Waxy.org: Links Archives: April 2008

Leonard's roundup of the best Web 2.0 presentations (most are now online and it looks like Web 2.0 was much better this year)

Grand Theft Auto IV mocks Flickr and tagging (there's a parallel-world Internet in the game with hundreds of pages, including parodies like Craplist)

Damien Jay's Opolis (comic built from photos of a 3D miniature office building)

Tresling, Tetris controlled by arm wrestling (the battling dynamic reminds me of the rare Panic Park gameplay)

Paulville, gated communities for Ron Paul supporters (no, really, the first one's in West Texas) [via]

Rocketboom's coverage of Before the LOL at ROFLCon (the history of online memes, back to the late 1800s; and yes, I'm a huge Jason Scott fanboy) [via]

Jason Scott runs the stats on his Goatse hotlinking prank (he goatse'd 704,000 people last year, which must be some kind of record)

Things I Learned About My Dad (in therapy) (edited by Dooce, a book of essays with several good friends (and excellent writers) contributing)

Clustarack's impressive Rube Goldberg contraption (behind the scenes, 180 hours to build the contraption, 98 takes, 30 minutes to restore to initial state) [via]

Antique children's book uses bellows and cones to make sounds (beats a tinny speaker playing the Dora the Explorer theme for 30 seconds) [via]

Google Maps adds Street View for driving directions (some clever tips in the video, like checking for toll roads and parking signs)

Robot reassembles itself after being broken apart (it uses a camera to seek out its missing parts) [via]

Penny Arcade, PVP launch live shows (streaming their desktop in real-time) [via]

Big Fan (Cabel Sasser's great story of fan noise on older Mac dev hardware)

WSJ on Miller Brewing's Brew Blog (a former reporter is scooping other brewers and the trade publications, and both are angry)

Analysis of malware that creates Blogger spam blogs (using remote CAPTCHA solvers run by the spammers) [via]

Falindrome (fake palindromes, updated daily) [via]

Mister Bookseller (scanlation of a wistful Croation comic about a bookstore with every book in the world, except one) [via]

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus (transcript of Clay Shirky's excellent keynote from the Web 2.0 Expo; watch it instead) [via]

John Resig on Orto, running Java apps in Javascript (also, John wrote about another project porting the Ruby virtual machine to JS)

Marc Andreessen's guide to the Microsoft-Yahoo hostile takeover (the best explanation I've seen) [via]

Howard Rheingold's footage of a WELL meetup from 1989 (everyone's identified in the Boing Boing comments)

Don Hodges fixed the kill screen bug in Pac-Man (he did the same for Ms. Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, and Donkey Kong, too)

ROFLCon Live Stream (hear the stories behind popular memes from their creators; see the Tweetscan for more)

Interview with the brains behind 419 Eater (I had no idea Shiver Metimbers unmasked himself last year)

TypeRacer, multiplayer typing game (I average about 90 wpm, even with my crazy nontraditional typing style) [via]

The history of NYC in video games (coming in October, Sierra's Prototype will also attempt to model NYC in exacting detail) [via]

Mixwit, mixtape maker from Y Combinator (like Muxtape, totally illegal fun; the embeddable players are great)

Pixel Pour (saw this a couple days ago, but now it's been tagged and removed) [via]

How Dave Cassel made $900 writing 300 reviews for Helium's Reward-a-Thon (he churned out at least 120,000 words in 100 days, most likely their biggest earner)

Pirate Bay hits 12 million simultaneous peers (the percentage of seeders is rising, despite Comcast's efforts)

Kyle Bean's The Future of Books (lovely art piece fashions a laptop out of an old book) [via]

How Hillary Can Still Win (anything's possible!) [via]

Superfan blogger visits the set of The Office (with detailed photos of every character's desk, among other details) [via]

Color Wars Street View Scavenger Hunt (I'm so impressed with the games they've invented using existing web services)

