Waxy.org: Links Archives: December 2007

Apple Keynote Index Fund (Matt Haughey finds out the returns for day trading AAPL during the last ten keynotes)

Steal This Film II released (free documentary about history of piracy interviews Pirate Bay, Mininova, EFF, MPAA, and others) [via]

Protagonize, community-driven hypertext fiction (reminds me of Gav and Peloso's interactive story from 1995; Wikipedia has more on the genre) [via]

Danah Boyd on Pew's report on teen use of social media (some interesting trends, including the bits about low-income blogging)

Matt Webb wraps up 2007 (massive brain dump that extends beyond tech into sociology, ecology, marketing, drugs, and genetics)

New Year's Eve invitations found on Myspace ("Dress and drive to impress!")

Duelity (video art project retells the biblical and scientific creation stories, with the prose and tone reversed)

Five Short Video Game Industry Keynotes (funny satire of conference cliches) [via]

Philipp Lenssen's overview of Backrub, Google's precursor (some good Archive.org dumpster diving)

Tristan's tech support hell with Palm customer support (the support tech insisted she was Palm's CEO; contrast with Apple's personal touch)

Snarkout's history of "White Christmas" (after a full year since his last post, Steve returns with a whirlwind history from Holiday Inn to Black Christmas; merry xmas, everybody!)

IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR (memeorific and sacrilicious "tale of three nerds turning a nativity scene into a LARP battle"; don't miss the video responses) [via]

The Last Man on Earth, full-length film on Archive.org (1964 adaptation of Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" starring Vincent Price as Dr. Will Smith)

Happy <Holiday Name Here> (Christmas card from Aperture Science and the Portal team) [via]

I Waterboard! (Straight Dope member waterboards himself and writes about the experience) [via]

Snowclone.pl, Perl script to query snowclone variations from Google (used often here, it also supports searching Yahoo, Live.com, Google Groups, Google Blog Search, and Gigablast)

Fake Steve Jobs pranks bloggers with Apple shutdown drama (update: the references to Tony Clifton and Kaufman are a sly confession)

Tracking Digg's most unpopular comments (it's a troll's paradise)

Hacking an NYC taxi's backseat kiosk (these things are so irritating, it's nice to see someone find a good use for them)

The Jingler (turns any MP3 into Christmas music with beat-matched sleigh and jingle bells (and Santa!)) [via]

Meta 419 Scam (pretends to reach out to victims of Nigerian scams, with a convenient $1M payment) [via]

I Am Legend DVD screener leaked to BitTorrent (there should be a special name for this time of year, when Oscar screeners flood the net)

xkcd's Randall Munroe speaks at Google (including an appearance by Donald Knuth and an impromptu stick figure Google logo)

Newspaper accidentally identifies thief on the front page (photos from two different stories showed the same man painting a storefront and stealing a wallet)

On the overuse of the Trajan typeface in movie posters (the accompanying Flickr pool) [via]

Rock Band: What you really sound like (stop harshing my delusion) [via]

Deciding the Long Bet winner for weblogs vs. the New York Times in Google (Rogers Cadenhead finds that while blogs beat the NYT, Wikipedia crushed them both) [via]

Colin's Bear Animation ("thanks for nothing")

My exclusive coverage of BravoNation, Yahoo! Brickhouse's newest launch (take that, Arrington!)

Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren't Reading (Rex's brilliantly-curated list of new, underrated blogs)

Flash: How is babby formed? (apparently pretty old, but made me laugh; the original thread on Yahoo! Answers)

NYC's area/code reveals they created Chain Factor (a wonderfully addictive Flash game, it also acted as a trailhead for a month-long ARG for CBS's Numb3rs) [via]

Long list of 2008's anticipated films (I'm most excited about Benjamin Buttons, The Box, Be Kind Rewind, Where the Wild Things Are, and Wall-E) [via]

GOOG-411 created to train speech-to-text software (running the free service to build up a corpus of voices? neat idea, but seems inefficient)

Pitchfork's Top 50 Music Videos (they include some fan-made videos and this charming cover from a high school trio)

Ryan Barrett's thoughts on SimpleDB (still catching up from my NYC trip, this was the best writeup I've seen so far)

Anil Dash on Google and the Theory of Mind (I had dinner with Anil on my first night in NYC last week, and he made me eat pig tails and cow glands; yum!)

Isometric pixel map of Hong Kong (insanely detailed with some odd photo collage bits; try the highest zoom level) [via]

Raiding the abandoned Sun Microsystems building (linked from a thread in this wonderful UK urban exploration forum) [via]

Ev's guide to evaluating new product ideas (for me, "personally compelling" is the only one that matters, since I can't build something I won't use myself)

Dopplr launches publicly at Le Web (even if you don't travel, it's worth signing up just to experience all the brilliant UI touches)

Pirate Bay launches Last.fm-powered Music section (mostly genre browsing, but suggesting torrents based on your listening habits is now feasible)

OptiMap, travelling salesman problem solver using Google Maps (neat, it supports passing addresses in the querystring; the methodology, for the curious)

Strange CPR/defibrillation fetish community on YouTube (with 192 subscribers) [via]

Aquaria finally released! (gorgeous underwater side-scroller won the grand prize at IGF; watch the movies) [via]

End of an era as New York Times closes recording room (NYT reporters tell their own stories in the comments)

NYT's The Year in Ideas 2007 (always a great read)

Richard Beymer's Twin Peaks photos (taken on the set of the final episode by the actor who played Benjamin Horne) [via]

Rails 2.0 released (multiviews, moving towards REST over SOAP, and better native security and performance)

James Kochalka's American Elf is now free! (he's been drawing a comic nearly every day since May 2002; highly recommended) [via]

RPS reviews Passage, an pixel art maze game about death (can a game that's only five minutes long make you sad? surprisingly, yes)

Google release chart image generator (50,000 images a day? I'd definitely use this for smaller projects)

Inside the "Ron Paul" Spam Botnet (doesn't explain who paid to send the spams, but a great glimpse into how spambots operate) [via]

Kristin Hersh's thoughts on sustainability ("You don't have to suck in order to work here, but it helps.")

Kleptones releases "Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be" (a nonstop mix of greatest hits from a concert earlier this year, with some new songs too!)

Emerging Tech 2008 program announced (definitely a welcome move away from NowTech and back to its roots) [via]

n+1 Magazine's long profile of Gawker (the essay that kicked off the editorial shakeup there, but didn't cause it) [via]

Flickr adds photo editing tools (partnered with Picnik, it's seamless and handles 90% of what I use Photoshop for)

Halo 3 Cheat Codes, as Explained by Neglected Girlfriend Janet Iverson

Kristin Hersh on CASH Music (with subscription and patronage benefits, artists like Kristin can stay independent forever, as long as they have dedicated fans)

IRSeek IRC search engine shuts down after user backlash (using non-obvious bot names and using Tor to hide the IP addresses was very dumb) [via]

Said the Gramaphone on Brooklyn band Vampire Weekend (refreshing sound, Sean nails it as Spoon meets Paul Simon's "Graceland")

Six Apart sells Livejournal to Russian media company (I guess that answers the question about how Vox fits with Livejournal) [via]

Google bans ads for paid link sellers (finally! taking money from spammers while banning them from the index was hypocritical)

MobileScrobbler (Last.fm client for the iPhone/iPod Touch, at last)

Square America's The Party (some photos are NSFW; don't miss the other exhibitions and the wonderful blog) [via]

Airball, an unreleased NES game, now available for sale (new games for dead systems make me happy; see the detailed review with video) [via]