Waxy.org: Links Archives: February 2006

Myspace launches video sharing service (undoubtedly why they blocked YouTube until Myspace users rebelled)

Video: Battlefield 2 machinima remakes Bravia commercial (parody of the bouncy balls ad)

Windows Live Local adds street-side views (the maps arms race escalates with this crazy driving mode)

iPod Hi-Fi (I just found my new stereo)

Zonetag, upload cameraphone pics to Flickr with real-time location tagging (neat hack for Series 60 phones, uses cell tower IDs to infer location )

NetJaxer (treat web apps like Windows programs, with desktop, tray, and quickstart icons and startup launching)

Yahoo Music exec says labels should sell DRM-free music (a breath of fresh air to hear this; Ian Rogers agrees)

MPAA targeting Usenet binaries services (looks like NZB indexes and forums instead of Usenet feeds)

I'm Your Biggest Fan (blogger flunks job interview because of daily fan letters to Star Jones) [via]

World of Warcraft teaches the wrong things (grinding and the time commitment are two big reasons why I can't get into current MMOs) [via]

Google To Become Portal (silly 2002 April Fool's article predicts the future)

Kottke.org switches from micropatrons to skyscraper ads (the parallel universe Kottke)

Google Pages (Google's Geocities 2.0 offers a simple CMS, free hosting, and 100 MB storage)

Kottke reviews first year as a pro blogger (1,450 people donated a total of $39,900, but almost entirely in the first three weeks)

All Google's Roads Lead to Kansas (with ground photos of the farm at the default center of Google Maps)

30 Boxes releases their API (they have serious momentum)

Neil Young's Perfect Echo Volume 1 '67-'71 (full album of heart-breaking rarities) [via]

MP3: Postal Service remixes Feist's "Mushaboom" (with new vocals by Ben Gibbard; also, the cover of Nina Simone's "See-Line Woman" (local copy) is worth hearing) [via]

Technorati launches Favorites (an RSS reader that never mentions RSS)

Democracy Player (making it drop-dead easy to subscribe, watch, and share video channels online; like a BitTorrent PVR community) [via]

Woman loses custody of son for participating in Subgenius holiday (anyone familiar with the Church knows it's religious parody and performance art)

Lego'd Video Games (the Excitebike scene is lovely) [via]

Techcrunch previews Flyspy, historical airline ticket search (like Zillow, blows up industries by making hard-to-find information widely available)

"Lost Camera" unlost, but not quite found (a Canadian couple found the Flickr fan's camera, but won't give it back) [via]

The Perils of Metadata (Washington Post accidentially exposes their anonymous botnet hacker with photo metadata) [via]

Gelf interviews the Smoking Gun on the aftermath of their Million Little Pieces expose (excellent interview on the history, media coverage, and a potential followup) [via]

Hell is Chrome (a screenshot of a new message in Outlook 12 beta) [via]

Bizarre "Contract of Wifely Expectations" emerges in Iowa kidnapping case (the text may be offensive)

Video: Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack on piano (jaunty!) [via]

NBC demands YouTube remove "Lazy Sunday" video (biting the hand that feeds you; they should have paid for that kind of amazing promotion)

Bradley Horowitz on Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers (only a fraction of a community needs to be active for everyone to benefit) [via]

OSX86 Project served with DMCA takedown (did it come from Apple?) [via]

Ning launches redesign (the popular apps page is useful, and they're doing a much better job of explaining what Ning is)

Anti-piracy poem hidden in Mac OS X source code (the AP got a quote from Apple about it)

John "Spumco" Kricfalusi's new blog is fun (there's a character named "Waxy" in the kid's show collage) [via]

Googler Matt Cutts photographs Jeeves, and vice versa (don't miss the followup) [via]

Video: Daily Show on Myspace (oof, Friendster gets dissed) [via]

SF Gate on Pillow Fight Club (also: the Upcoming event and photos) [via]