Penny Arcade on Twitter (it seems to have spawned a catchphrase) [via]

The Dinosaur Soothsayer (the Nostrasaurus knows all)

Chirrp, 8-second voicemail for Twitter (a silly little mashup from Why built in haXe)

Wesabe Tips (shows aggregate spending info culled from their user data)

Mighty God King's Atari 2600 games you might have missed (Gay French Mario Bros. was a great game) [via]

Human Giant picks the next web-to-TV comedy stars (sounds about right, but will they need TV, or will TV need them?) [via]

Disturbing video of the Golden Eagle throwing goats off cliffs (hide your kids! at the five-minute mark, it carries a goat back to its nest)

Doeo (RPS nailed it as "whack-a-mole with Katamari Damacy's aesthetics") [via]

A Message to Pennsylvanians from Bill Clinton (brilliant bit of found video courtesy of Josh Marshall)

Portishead's Third on Last.fm (nice exclusive, stream the full album for free) [via]

Unreleased Atari 2600, Coleco games found at Oakland flea market (a legendary haul) [via]

Project Gazelle open-source tracker debuts on What.cd (great tracker, but risks drawing too much attention to the site)

Kevin Kelly interviews musician Robert Rich on the economics of 1,000 True Fans (he shares his earnings and the implications of depending heavily on a small core base)

Charlie Rose interviews Charlie Rose on technology (Steve is not happy) [via]

Todd McHatton's Grass-Stained Twilight (my brother-in-law's been recording and posting a song a week since January; reminds me of Shel Silverstein meets XTC's Apple Venus)

1977 video explains how the computer graphics in Star Wars were created (reminds me of the the Star Wars arcade game from 1983) [via]

CNN started selling t-shirts with their headlines on it (look for the shirt icon on the homepage; also, it's fun to manipulate) [via]

David Heinemeier Hansson's Startup School talk on sustainable web startups (completely sane message, but it's not being told enough)

Ohshiit (great single-serving site listing search result counts for each permutation) [via]

Michael Pollan on climate change and carbon footprints (thoughtful piece addresses the seeming insignificance of lifestyle changes)

Google News adds quotation search (nicely extracting quotes from articles with proper attribution, similar to Daylife) [via]

Automating Firefox for Web App Integration (insane, you can telnet to Firefox and control it with any scripting language)

Talking Picture (The Road to Ruin) (removes all dialogue from a 1938 film; also, I just updated the list of supercuts)

South Park's new episode parodies our Internet dependence (the Internet is a giant Linksys router in the desert) [via]

Kevin Kelly lists his worst predictions (in 1995, I thought VR would be huge and Apple was in a death spiral) [via]

Let's Tell a Story Together: A History of Interactive Fiction (expertly-written history of the subject, from Eliza to Inform 7)

Brad Bird's tribute to Ollie Johnston (after Ollie retired, Brad took his desk the following Monday)

LOLGRUES (it is pitch black) [via]

Metafilter comment relays a conversation about the origins of man with a 5-year-old (some more great stories in this thread, like this story about a 5am walk in Vancouver)

Ben Heck's custom-made Apple IIgs laptop (it's like technology from a parallel world) [via]

Alpha Twitter (dead-simple meme tracker for popular links on Twitter) [via]

Oregon state sends cease-and-desists for republishing statutes (they claim copyright on the typesetting and numbering of the documents, not the text of the statutes themselves)

Defamer investigates the Marilyn Monroe sex tape, claims hoax (no real evidence supporting hoax theory, but undermines credibility of the seller) [via]

Michael Arrington loves the Twitter "block" button (though I'm pretty sure the New York Times doesn't killfile people who correct them) [via]

Youngme/Nowme (people reproduce their childhood photos and tagging each photo on Flickr)

Twilight of the Area Code Master (add it to the list of obsolete skills)

Heroes & Villains (portraits of artists in the graffiti, alt-comic, and underground art worlds) [via]

