Waxy.org: Links Archives: April 2006

Video: Powerpuff Girls Z trailer (bizarre Japanese-only anime version of Powerpuff Girls) [via]

Hi, Racists! (Ryland tweaks his Church Sign Generator to thwart white supremacists) [via]

VideoDownloader extension for Firefox (download embedded media, including Myspace, Youtube, and Google Video; see the screencast) [via]

Stephen Colbert kicks ass at White House press corps dinner (don't bother with the torrent, use these YouTube videos instead) [via]

YouTube spending $1 million per month on bandwidth (200 terabytes per day of mostly illegal goodness)

MP3: Bell Labs' Synthesized Speech 33 1/3 record (bicycle built for two)

Database War Stories #3: Flickr (also: Second Life, Bloglines and Memeorandum)

Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 (making the rounds, and well worth watching; lower-res streaming version) [via]

The Endless Forest (multiplayer game (?) where you control a deer in a forest of other players, but with only non-verbal communication) [via]

Google releases Sketchup Free (the most intuitive 3D modeling app now free, and with a shared repository of models) [via]

Visual Scratch (visualization of turntable scratching with Max/MSP and Processing)

Last.fm isn't just for humans (BBC radio station quietly tracking nearly every song played for the last year) [via]

Typography for Headlines (I'd love to see a site like GUIdebook for web UI elements) [via]

Facebook expands to corporate users (expanding the scope makes sense as their base starts graduating)

Video: Super Mario, live on stage (nice rendition) [via]

Make magazine launches Craft (a geekier Readymade?) [via]

Ze Frank's The Show (highly concentrated daily video goodness, like Rocketboom but awesome-r)

1968-1974 Alcoholics Anonymous comic strips (tons more great comic propaganda on Ethan Persoff's site)

Second Life on cover of Business Week (with four feature stories about the virtual world)

IE 7 beta 2 ships ("put safety first")

Google Cartography (visual representation of the interconnectivity of streets using the Google Maps API) [via]

SFGate tribute to the 25th anniversary of Journey's "ESC4P3" (don't stop believin' )

Feedburner now tracks more podcasts than sum total of all radio stations (and it's just beginning)

Video: IFC's SXSW Behind the Badge, starring Consumating's Ben Brown (I'm offscreen in the taxi, calling Ben a corporate sellout whore)

Bush administration proposes mandatory website ratings (or risk imprisonment for up to five years)

More details on AOL's Myspace killer (building on the back of the AIM network; the I Am Alpha screencast is neat, too)

Microsoft Live Drive may launch before GDrive (in the meantime, a handful of startups are vying for the space)

Most Popular Words 2006 (according to Google rankings )

Slashdot on the Digg censorship conspiracy (don't miss the comments on Slashdot's own policing) [via]

Sabifoo (IM bot that turns all incoming messages into an RSS feed and web page)

Bush impersonator reads speeches written by little kids (he should fire his speech writers and hire these kids) [via]

Kevin Rose on the Digg conspiracy (people were scripting bots to mass-digg stories; Thomas Hawk has more)

LiveJournal adds ads (LazyWeb request: an Internet Archive visual diff tool)

Rolling Stone cover story on the Worst President in History (he's the decider, he does the deciding around here)

Daring Fireball goes full-time (John left Joyent to try blogging as a career)

Web 2.1 server-side blink tag (replacing the blink tag with a standards-compliant Ajax alternative) [via]

Digg Corrupted (strangeness involving identical Diggs on two posts, silent user bans, and a popular story conspicuously missing from the front page)

Famous Sounds (aka cliched samples; see also: Julien's originals) [via]

Onion AV Club interviews Wonder Showzen creators (I've been a fan since the bootleg pilot) [via]

Flash: Pepsi NexGame (blissfully stupid)

Sesame Street Video Clips (59 of the videos were added by one YouTube user)

Chris Ware on his move from Fantagraphics to Drawn & Quarterly (the distributor unwrapped every book and added a permanent sticker to the cover) [via]

In the Pit, an audio-only game for Windows (also, Sonic Invaders sounds great) [via]

Hacking A More Tasteful Myspace (making MySpace attractive is the new CSS Zen Garden) [via]

Chris Ware ends his run in the NYT Magazine (the 29 parts are all online, but in PDF format (yuk)) [via]

Cabbie drives Ben Folds to laundromat, ends up on stage playing harmonica that night (no bootlegs online just yet) [via]

State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 (blogosphere continues to grow at a frightening rate)

Kleptones' "24 Hours" sample listing on Wikipedia (a work in progress) [via]

Kottke joins The Deck (he explains what makes The Deck different)

"thanks for the add, you guys rock" (the MySpace cliche watch) [via]

iTorrent (download BitTorrent distributed podcasts from iTunes) [via]

"Ante Dominum" by Traction (lovely graphic demo available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, stuffed into only 64k bytes)

Alleged cannibal blogged about plans (Mefi has a link roundup, including his Blogger blog, Myspace, and profiles on Blogger, Yahoo, eBay, ) [via]

Video: Saturday TV Funhouse's "The Disney Vault" (shocking Disney parody uses the image of Mickey Mouse and clips from "Song of the South")

"Barn" by the Digital Artists (Windows-only graphic demo that transcends the cliches of the demoscene, with music by The Wailers; other mirrors)

Madin.jp Ouen (convert any photo into 1,024 stadium flipcards held by a pixel army) [via]

Video: Adicolor Pink (Adidas viral video, but I don't care; it's high-quality stuff) [via]

