [via]

Stereogum on Pretty in Pink sequel (John Hughes directing; will the very depressing Breakfast Club 2 be next?)

Yahoo API adds term extraction from documents (wow, I could imagine using this on many projects unrelated to Yahoo) [via]

Video: DJ Format, "3 Feet Deep" (music video inspired by Konami's rhythm games) [via]

Independent developers claim wireless DS tunneling by April 11 (hard to believe, but here's an interview with them) [via]

The Thumb-sized Heart of TK the Cat (Paul Ford is a great writer, and this made me sad) [via]

How to port your blog to Gopher space (the finished product was one of my favorite April 1 gags)

Tetris and Pong on a mechanically scanned display (persistance of vision with quickly rotating LEDs) [via]

Business Week on tagging (nothing new here, but the most mainstream coverage so far) [via]

"I Am 8-Bit," retrogaming art show at L.A. gallery (here's a small gallery of inspired artwork) [via]

Best Buy to stop mail-in rebates within two year (Circuit City and CompUSA to follow) [via]

Free stock photo roundup (a great guide to finding free stock photos online) [via]

Stopdesign redesigns (try refreshing a few times for tributes to Kottke, Cederholm, Dominey, and Santa Maria)

Video: King Kong cast and crew discuss "Son of Kong" sequel (Andy Serkis, as Son of Kong, will fight the Nazis in WWII; a brilliant and convincing prank)

NASA photo of water on Mars (also: Life on Mars)

John Woo to direct Katamari Damacy movie (The Rock signed on to play the Prince of All Cosmos)

YagooHoo!gle (looks like the merger rumors were true)

Del.icio.us Colors (looks like those big VC bucks are already paying off)

UC Berkeley folklorist and hoax expert Alan Dundes dies while teaching (this is terribly sad, he was one of the best teachers I've ever had) [via]

Half Life 2's Gabe Newell leaves Valve to pursue music career (I think he has a chance)

MP3: New Foo Fighters' single, "In Your Honor" (Grohl is pushing the envelope with their new sound)

zoDiacS (Nintendo DS emulator for the Tapwave Zodiac)

Bloggy, the first automated blogging robot (Bloggy's blog is more interesting than 80% of human blogs)

ThinkGeek announces new products (including the executive Pong set)

The Commentator, utility to automatically comment your code (see also: the Herman-Miller Pairon chair for extreme programming)

Homestar Runner's Pay Plus (only $12.95/month)

Apple founder Jobs joins IKEA ("in every Mac home, a Waenka")

Urgo's list of April Fool's websites (like last year, this is the ultimate reference for Internet Jackass Day 2005)

Britannica takeover of Wikimedia (to be renamed Wikipædia) [via]

43 Folders' April Power Hacks ("16. Consider using a desk.") [via]

First look at iTunes phone (I think it's a hoax)

Gmail increases storage to infinity+1 (but seriously, they really did increase it to 2GB) [via]

Sixfoo! 660 feta (sixfoot6.com launches new social networking service; don't forget to log in!)

TeeVeePad, the celebrity blogging service (absolutely brilliant)

Google Gulp (Google announces new smart drink; on eBay, a Google Gulp invite) [via]

Brad's Corner (hilariously subtle humor from the Livejournal creator)

Google April Fool's (they managed to find every hoax-related page on my site)