Photorealistic 3D buildings in the new Google Earth (very impressive, includes sunlight and shading)

Django-MMO, open-source clone of Game Neverending (is this the first open-source web-based MMO?) [via]

Winners of the Color Wars rap battle (judged by Jonathan Coulton and Doc Popular) [via]

Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney's Nine Old Men, passes away at 95 (loving tributes in the updates and comments) [via]

Fring, a simple Skype/IM/Twitter client for the iPhone (Skype support appears to be wifi-only) [via]

Time-lapse security cam of Nick White, a man trapped 41 hours in a NYC elevator (from brilliant New Yorker article about the lives of elevators; the ordeal changed him forever) [via]

RC car plays Super Mario theme on long line of filled bottles (a thing of beauty)

I Hate Drake (animated rendition of an 11-year-old's diary; see also: 500 Miles to Hollywood) [via]

Jason Scott analyzes how an Atari Age thread devolves (for anyone interested in online group dynamics and/or the current Atari 2600 scene)

Excelsior 1968 (John Martz drew cartoon versions of every student from his mom's 1968 yearbook; see also: The Liner) [via]

Amazon adds persistent storage to EC2 (a massive upgrade, allowing snapshots with a single API call)

Disney shutting down its Virtual Magic Kingdom MMO (read the comments to see players and parents absolutely devastated by its closure) [via]

Numbers Station Bingo (clever idea, builds a game using the mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts)

Download YouTube videos as MP4 files (higher quality and better sound than the FLV versions) [via]

Hands Free 3D (Mitch Kapor shows how to navigate Second Life with your full body) [via]

Cartoon Brew on the aborted Yoshifumi Kondo pilot for Little Nemo (Brad Bird responds in the comments! see also: longer version of the pilot and the 1992 feature film for comparison) [via]

Eric Schwartz' animated Amiga tribute (created on an Amiga 4000T to the tune of "Still Alive," it's very faithful to Amiga history)

The Droste Effect in Packaging (self-referential products) [via]

Martijn Hendriks' "Give Us Today Our Daily Terror" (Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" with every bird digitally removed) [via]

Ironic Sans' idea for tactile feedback while driving (Rumble Pak on the steering wheel to sense cars in your blind spot)

Celebrity Heights (determined by taking a photograph next to a person of known height) [via]

Chuck Jones' Isolation Studies (brilliant supercuts created by a Chicago artist; the Loveline montages are amazing)

TDD Rickroll (total abuse of the TRS, but still very funny)

Jerry Yang and David Filo play Faceball (spoiler: Filo wins!)

Sourcing the 1980s TV bumpers from Justice's DVNO video (the original video, if you missed it)

Yahoo! Pipes feed of YouTube channel subscriptions for a user (YouTube doesn't provide any subscription feeds, but this works perfectly) [via]

Freakonomics guys on the Metafilter vs. YouTube commenters (it's worth noting that the NYT is cultivating a high level of discourse in their own blog comments) [via]

Winners of Jay Is Games' Casual Gameplay Comp 5 (like always, incredible quality from the vibrant community) [via]

Defective Yeti researches the LOST screenplay profanity (I thought this was a joke, but I verified it; JJ Abrams has a potty mouth)

Flickr's buying donuts next Friday for every member in SF who shows up (mroth, you're a crazy bastard)

IFC/Nerve's Top 50 Comedy Sketches (there goes my afternoon; strange how it switches between IFC and Nerve on every page) [via]

RSS 2.0 guid is broken by default (or: why my links were still pointing to Waxy.org until this morning; sorry!)