Market share of TV release groups (ripping the new "Lost" episode isn't as hard as leaking pre-release software, but it's neat to see the diversity) [via]

1UP feature on Second Life call girls (interviews with two virtual escorts and the guy who reviews them publicly (NSFW))

Google integrates Calendar with Gmail (detection of events in e-mails with a link to quick-add to calendar)

Akismet for Movable Type (unexpected, but welcome)

Video: Where to Attack Next (enough with the geography lessons, let's blow up Australia already!) [via]

Land of the Rising Fun (1UP's feature on innovative and unusual Japanese videogames) [via]

MeFi Projects Most Popular (monthly top 10 projects created by Metafilter members)

hCalendar and Google Calendar reminders (Greasemonkey script adds reminder links for any hCal formatted page, like all of Upcoming)

Google Video adds Top 100 list (also, the YouTube top videos is an essential car wreck) [via]

Audio: Virt's chiptune remix of the Katamari theme (as always, a flawless NES-style cover) [via]

High-res remake of "Another World" game to be released tomorrow (one of the best games ever made) [via]

Beatles to sell catalog through online music services (would selling it through iTunes affect the Apple vs. Apple litigation?)

Flash: Dungeon Escape (stick figure tribute to Dragon's Lair) [via]

Audio: The Great Failure of Wikipedia (though I disagree with his conclusions, this is a fascinating listen covering the rarely discussed internal politics and cover-ups; also: full transcript)

Google Calendar goes live (I'm glad they didn't keep the "CL2" name) [via]

Video: Titanic Two (high-quality trailer mashup) [via]

Etsy Garden's Town Hall (interesting avatar arrangement for a Flash chat room) [via]

Google's Da Vinci Code Quest movie tie-in (puzzling)

News.com profile of "age play" in Second Life (is virtual sex play between adults using child-like avatars more like infantilism or pedophilia?) [via]

Duke Nukem Forever may finally be released by year-end (if not, 3D Realms sacrifices half a million dollars) [via]

Bumbershoot announces partial lineup (Feist, Mates of State, Metric, Of Montreal, Kanye West, and more)

Flashbag (USB flash drive that bloats when it's full) [via]

Snoil (a ferrofluid-based version of Snake) [via]

Argentina on Two Steaks A Day (I'm drooling vicariously through Maciej)

Video: Incredible Machines (more Japanese Rube Goldberg fun; also: cooking ramen, the hard way) [via]

IGN's I Am 8-Bit contest winners (don't miss the winner on the second page) [via]

Hell Is Other People's Music (Momus' rant on the "soundtracking of America")

Forbes on the MySpace cottage industry (countless small startups creating utilities and add-ons for MySpace users)

Cadbury Egg Cake (replace real eggs in cake batter with Cadbury Creme Eggs) [via]

Video: 1986 World Series Game Six recreated on the NES (lovingly crafted in RBI Baseball, itself released in 1987) [via]

Rex Sorgatz revisits Microserfs (he's now working at Microsoft, 12 years after Coupland's novel was published; see also: jPod)

EyeSpot (web-based video remixing) [via]

New Yorker profile on Muzak ("Our biggest competitor is silence.”)

KittenAuth (I prefer this to captchas)

Cabspotting Cab Tracker (averaged and real-time visualization of taxis moving around San Francisco)

Park Place, an Amazon S3 clone in Ruby (also, how Adrian Holovaty is using S3 as a media server at 35 cents per month) [via]

"Star Wars Kid" settles out of court with schoolmates (new details emerge as the trial come to a close)

Jon Gruber on Apple's strategy with Boot Camp (dead on, from the inevitable reaction of PC enthusiasts to the future direction of the OS)

Half-Life 2 on an Intel iMac (it runs surprisingly well)

Seven Songs With Factual Or Logical Mistakes In The Lyrics (also, there's no colloquial "East California" as mentioned in "Kids in America") [via]

Video: Devo live on "Fridays" (performing "Girl U Want" and "Gates of Steel" in May 1980)

Video: Google Current's tribute to Numa Numa star (Gary Brolsma, this one's for you) [via]

Santa Monica to get free wireless (Google and Yahoo both have a strong presence in Santa Monica)

Apple's Boot Camp public beta (the stock market loves Apple's new official support of Windows XP dual boot)

s3DAV (virtual filesystem using your Amazon S3 account) [via]

Tyra Banks show dedicated to Myspace (if you find the full video, let me know)

Scene.org Awards 2005 nominees announced (the best of real-time, algorithmic art from the PC demoscene)

Interview with an ex-exployee of adware creator 180 Solutions (insider details about employee adware usage and dealing with public perceptions) [via]

Video: Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3 in 1992 (keep in mind, Windows 3.1 was released the same year)

Interview with the head of the Swedish Pirate Party (contrary to previous reports, it's not formally connected with the Pirate Bay)

Gnarls Barkley single becomes first Internet-only single to hit #1 UK charts (I see why; the Danger Mouse/Cee-Lo joint is catchy as hell)

Ohio town calls in bomb squad over Super Mario power-up cubes (an April 1 prank takes a turn for the surreal)

URLFan, top 100 sites linked in RSS feeds (a surprisingly good alternative to Icerocket and Technorati)

New York Times redesigns (not designed by Khoi Vinh, but a lovely and clean redesign)

Anti-SUV Chevy Tahoe commercial contest entries (they don't seem to be moderating the entries; two more)

Video: O'Reilly Factor on Myspace (features the brilliant Danah Boyd; he's surprisingly reasonable) [via]