December 30, 2005

Public Domain Torrents — with iPod and PDA versions, too; try the top 20 movies #

Slate reflects on the Chronicles of Narnia rap — it's not just funny, it's good music #

Suck.com taken offline, replaced by porn portal — suck, suck, sucks #

Suck.com, Gone for Good?

Posted December 30, 2005 by Andy Baio

Suck.com, one of the most important and influential webzines, appears to be offline permanently, replaced by a porn search portal.

The strangest part is that the domain continues to belong to Lycos, with Hotwired acting as the nameservers. If you query ns1.hotwired.com for the suck.com domain, it returns 198.65.105.202, an IP address of a Verio server currently hosting over 36,000 domains. The server is owned by a company called ParkingDNS.net, which seems to be hosting nothing but Parkingdots.com affiliate search portals.

It also appears that there’s no complete archive of Suck.com remaining anywhere online. Because the new owners have blocked web crawlers, Archive.org has ~~purged~~ blocked access to the archived version of the site. (Last year, Suckarchives.com expired and was snatched up by a squatter.)

If permanent, this is a tragedy for anyone who cares about the web’s history. Does anyone at Lycos know what’s going on? Also, if anyone out there has a complete copy of the Suck archives, please get in touch. (If you need to submit it anonymously, that’s fine.)

Update: Interesting stuff in the comments below. Greg Knauss, himself a Suck.com contributor, is proxying requests to the old Suck.com server through his own server at suck.eod.com. Also, Mike at Injoke.com posted a 200MB torrent of the entire Suck.com archive. Update: Boy genius Aaron Swartz is mirroring the Suck.com snapshot from Mike’s torrent. Nice work!

This doesn’t change the fact that every link to a Suck.com article is still broken, but at least the articles aren’t lost.

January 2, 2006: Suck.com is back! Someone out there must have the inside story of what went on over the past few days.

iFilm's top 25 viral videos of 2005 — I'd seen all but two #

Philipp Lenssen's 15 search predictions for 2006 — some intelligent guesswork #

December 29, 2005

Java: Falling Sand game — try the effects of sand and water on the bouncing object; also: hell of sand with people #

Flash: My Humps Christmas card — I wonder if American Greetings is getting complaints about this one #

PopCap mini-games save lives — bizarre testimonial #

Guardian UK on the grassroots UK music boom — how the Internet and word of mouth is launching indie acts and singles into the top charts (via) #

I'm Feeling Silly — Googlers order 250 pounds of Silly Putty; hilarity ensues #

Gaming Digg — story of one jerk who used a bookmarklet and fake accounts to ruin Digg for a day #

Google to release feed reader API — don't like the Google Reader UI? roll your own with the underlying data (via) #

Regret the Error's year-end roundup of media mistakes — most are funny, but several upsetting (via) #

Flying Spaghetti Monster tree topper — or put it on your Festivus pole (via) #

Acquisitions and the Big 3 — that's us: fun, jagged, and dangerous #

Typographica's favorite fonts of 2005 — some very flexible choices; Garda is beautiful (via) #

DivX browser plugin for Windows released — Mac and Linux versions coming soon (via) #

Video: Pac-Man Puppet Show — lovely viral ad for the Gametap emulation service (via) #

Brett Tabke's robots.txt blog #

Metafilter members on Google Earth — nice screenshots; also, I updated the Mefi Stats through December #

Million Dollar Homepage creator on verge of reaching goal — at this rate, he'll hit a million in a week; also, there are quite a few cheap imitators (via) #

Khoi Vinh joins NYTimes.com — they must have liked the Onion redesign (via) #

Xbox 360 costs $715 to manufacture? — they may be losing more than $300 per sale #

Rex Sorgatz' 2006 predictions — more predictions from Blake Ross, Tristan Lewis, Cameron Moll, John Battelle, Jason Calacanis #

Do you get less wet if you run in the rain? — the BBC does the math; reminds me of the shower curtain puzzle #

Top 50 Music Videos of 2005 — generally good songs, too (via) #

How shows on DVD suffer from music licensing — mentions the massive WKRP music changes (via) #

December 26, 2005

Video: Pants Pants Pants, "Fabio Salsa" — SF indie band recreates the opening sequence from Full House #

December 23, 2005

Double Feature Finder — nicely designed tool for theater hoppers (via) #

C64 PSP — Commodore 64 emulator for the PSP #

December 20, 2005

Animal Crossing character promotes file sharing — the story seems more suited to a blog post than an 1,100-word NYT article (via) #

Wikipedia founder edits own bio — and insists others stop editing it without contacting him (via) #

Google's 2005 Year-End Zeitgeist — the growth of Wikipedia queries reflects their traffic #

Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2005 — some surprisingly accessible choices throughout; also: Rex's growing list of year-end lists (via) #

Homebrew Lumines for the GBA — one less reason to own a PSP (via) #

Digg Spy v2 released — real-time view of Digg activity; very nice #

Federal judge rules intelligent design curriculum unconstitutional — the court opinion (PDF) is an amazing read; read about the Wedge Document on page 28 #

Ari Paparo on why Delicious succeeded where Blink failed — design decisions prevented his social bookmarking service from getting popular (via) #

Pokemon gene renamed following legal threat — Nintendo didn't like "Pokemon" being associated with "cancer" (via) #

December 19, 2005

Sloncek's story of the Suprnova shutdown — a year ago today (via) #

Dogwelder's "My Humps"

Posted December 18, 2005 by Andy Baio

When Luke Gattuso isn’t putting bananas on his head, he’s busy making wonderful things that make me smile.

His latest is a cover of Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” a song that represents a low point not only for popular music, but for humankind.

The only thing that could possibly be better than his MP3 version is syncing it with the original video. Download this now.

Quicktime: dog_eyed_welders_-_my_humps.mov (11MB)

XviD: dog_eyed_welders_-_my_humps.avi (10MB)

(Thanks, Chrominance!)

December 18, 2005

Video: Lazy Sunday, the Chronicles of Narnia Rap — easily the best thing I've seen on SNL in years #

Wife, lover held for murder of former Quark engineer — bizarre story involving a conspiracy involving an embezzling scheme at Quark #

December 16, 2005

MP3: Dog Eyed Welders – My Hump — best cover of the worst song ever #

43 People adds year-end calendars — aggregates info across all the 43 sites (via) #

Tim Berners-Lee starts a blog — first post! #

Bush authorized NSA to eavesdrop without warrants in U.S. — NYT exclusive finds the administration breaking federal law; also, no more Patriot Act! #

December 14, 2005

Animated Singing Santa Hack — hack a Wal-Mart Santa to be evil; don't miss the videos #

Facebook doubling as a CIA front? — some fun conspiracy theorizing #