RIAA attacking AllofMP3.com (the Russian grey-market MP3 site is great, but not long for this world)

Podbop (podcasting MP3s from bands on tour using the Eventful API; very clever mashup) [via]

Little Food People (and a second set; originally from a French site with a bad UI) [via]

First Mac OS X trojan in the wild? (every Mac is a powerful Unix box, so it's inevitable that it gets targeted) [via]

Video: Oprah grills Tom Cruise (great mashup of two famous Oprah moments)

Fisheye (neat visualizations for CVS/SVN source code repositories) [via]

Amazon's most edited wikis (appropriately, A Million Little Pieces has nearly twice the edits of the next runner up) [via]

Daily Candy may be sold for $100 million (not bad for a daily newsletter that found its niche)

Chuck Norris Facts, Web 2.0 version (also: Chuck's selling his own shirts now) [via]

Flowcharts in art and comics (not mentioned is Jason Shiga's Meanwhile) [via]

37signals launches Campfire (group chat for distributed teams and projects) [via]

CNNi redesigns with clean onscreen titles (more details at Kemistry )

Google buys Measure Map (congrats, Jeff and the Adaptive Path crew!)

The Dumpster (a visualization of romantic breakups collected from blogs in 2005) [via]

New York magazine's cover story on blogging (the issue includes a Ben Fry infographic PDF and some other fluff) [via]

WSJ on web parodies and copyright enforcement (with a very high-profile mention of House of Cosbys!)

Video: She Hit Me (motorcyclist records video of Honda Civic losing control and hitting her, posts video online)

Half-Life 2 to become episodic series (exactly the way it should be) [via]

Review of Firewall movie, a big-budget computer thriller (Harrison Ford just hacked your bank account with an iPod; the trailer) [via]

Can MTV stay cool? (I wouldn't be shocked to see YouTube bought by Viacom) [via]

Alexadex (like Blogshares for the entire web, using Alexa traffic data) [via]

SiteAdvisor Preview (Firefox/IE plugin detects unsafe websites and warns you in search results; Waxy is safe, but try looking for divx)

Dave Winer responds to Steve Kirks, former Userland evangelist and developer (I knew Dave could be difficult, but this is ridiculous)

The Beastles (Beatles to Beastie Boys mashup album; illegalicious!) [via]

LA Times on creationism being taught to young children (most depressing are the two curious kids crushed by their parents' dogma) [via]

The Song Tapper (overloaded the last time I tried to visit, it's working now and found "Since U Been Gone" on the first try) [via]

Oh No Robot (web comic search engine and transcription) [via]

How to Make Garfield Funny (a growing meme, this thread collects some of the best examples)

Video: Top Gear trashes a Toyota Hilux (increasingly insane tests of strength; also: Top Gear Turismo and more)

Star Wars Valentines ("my love for you will stay on target") [via]

The Hall of Best Knowledge (weekly comic on Flickr combining hand-drawn typography and prose) [via]

Image: You Complete Me (originally from 4 Color Rebellion, but their account was suspended)

PowerGlove Mouse (brilliant hack to control your mouse with a Nintendo PowerGlove; it's so bad) [via]

EFF issues Google Desktop warning (I'd prefer a Hamachi-like virtual network instead of sending everything to Google, but it's a tradeoff of privacy and convenience)

Who Is Harry Nilsson? (new documentary about one of the most underrated songwriters of all time; also: production notes) [via]

Video: Half-Life 2 mousetrap (ridiculous Rube Goldberg device built with Garry's HL2 mod) [via]

Brokeback Mountain mod for the Sims

Current style in web design (a good explanation of current trends in good web style) [via]

18x18 pixel clones of classic arcade games (they're surprisingly playable)

Alone together in World of Warcraft (the MMO players favor loose, indirect forms of social contact) [via]

Video: Dave Chappelle's Block Party (Michel Gondry directs the story of an epic party) [via]

