Ads via The Deck
June 30, 2006
Twenty mp3s of Great Songs from 1901-1920 (one great thing about early 20th century MP3s: everyone that would sue you is dead)
Macros2000 (way funnier than the concept suggests; from the genius of Cardhouse)
No more cavities? (how genetically modified organisms could wipe out cavities, and every species on Earth!)
John Brownlow's portraits of burn victims (stunning work)
Image: Tunnel of Love (I love how Perry Bible Fellowship explores new drawing styles)
MeFi Music (Matt and pb hack up a sexy section for Metafilter's musicians in 24 hours)
Ajax timeline of the Kennedy assassination (interesting choice of a sample dataset; all the timeline code is open source)
For the love of Florrie (the woman that Jerri Blank from "Strangers with Candy" is based on; don't miss the insane LSD video) [via]
June 29, 2006
Couchsurfing down for good (hard disk failure and bad backups led to the permanent loss of the great service)
Canadian scientists regrow teeth with low intensity ultrasound (what a relief! I'll be able to go back to my all-gummi diet)
June 28, 2006
Nigerian scammer baited into making actual-size wood carving of Commodore 64 keyboard (Shiver Metimbers is the God of scam-baiting; he convinced one scammer to get a "Baited by Shiver" tattoo)
Disney's list of trademark registrations for Pirates' Jack Sparrow (related: Alan's great roundup of Cars merchandise)
Bible quote database built with Amazon Mechanical Turk for $75 (2 cents a quote, with a 98.3% success rate) [via]
Daily Show on Congressional hearing on video game ratings (with Samantha Bee reporting live from San Andreas) [via]
Listr 2.0, 55 websites with a Flickr-ish name (I read about it on Valleywaggr) [via]
June 27, 2006
Mike Monteiro looks for backstory to the "Sucker Punched Teacher" video (after getting called out, I did some research; not a PTA meeting, but a courtroom)
Sleater-Kinney to break up after summer tour (their last album was adored by critics) [via]
Jeopardy all-time champion Ken Jennings is blogging (he's a good writer, and funny! for example, his writeup on a trivia court decision, movies to sitcoms, and his giant head) [via]
Ice Cream Truck Music, Revisited (MP3s of the defining summertime music) [via]
June 26, 2006
overplot (incredibly great mashup of Overheard in New York and Google Maps)
Stewart Butterfield on Photobucket (an interesting comparison of photo sharing numbers, but also insight into the accuracy of web tracking services)
Neat dataviz of coordinates mined from 10% of the web (any guesses on why the lightning bolt pattern emerges?)
Kevin Smith recording a Clerks 2 commentary track for in-theater use (free iTunes download to encourage second viewings for viewers with iPods)
Rails Day 2006 list of live projects (all built in a day; D20, Roomind, and Hugtracker are my favorite ideas)
Digg users a bit obsessed with Scientology? (eight front-page stories in the last seven days!)
June 25, 2006
Down From the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc. (52-page PDF of the definitive history of Infocom's rise and fall)
Gutenkarte (browse Project Gutenberg classic texts on a map; uses the GeoParser API)
Details on Johnny Depp added to Disneyland's Pirates of the Carribean (the LA Times had some fan response; most of the Disney fans who've actually seen it like it)
Ning introduces the Ningbar (expanded social network browsing and one-click app cloning)
Travian reaches the end of the world on Server 1 (one alliance in the web-based game triggered the game's end and server reset, despite an all-out war from other players)
DiggTrends (stories pulled from the homepage, charts of story activity, and other good stuff)
June 24, 2006
David Lynch's 52-second Lumiere film (in other Lynch news, he's selling his own ringtones; "my teeth are bleeding!") [via]
Howard Rheingold's "Virtual Community" e-book from 1993 (pre-web and still good)
Chowhound launches huge redesign (some love it, some hate change; it's a huge improvement)
Ask.com blocks search queries related to illegal sex acts (nobody's rooting for sex offenders here, but I don't think I've ever seen it handled this awkwardly before)
June 23, 2006
Silk Icons (1,000 icons for web apps, free and very high quality work)
Washington Post reporters get digital video cameras for online reporting (useful in field reporting, but I could see where it could distract from interviewing and writing)
June 22, 2006
Digg v3.0 to launch Monday (I just left the Digg party; TechCrunch doesn't mention the amazing Stamen visualizations or open API)
Video: BumpTop 3D desktop prototype (toss files into piles with a pen-driven GUI with physics; also, I think every demo needs a rap version) [via]
Pitchfork's 100 Awesome Music Videos (all with embedded YouTube links; I just killed a full hour on this)
TextAmerica to switch to paid model, and delete all non-paying moblogs (holy cow, that's terrible form)
June 21, 2006
Y! Local now supports microformats (or: why I haven't been blogging for the past few days)
June 20, 2006
Files Are Not for Sharing (a children's primer by Matthew Baldwin and Goopymart)
Video: Reanimating Marlon Brando for Superman Returns (great clip breaking down the effects process) [via]
June 19, 2006
The War on Fluff (Cambridge politicians try to ban the Fluffernutter from public schools)
