Ads via The Deck
July 31, 2006
Aaron releases Filtr, the Flickr image preprocessor (it turns cameraphone photos into a thing of beauty)
The Plight of the Colorblind Gamer (some surprisingly good comments in the Digg thread; good to know I'm not alone here) [via]
July 29, 2006
Video: Microsoft Vista speech recognition demo gone bad (Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all)
Dicewars (highly addictive simple strategy game, but needs multiplayer badly; instructions) [via]
July 28, 2006
Video: 787 Cliparts [via]
Video: Solla Solla Enna Perumai (other good stuff in the same vein)
Video: Nike McFly commercial (with new power lacing technology!)
Owen Wilson responds to Steely Dan letter (very funny)
Anthony Bourdain writes about watching Beirut die (he was there to record a TV show when everything started falling apart)
Smoking Gun finds angry letter to Lindsay Lohan from Hollywood brass (studio head blasts her for disrupting movie shoots with no-shows from heavy partying)
Secret Google services uncovered (all sorts of speculation fodder, "Google Guess" sounds interesting)
On Piracy, a 2-hour documentary on file sharing (Julien McArdle's made his prerelease version free for viewing)
July 27, 2006
Cyworld launches in US (insanely popular Korean MMO comes to the states)
Google announces hosting for open source projects (some badly needed competition for Sourceforge; an example project) [via]
Amy Hoy's Javascript Boot Camp (her three hour OSCON tutorial for "everyone who feels their Javascript skills just aren't up to snuff") [via]
Hotwired demo site from 1995 (a wonderful snapshot from November 1995) [via]
Video: Enchantment Under the Sea Revisited (synchronized split-screen of both dance scenes from "Back to the Future" I and II) [via]
Life2Life, Amazon store within Second Life (build on Amazon's web services, including spatial positioning based on sales and relevance) [via]
Billy Bragg prompts Myspace to change musician's rights (Myspace safe for musicians again) [via]
July 26, 2006
Sneak preview footage of the Simpsons movie (animated storyboards, but still cool) [via]
Next-gen Microsoft Flight Sim uses Navteq data for mapping the real world (seamless intercontinental flights that look like the real thing)
Unofficial Digg API (deconstructed from the Digg Labs Flash files) [via]
Video: Justin Hall on Passively Multiplayer Online Games (a concise description of his earlier experiments, now with an official site)
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence (Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored)
Video: Sims 2 "Sk8ter Boi" machinima music video (bleh music, but I'm impressed how good Sims 2 machinima can be; more from the same author)
July 25, 2006
Lost Experience reality game character confronts Lost cast at Comic-Con (they seem genuinely surprised; more background here)
Python on the Nintendo DS (also: HelloDS voice over IP )
PBS Kids Sprout host fired for abstinence spoof videos (see both fake commercials here) [via]
Digg Labs (the Stamen Design visualizations go live)
Famous logos redone Web 2.0 style (hilarious; Digg's hitting the original YayHooray thread hard) [via]
July 24, 2006
Details on Tenori-On, Electroplankton creator's new musical instrument (the official site has samples and details on two-way collaboration; don't miss the demo video) [via]
Doom 1 ported to Doom 3 (very meta hack lets you play Doom on a virtual screen inside of Doom 3) [via]
July 22, 2006
Pointer Kite (wonderful kite imitating a GUI cursor)
July 21, 2006
Learning from Atari (Jason's scans of the Atari Game Catalog, 1981)
July 18, 2006
Video: Trailer for Valve's Portal game (holy cow; like the gravity gun, it's amazing how one weapon can revolutionize gameplay)
Video: The Big Lebowski - F_cking Short Version (incredible editing work) [via]
AOL's customer retention manual revealed ("You gotta love it!" ...or else) [via]
Boing Boing Analysis (don't miss the acronym use by author; related: my BB stats) [via]
Wal-Mart Tries to be Myspace, Seriously (sorry, not nearly ugly enough)
July 17, 2006
Comcast censors critical Nightline story (stupidity by obscurity)
Video: The Hotwired Archive from 1998 (internally produced video of Hotwired's design and redesign; a must see)
Happy iCal Day! (celebrating the default day on the static iCal icon) [via]
Five TV pilots "leaked" to torrent sites from new fall season (is it piracy or pseudo grassroots promotion?)