Hulu posts all three seasons of Arrested Development (I've really been enjoying Hulu lately; popular episodes today and newly-added feature films) [via]

No Photos on Flickr! (perfect response to the crybabies, with confused comments from some of them)

Can singing death metal ruin your voice? (bizarre endoscope footage of people singing, screaming, grunting, and talking like Barry White)

Black & Blue, Quicktime 1.0 sample video from 1992 (the Quicktime development team gets silly, in a decision that still haunts them 15 years later)

Seeing some weirdness in the Waxy.org RSS feed? (I fixed the bug causing links to point to Waxy.org, but your feedreader needs to refresh the feed first)

Lies I've told my 3 year old recently (Sadness can be eaten.) [via]

Huddle Chat taken offline after cries of plagiarism (people complained the UI ripped off 37 Signals' Campfire; here's an official response)

Flickr Video's live! (this group includes some examples, including my son's testimonial and thud!)

Flickr's cheeky acknowledgement of Video support (Techcrunch jumped the gun, it goes live any minute; it's very different from YouTube and very, very Flickr)

Rock Paper Shotgun's roundup of Yoshio Ishii games (I feel the same way about DOFI)

Multiple SIDosis (innovative split-screen techniques and multitrack recording from the late '60s; high-quality video and backstory) [via]

Twubble, search for people you might know on Twitter (exceedingly easy to use, but must be hammering the Twitter API)

Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards (Wilson Miner explains how EveryBlock does it; also, Paul Smith on how/why they rolled their own maps)

Friendfeed's Bret Taylor builds a blog CMS on Google App Engine (it's amazing how easy it is to get started; Nelson went from zero to app in 30 minutes)

Gamasutra catches GamePro (and others) cribbing data without credit (entertaining, if only for the spot-the-fake games)

Official Charlton Heston Postmortem Joke (using Tweetscan as Clichewatch)

Improv Anywhere's Best Little League Game Ever (hopefully, they managed to avoid post-gig bitterness)

Google App Engine (Google dives into the cloud; Python-only and free for limited use)

How OK Go Benefited from Net Neutrality (NYT op-ed by their lead singer) [via]

Pitchfork.tv goes live (still beta and an awkward UI, but some great exclusive video including the full-length Pixies reunion documentary) [via]

Ten Thousand Cents (Mechanical Turkers reconstruct a $100 bill using custom drawing tools for 1 cent per drawing) [via]

Imageshack launches free BitTorrent downloading service (for people who can't run BT or limited by their ISP, this sounds great)

Magic Pen (complete clone of Crayon Physics, but still worth trying) [via]

You Have to Burn the Rope (walkthrough available, if you need it)

The Making of the Flagpole Sitta lip dub (Jakob made it look effortless, with quite a bit of planning)

fruit mystery, a flash game (from the fine people at BrettCorp)

Infochimps, insane collection of open datasets (subscribe to their blog, which tracks new data as its added)

Charles Manson's 2005 album released under Creative Commons license (how does a 73-year-old man who's never used a computer hear about CC?) [via]

Adrian Holovaty's jazz acoustic remix of Radiohead's "Nude" (current ranked #35 out of 423 remixes)

South Park meets the Internet Stars (takes on Tay Zonday, Tron guy, Chris Crocker, Afro-Ninja, SWK, Dramatic Chipmunk, Numa Numa, and more)

Akon Calls T-Pain (butternut reduction) [via]

Mike Gravel's cover of Helter Skelter (he should run for the President of YouTube)

Quest for the Crown (old but good, I still can't get past level 12) [via]

Metafilter roundup of Paul Green's School of Rock videos (these videos of kids rocking out brings joy into my heart)

straightest freehand horizontal one pixel black line contest

Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Estupido Espezial, a joke version of OCR-A with swashes (even their joke typefaces get them paid) [via]

Guncho, a multiplayer IF system based on Inform 7 (upload Inform code to create realms browsable by multiple people at once)

Porn for the Blind (a free public service)

Dropclock, Mac/Windows screensaver (lovely slow-motion Helvetica dunking; also: animate movement based on wind activity in your town) [via]

Blogoscoped has my favorite April 1 joke, so far (understated and unexpected, it fooled me)