Extortr (free and easy video blackmail; I'm disappointed this is just a joke)
June 18, 2006
Video: 3-year-old picks "NewsHour" as birthday party theme (the video is classic) [via]
NYT's profile of Ze Frank's "The Show" (transcends the concept of a "video blog" daily)
June 17, 2006
Microsoft C&Ds Vista Torrent for trying to help them (LawyerBots suck; is there some law that companies can't send human e-mails anymore?) [via]
Company buying Myspace profiles with over 20,000 friends (be prepared for your "friends" to start dropping references to Cialis retailers)
June 16, 2006
The Duke Nukem Forever List (since DNF was announced, 19 wars were started and 5 have ended)
June 15, 2006
Singlestat.us shut down by Myspace ten days after launch (don't miss David Weekly's excellent response, and the entertaining Valleywag interview)
Tim O'Reilly on Internet usage in South Korea (really interesting discussion of Cyworld, broadband usage, and spam)
Summary of the LiveCoda real-time programming competition (write an app in ten minutes; I'd love to see this as a regular vlog show)
June 14, 2006
Valleywag scoops the new Digg redesign (finally expanding beyond tech, even though the community's been forcing the issue)
Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years? (Leonard has some great thoughts, but he left out holographic nachos and 3D chocolate printers)
Russian submarine base (very Half-Life 2) [via]
Livejournal animated GIF scraper (potentially NSFW) [via]
June 13, 2006
Aaron sees a market for liveblogging delivery of big events (getting pushed IM updates from E3, the Macworld keynote, or sporting events would be neat)
ASCII World Cup 2006 (streaming ASCII video over telnet, begins ten minutes before every game) [via]
Peanut Gallery (multiplayer video player for OS X with built-in heckling support!) [via]
Walt Disney's time capsuled 1956 letter to people of the year 2006 (nice find! we can all read it, thanks to atomic energy and the extension of radar)
New Yorker on Bazooka Joe's makeover (the punchline is in the final paragraph; meet the new gang) [via]
iTunes Signature Maker (listen to the gallery for examples; pure chaos)
June 12, 2006
Diet Coke experiment gives Mentos a surge in publicity (Coke and FedEx seem desperate to kill grassroots love of their product because it "doesn't fit with the brand personality")
June 11, 2006
Paul Kedrosky finds an unusual profanity in an SEC filing (I'd love to see a followup on this) [via]
June 9, 2006
NSA to datamine social networking websites (is it any wonder that Tom is their only friend?) [via]
Hamptons garage sale unearths rare Nintento motherload (with screenshots of the ultra-rare championship cartridges)
June 8, 2006
DSQuake (not available yet, but Quake on a DS would be a dream)
June 7, 2006
Video: Young FrankenSteve (dance, monkeyboy) [via]
June 6, 2006
Video: MC Lars, "Download This Song" (old, but new to me)
Flickr and Del.icio.us founders invest in Etsy (one of my favorite sites gets backed by some of my favorite people!) [via]
OJR interviews "journalist programmer" Adrian Holovaty (I suspect there's more of us than people realize; my background and education is in journalism, not computer science)
Facebook C&D's Gawker for posting profile photos (the Facebook profiles aren't public; only viewable by friends and people affiliated with the same school)
Time and Again (photographer returns to small Iowa town 20 years after taking photos of every citizen) [via]
Slate on athletes using LASIK as performance enhancer (is surgical eye enhancement a form of cheating?)
AllofMP3 breaks silence (they claim they're going to work out deals with all music rightholders by September 1)
June 5, 2006
Google Spreadsheet coming tomorrow (their web office suite is coming along nicely)
Cory Doctorow visits a Radio Shack (Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod) [via]
Zasterisk, Zork on Asterisk (voice recognition and speech synthesis for playing Infocom games over the phone)
June 4, 2006
Singlestat.us, Myspace single status monitor (David Weekly's brilliant entry for the Super Happy Dev House money printing competition)
Notes on the Pirate Bay Downtime (I love these guys; more humor)
Pilot finds snake stowaway inside cockpit ("one hand full of snake and the other hand full of plane")
June 2, 2006
Fonts on LOST (good to know I'm not the only one who thinks Verdana in the closing titles is hideous)
MP3: Nelly Furtado covers Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" (almost makes me forgive her for her new album)
Video: Bjork Street Fighter (oh, this kills me)
Yahoo Korea's Webzari (they should add a shmup mode)
eBay to Launch Blogs, Wikis and Tags (signs point to Typepad as the blog provider, which would be a big win)
June 1, 2006
Super Mario Bros remake in 3D (not too far off from the voxel 3D Metroid)
Eurogamer reviews Half Life 2: Episode 1 (it was released today, and I can't wait to play it tonight)
Six Apart launches Vox public preview (invite-only, and incredibly sexy; if you think it's just another social network, you're missing the point)
Techcrunch on the new Yahoo Video (YouTube competitor with no time limits; will they be as laid-back about infringing content?)
Technorati's Microformats Search (there's a bunch of Upcoming.org event listings in there, too)