Video: Stop-Motion Human Space Invaders (so very awesome) [via]
Video: Bike Thief (NYC bicyclist steals own bike four times on video in broad daylight, and nobody flinches) [via]
CouchSurfing, back from the dead (an incredible story of community participation)
July 16, 2006
Wired cover story on Myspace (the article certainly makes it sound like they don't have a clue what to do with it)
Video: Stanford Prison Experiment ("What happens when you put good people in an evil place?")
July 15, 2006
Video: Mac OS 7.5 running on Sony PSP (also: System 6 running on the Nintendo DS) [via]
QSL Card Museum (ham radios exchanged QSL Cards to confirm two-way contacts; I love the antique and interesting cards)
Gamespot interviews Klosterman about his Esquire article on game journalism (if you missed it, The Lester Bangs of Video Games) [via]
Ugly Myspace Contest Winners (democracy isn't pretty)
Janek Simon's Carpet Invaders (playable art inspired by Space Invaders and woven Oriental rugs) [via]
Last.fm redesigns (the design is nice, but they're forcing bidirectional friend connections; the new Last.fm client handles all the plugins automagically)
Google Visualizations (chess boards, keyboards and Go)
Video: Zefrank on Myspace and the democratization of design (wonderfully coherent, prescient, and distinctly Ze) [via]
A Slice of the Blogosphere (pb breaks down blog tool usage for ORblogs)
Lycos to shutter Webmonkey (combined with the Hotwired closure, this is too much to take; I hate you, Lycos)
Caleb's How-To Hottub an Email List (harsh, but there's a certain beauty and elegance to this)
July 14, 2006
Apple Switch ad's Ellen Feiss starring in French film (star de la campagne publicitaire Switch de Macintosh)
Veen discovers Hotwired is now a junk search portal (when was it sold? this is a sad end to one of the first great websites)
Dandelife, social biography network (create your own personal timeline of stories, photos and video, like this one) [via]
July 13, 2006
Video: Super Galdelic Hour for the PS2 (absolutely insane Japanese game; gameplay footage starts at the 2:05 mark)
Video: 8 1/2 Mile (Fellini meets Eminem; Youtube Mirror)
What's the best time and day to submit Digg stories? (short answer is Friday and Saturday, but the rest of the stats are just as interesting)
Video: Unflinching Triumph (documentary of the National Staredown Competition)
Hot Captcha, a Hot or Not mashup (pick the three hot people to prove you're human)
Weather Bonk (winner of this year's Mashup Pit best mashup contest)
July 12, 2006
Bakuten Domino (more insane domino object stacking from the Japanese show devoted to it)
Quantum Link Reloaded (unbelievable; a Commodore online service from the '80s, reverse engineered and put online for use with C64 emulators!) [via]
Video: House of Dominoes (random household objects and media stacked into one long line of dominoes)
Jeff Veen's history of the Hotwired homepage (maybe he's getting nostalgic because Wired magazine and Wired News are in love again)
SMS shorthand using server response codes (except that "200" is longer than "ok")
Population One (I feel insignificant; a good companion piece to this)
July 11, 2006
Multiplayer Asteroids (even without the asteroids, it's addictive) [via]
Solve sudoku without thinking (killjoy) [via]
Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival (Anil collects every Zidane remixed animated GIF into a single video; funny!)
Daniel Raeburn's harrowing story of the stillbirth of his first daughter, Irene (after reading that, don't miss the happier ending; thanks for making me cry at work, Jason) [via]
Hitwise claims Myspace now #1 most popular website (though Stewart's case study for Flickr shows that Hitwise has some accuracy issues)
Syd Barrett, dead at 60 (shine on, you crazy diamond) [via]
Bradlands SXSW 2000 recollections (stumbled on this from the comments on Matt Haughey's classic photo)
July 10, 2006
Video: Weird Al interviews Eminem (I missed this ballsy cut-up interview from 2003, y'know what I'm saying?)
Pixhell (Waferbaby's oddball animated series, now CC licensed)
Cody's Books in Berkeley closes today after 50 years (so sad, but almost inevitable; will Amoeba and Rasputin's be around by the end of this decade?)