The Mohammed Dance (yes, it's exactly what you think it is)

Reclusive Sly Stone surprises Grammys (sporting a huge mohawk, he wandered off after a couple minutes)

Zillow, real estate valuation search (find out how much your boss's house is worth)

Video: Multi-Touch Interaction Research (it's like the Nintendo DS as a PC)

Yahoo testing new homepage (funny that this first appears on Flickr)

Make Your Own Oscar Pool (I'm voting for a Dukes of Hazzard sweep)

Boing Boing interviews Rob Lord on Songbird (the open-source iTunes clone launched today, though the site is totally crushed)

Video: Pac-Man on campus (incidentally, these YouTube clones are popping up like weeds)

Canadian customs censoring adult DVDs at the border (the list reads as both bizarre and arbitrary)

BitTorrent to crack down on use of name (I was afraid this would happen eventually)

WINE running on Intel iMacs? (if true, the ability to run Windows apps in a natural way could be huge) [via]

Video: Nacho Libre trailer (quite possibly the best and/or worst movie of the year)

Blurb (brilliant book creation software for on-demand publishing, a la Cafe Press)

Cupid Mistake (a particularly good Perry Bible Fellowship this week)

Sketch Swap (draw a picture, get one in return; also, File Swap)

Clearbits, free CSS icon set (looks uncannily similar to Dan Cederholm's Chameleon; is it plagiarism?) [via]

Visualizing relationships and geographies of New York Times articles (Aaron dumps the RDF daily, so you can hack on it yourself; mashups, please!)

Ben Goodger on the history of Firefox (a must read; it also cites Greg Knauss' pan of Netscape's themes)

The Art of De-Touch (Eyebeam's Processing utility lets you scrub through before and after retouches) [via]

NYT announces Gmail Chat (web-based instant messaging with Gmail)

Disney retooling Pirates ride with movie tie-ins (gah, this sounds awful)

µTorrent creator on BitTorrent encryption (Bram doesn't like it, but clients are encrypting BitTorrent traffic to get around ISP bandwidth throttles)

Super Noah's Ark 3D (also: 1UP's great roundup of retro game ripoffs)

CoComment, blog comment tracking (leave a comment, hit a bookmarklet to track the conversation)

Sifry's State of the Blogosphere, Feb 2006 (75k new blogs per day, though unclear how many are automated spam blogs)

Anil responds to SFBG editor's rant on Craig Newmark (the editorial compared Craig's List to Wal-Mart) [via]

Superbowl commercials on Google Video (for once, I don't miss AdCritic)

30 Boxes beta (now open to the public, and they added iCal and mobile support over the weekend)

Jason Robida's Myspace journal (the teen wanted in the gay bar rampage was caught today in a bloody shootout)

playsh, the playful shell (Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny's Etech session sounds so intriguing that it hurts)

London Underground as a music map (surprisingly good and accurate, and available as a poster) [via]

Legal firms cold-calling artists appearing on P2P networks (Jason Scott gets a call from a paralegal looking for witnesses in a new P2P lawsuit)

Katamari Damacy lyrics translated (everybody clump together and spurt it all out) [via]

SimpleTicket (open-source trouble ticket support software built in Rails) [via]

Motown Building Razed for Super Bowl Parking (along with countless historical Motown documents)

Valleywag, Silicon Valley gossip blog (it's like The National Enquirer meets Fucked Company) [via]

Thomas Hawk reviews 30 Boxes, a new calendaring startup (I was at this private demo last night and I agree, it's the best web-based calendar ever)

The GNE Mystery, a pre-Flickr interactive fiction game by Cal Henderson (Cal said I'm the first person to ever beat the game without hints)

Comparative review of Pandora vs. Last.fm music recommenders (the big difference is that Last.fm gets better as more people use it at no additional expense)

The Best BBS Movie Ever Made (sounds like a good candidate for a bandwidth blowout)