Waxy.org: Links Archives: September 2006

Video: Beck's puppets visit Yahoo! (today was Open Hack Day, and they played this video at the amazingly awesome Beck concert; )

Dreamhost bans BitTorrent, regardless of file legality (they're a clueful company, I expect them to figure out this is a bad idea)

Google Reader redesigns (light years better than the last design)

Video: Mr. Rogers plays Donkey Kong (this is great for so many reasons)

Video: Katamari-inspired insurance commercial (reminds me of the older HIV PSA) [via]

Nelson Sings Nilsson (Harvey Danger's Sean Nelson covers great selections from Harry Nilsson's catalog) [via]

Atari Music (vintage records inspired by Atari games, with MP3s)

Video: David Bowie on Extras (like Patrick Stewart, Gervais gets incredible performances out of his cameos)

Flash: Phoenix Wrong (all of these are great, but the third is my favorite) [via]

Hack director Uwe Boll defeats five Internet critics in an amateur boxing match (he just crushed Lowtax from Something Awful in a single round)

Flash: Line Rider (oddly addictive; don't miss this incredible helicopter escape) [via]

Apple hits PodcastReady with nastygram (claiming infringement for all things "pod" is ridiculous)

Super Mario Bros underground theme stolen from 1970s funk band? (extremely unlikely; despite the similarities, coincidences do happen in music)

Video: Ben Folds covers "Such Great Heights" (accompanied by found objects) [via]

MTV buys Guitar Hero (this does not bode well for the Guitar Hero franchise)

Gran Turismo for PS3 may use micropayments for new tracks and cars (total retail cost could be between $430 to $975 )

Amazon adds comments to reviews

Japanese company had Sotheby's and Christie's play Rock, Scissors, Paper to decide art auction (old, but great; they turned to 11-year-olds for advice) [via]

First penis transplant reversed after two weeks (rejected by another organ: the brain) [via]

Defaker (was Defamer involved in this parody for NBC's Studio 60? they don't seem to even know about it) [via]

Video: Yahoo Current interviews Gary Brolsma (as terrible as New Numa is, it's weirdly compelling to see this guy from another angle)

Moo MiniCards, lovely business cards from your Flickr photos (first 10 free for Flickr Pro users)

Upcoming.org is hiring (come work with us)

JPG Magazine relaunches (great new design, and you can vote for what goes into each issue)

The Shire (Hobbit-themed housing development in Bend, Oregon) [via]

Video: Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" (watch for the O'Reilly book reference and Star Wars Kid parody)

Photos from Banksy's Los Angeles art show (here's first-hand video of the live painted elephant that everyone's fussing about) [via]

TRYNT free APIs (excellent set of unique web services, like the image nudity detector and bootleg IMDB API)

MySpace MP3 Gopher (Windows app to bypass Myspace music player security; or try the online version) [via]

ReFrederator (daily video podcast of great vintage cartoons) [via]

Video: Mike Patton mentioned on All My Children (extremely surreal cultural references slipped into soap opera) [via]

Universal Music planning lawsuit against YouTube and Myspace (idiotic, but obvious)

Viral Video Chart (tracking the most popular on Youtube, Google Video, and Myspace) [via]

Video: Xiu Xiu, "Boy Soprano" (indie bands go 16-bit, moving on from the C64 and NES eras) [via]

Highlights from this year's Independent Games Festival entries (or see the complete list)

News Corp exec implies Myspace can destroy any Web 2.0 company (says that Flickr, YouTube, and most next-gen apps "are really driven off the back of Myspace"; note that all three companies have typos) [via]

The Secret Life of Jason Fortuny (constructing a psychological profile of the man behind the Craigslist sex baiting based on his online writings)

Sky pulls down video service after Windows DRM cracks (after FairUse4WM defeated Microsoft's patch within days, my insider sources say some major media companies will be pulling their DRM content within days)

eDonkey shuts down, kills installed clients (not quite a fond farewell)

Lonelygirl15's identity revealed (19-year-old actress Jessica Rose from New Zealand; the producers were very good about covering up the original photos)

Jimmy Wales debates Brittanica editor ("fitting words for an epitaph"; them's fighting words!)

Apple announces 80GB iPods, iTunes Movies and Games, and iTV wireless set-top box ($13 for new releases, $10 all others; also, they bought Cover Flow)

Neave.tv (fullscreen mashup of Flash video sites; the transitions are outstanding)

Video: Douglas Adams' Hyperland (1990) (pre-web BBC documentary on hypertext and multimedia; interviews Ted Nelson (among others) and stars Dr. Who's Tom Baker as the software agent)

September 11, 2001: What We Saw (unreleased 30-minute home video captured from 500 yards away; Revver is crushed, so use the torrent)

Minnesota State Fair on a Stick (as advertised, 59 foods on a stick; Scotch Egg on a Stick gets my vote) [via]

Popcorn Song (over 300 versions of the obnoxious song made famous by Hot Butter in 1972)

Video: SNL skit on Myspace pedophiles ("chadster1991?" "1,991 is my favorite number")

Myspace graffiti in Italy (for an Orange County-based hip hop artist?)