Zidane simulator (8 of the top 20 YouTube videos right now are versions of the Zidane headbutt) [via]
Insider's response to "Who Killed the Electric Car" (I love a conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but the film's premise smells iffy) [via]
Jason Scott's awesome deathbed dream (hmm, I should get some of those kidney stones just to have dreams like this)
Real-life version of George Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon" painting (it feels natural; even the dog cooperated) [via]
Video: Mr. Yuk poison control commercial from 1971 (terrifying young kids on Saturday mornings)
July 9, 2006
Profanity Adventures (profanity recognition in Spectrum 48k adventure games; worth it just for vintage screen grabs) [via]
July 8, 2006
Red Paper Clip guy gets his house (does this mean the mayor of Kipling, Saskatchewan appear in a movie with Corbin Bernsen?) [via]
July 7, 2006
Kevin Tiell's pinball-eye-view photography (he'll be speaking at the California Extreme pinball and arcade game show in San Jose tomorrow)
BBC homepage redesign winners announced (and the runner-ups are good, too) [via]
Vox adds cross-posting to Typepad, and more (those crazy 6A kids have been doing nice work lately; [this is good])
Livejournal integrates Jabber messaging (built on the high-performance DJabberd framework)
July 6, 2006
Matt Haughey goatse's the new Mastercard logo (if this makes no sense, consider yourself lucky)
Okkervill River's Will Sheff on file-sharing, bootlegs, and digital music (he worked at Audiogalaxy and has seen this from multiple sides; you can hear the internal conflict) [via]
Indie rock and the Garden State effect ("nobody thinks long and hard about music and what it means to them and then ultimately decides to listen to Toby Keith")
Ren and Stimpy's John K. angry at Warner Bros. on Youtube takedowns (not sure I buy the "high-res" angle; at what resolution does promotion stop and piracy begin?)
Web 2.0 in Japan (I wish translation tools were good enough to make Japanese web surfing realistic for me) [via]
LA Weekly on the Laurel Canyon music scene of the '60s-'70s (juicy gossip, 40 years late)
Amazon.com conspiracy theorist (someone get this guy a Usenet newsreader) [via]
Making Something Meaningful (hear, hear)
July 5, 2006
Origin of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" (the sample that inspired the entire tone of the song and underlying melody) [via]
Amanda Congdon and Rocketboom part ways (she implies she was fired, while Andrew says she quit, Amanda shoots back; vlog drama!)
Red Swoosh relaunches with free ad-supported client (their best feature is that they act as a mirror for all your files; unlike BitTorrent, no need to run a local server)
Lyric changes in Disney's Devo 2.0 (plus, links to every video and one of the first new Devo songs in 20 years)
July 4, 2006
Video: Harry Nilsson on the Poet's Corner with Tommy Smothers (syncing problem, but gorgeous versions of "Poli High," "One," and "I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City")
July 3, 2006
NBC rumored to be acquiring Tribe? (yes, two consecutive Valleywag links; it's a weirdly believable rumor)
Anatomy of the Google Product Cycle
Crate Tetris
July 2, 2006
Sunday Mix Tape: Volume 22 (a little sullen, but any mix with both late-era Monkees and Songs: Ohia is okay with me)
Maritime records a Daytrotter session (Daytrotter offers exclusive in-studio performances every week from great bands)
FreeDB shuts down because of developer in-fighting (more like a band breaking up than the end of a great service)
Lullabyes records Tilly & the Wall's show on Thursday night (Lullabyes serves up some of the highest quality soundboard recordings I've ever heard)
July 1, 2006
Washington State declares June 30-July 1 to be official "RSS Days" (only slightly more meaningful than a Universal Life Church ordainment) [via]
Video: Secret of Monkey Island high school play! (extremely faithful adaptation to the stage, with the entire thing hosted on Google Video)
Secret of Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert interviewed on Gamespot's Designer Threads (he's still holding onto Monkey Island's secret, just in case he ever gets the chance to do a sequel) [via]
Free tech school in basement: GO RIGHT IN (an older gentleman in the Bronx teaches electrical engineering for free to whoever wants to learn) [via]
Advanced Computerized Metering (digital e-meter software for "upper level auditing," for when those cheap Scientology E-meters won't cut it)
Children's drawings of Winnie the Pooh, redrawn by talented artists (nightmarish and wonderful; I like the Mark Bodnar painting) [via]