Destinyland, Dave Cassel's new podcast (frenetic and full of fascinating random trivia, like Dave himself; most recent episode is all Disney secrets and urban legends)

Gary Brolsma releases "New Numa Numa" video (self-conscious and unfunny, it proves once again that creating a meme is practically impossible)

Robot Coop's Erik Benson changes name to Buster Butterfield McLeod (but only for a year)

Sex baiting prank on Craigslist affects hundreds (griefer republishes personal ad responses publicly, ruining lives in the process)

Video: Ze Frank at TED (quite possibly the best conference presentation I've ever seen)

Lonelygirl15 is an art project by independent filmmakers (the official site is down, but Danah has the best analysis)

Danah Boyd on the Facebook controversy (I was waiting for her to chime in; the big issue is not privacy, but too much transparency)

Microsoft patches DRM faster than fatal security flaws (they care about their record label partners much more than you or the Internet)

Video: Composing a Fugue (brilliantly meta explanation of how to write a fugue based on Britney Spears' "Oops, I Did It Again")

Digg to counteract tight friend networks in promotion algorithm (close networks of friends have the end result of gaming Digg, even if they're not trying to) [via]

WFMU's Great Copycat Contest (bands that sound exactly like their influences; don't miss Scott Wilk, the Elvis Costello clone) [via]

Catbirdseat's Handy Music-Blogger "Best Of 2006" List Cheat Sheet (it'll be fun to compare this to the actual lists in December)

Adrian Holovaty on how newspapers need to embrace structured content (good comments, too)

Video: Gumbasia (Art Clokey's Gumby ancestor from 1955, abstract and set to a frenetic jazz soundtrack)

Six Apart acquires Rojo to get their founder and CTO (buying companies to get to the juicy people inside)

Tucows was Kiko's auction winner (glad to know it wasn't just a domain spammer, but a good company)

In-game developer commentary in Half Life 2 (I captured video of the best examples of this interesting glimpse into the videogame design process)

Video: Everyday (Noah Kalina has shot a photo of himself every day for six years; see also, every day for three years)

When What We Love And Who We Love Are At Odds (Greg Allen wonders whether our dangerous passions can, or should, change after becoming a parent) [via]

MP3: Mathowie's Community Blog (22-minute epic parody of Alice's Restaurant, chocked full with Metafilter in-jokes) [via]

Aaron Swartz asks, who writes Wikipedia? (most Wikipedia edits are by core users, but Aaron finds the most important contributions are by infrequent or anonymous users) [via]

Croc Hunter Steve Irwin, dead in freak stingray accident (died doing what he loved)

100 Acre Deadwood (very offensive (and mostly unfunny) Disney meets Deadwood parody, banned from the new Cracked magazine)

Video: 1K Project, videogame cars as fluids (1,000 virtual cars overlayed in a single Trackmania run; also, the 3K Project and the full game for free download) [via]

~~iTunes disabling CD burning for some albums~~ (update: false alarm! it appears that the unburnable tracks are the bonus videos)

Fox trying to bury Mike Judge's Idiocracy (by all accounts, his followup to Office Space is an instant cult classic, but Fox released it this weekend without a trailer or website into only 130 theaters)

Game|Life's exclusive details on the new Sam and Max game (also, the original game's a steal at $25 with Day of the Tentacle, and runs on any modern OS with ScummVM)

Video: KITT vs KARR Showdown (like Nelson says, "TV never got any better than this") [via]

Guitar Hero 2 Songlist Revealed (I can't wait until November 1)

Video of the bootleg Super Mario World on the NES (insane port of an SNES game to NES; looks surprisingly playable)

Warrick, tool to reconstruct lost websites (uses Internet Archive and web caches to store website on your local filesystem)

Animatus, realistic resin sculptures of cartoon character skeletons (a physical manifestation of Michael Paulus's drawings)

Pirated jazz albums etched on recycled X-ray films (in the the '30s and '40s, vinyl was hard to come by in the USSR and Eastern Europe) [via]

Google Image Labeler, the Google Images multiplayer game (Luis von Ahn's ESP Game now officially part of Image Search; see also, his excellent Tech Talk at Google)

Video: Nigerian authorities bust 419 scammers (fascinating glimpse into the origin of Nigerian scam e-mails)