June 30, 2008

Netflix team decides to keep Profiles after community backlash — good move, the users are rejoicing #

Aza Raskin announces Algorithm Ink and ContextFree.js, making art with Javascript — Resig mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but Aza's video demo is a must-see #

Chuck Klosterman asks 100 German college students to name the most interesting 20th Century American — wide range, from George Gershwin to Jared Leto (via) #

Anil Dash on Bill Gates and The Greatest Tech Hack Ever — still catching up from vacation, this hit Digg but worth reading if you missed it #

Josh Harris tells Boing Boing that Pseudo.com was conceptual art — don't miss Douglas Rushkoff's comment about his Pseudo investment #

Habbo Hotel may soon overtake World of Warcraft's total subscribers — then again, it's free to register and there's no client (via) #

GlaGPS, GlaDOS voice for the Garmin Nuvi — how about a JOSHUA voice pack next? #

Visualizing 4.5 years of Flickr with code_swarm — see also: Federated Media and Django (via) #

No Country for Raising Arizona — deliberately or not, the Coen Brothers quote from their early work (via) #

LA Times on YouTube's Fred — insanely popular with tweens, he has 242k subscribers and a sponsorship deal; here's an interview #

There's No Such Thing As New Wave — animated type (via) #

Sound Chaser — broken vinyl used as train tracks; don't miss the video (via) #

Tom Taylor's Delighting with Data — presentation about clever parsing hacks, several oriented around Twitter (via) #

Electronic Arts veteran starts iPhone-only gaming startup — some insights into what's attractive about the platform for game developers #

June 29, 2008

Last.fm launches new public API — a huge upgrade, with write support and many new methods #

One Post Wonder — collection of blogs who never got past their first post (via) #

Google releases data dump of US copyright renewal records — Jarkko Hietaniemi, you're my hero #

Nintendo DS homebrew music apps — I hope niche apps like these move over to App Store (via) #

Winners of the Procedural Generation Game competition — Rescue: The Beagles looks like fun, and some of the other entries are intriguing (via) #

Boing Boing removes over 100 70 posts linking to Violet Blue — whether this was a glitch or vendetta, some sort of response would be nice (via) #

Biotech firm Analtech creates viral video to attract the youngsters — they spent $60,000 and had 44 performers, including a congressman; sounds like a massive train wreck #

Anonymous Yahoo employee snarks on the re-org — pure sarcasm, but sums up the shuffling as viewed from the ground (via) #

June 28, 2008

Kevn Kelly on brute-forcing science — an excellent companion piece to Chris Anderson's Wired cover story #

Wall-E's easter eggs and inside jokes — with more unconfirmed ones listed in the comments #

June 26, 2008

Waxy on Vacation — or: why I'm awfully quiet this week #

June 25, 2008

The Paper Version of the Web — early paper prototypes for Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, and others (via) #

Exaggeration with Maps — in one example, one pixel represents 114 miles (via) #

June 24, 2008

Metafilter's Guide to Indie Platformers — a brilliant primer with some familiar names to Waxy readers, and plenty of new ones #

June 23, 2008

The Simpsons map for Quake III Arena — incredible detail, including the Simpsons house, Moe's, and much of Springfield (via) #

June 22, 2008

Perfect game of Peggle, 18 million points — the amount of planning in the how-to is staggering #

Gamasutra on Nintendo DS piracy in South Korea — media piracy of all kinds is pervasive and not stigmatized (via) #

Jim Le Fevre's zoetrope built from a Technics turntable — like a real-life animated GIF (via) #

Kanye West on Ice-T vs. Soulja Boy — hip-hop rivalries in the YouTube age (via) #

"Where the Hell is Matt?", the 2008 sequel in HD quality — exactly two years from his first video, Matt returns from a 14-month journey around the world #

Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children's Healthcare — "the majority of respondents shrieked 'NOOO!'" (via) #

June 21, 2008

Simple Truths, a quiet video of parkour training — more discipline than sport, this seems truer to parkour values than the over-the-top highlight videos #

June 20, 2008

Ian Rogers unveils Topspin, his digital music marketing startup — one of the smartest guys I know, I'm keeping a close eye on this #

History of the TiVo peanut remote control — story of the design process with several photos of prototypes (via) #

Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe's The Big Picture

Posted June 20, 2008 by Andy Baio

Alan Taylor, The Big Picture
Photo by Buster McLeod

With its vibrant oversized photographs and minimalist design, the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture weblog launched on June 1 to instant global acclaim. It’s designed, programmed, and written by Alan Taylor, an old-school web programmer and blogger, in his spare time while working on community features at Boston.com. (You might know Alan from his popular MegaPenny Project, Amazon Light, or his other projects.)

The idea’s simple, but extremely effective. Spend a few minutes with the Iowa floods, the faces of Sudan, or the daily life in Sadr City, and you feel like you’ve opened a window to another world.

I interviewed Alan about the inspiration for the site, his methodology, and what it’s like being a programmer in a journalist’s world.

The Big Picture’s become an essential read for me, and I totally agree with Jason Kottke when he called it “the best new blog of the year.” What inspired it?

Alan Taylor: Lots of things — my parents used to always have Life and National Geographic magazines around the house, I fell in love with the visual storytelling way back then. When I was getting my feet wet in the online journalism world as a developer at msnbc.com, I had the good fortune of working alongside Brian Storm and a few others in MSNBC’s photo department, who were just phenomenal as far as selection, editing and presentation.

I wondered why other sites didn’t reach that level. Many have by now, but I was still frustrated by the presentation — either far too small, or trapped in click-after-click interfaces that were in Flash or just acted as ad farms.

Continue reading “Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe's The Big Picture” →

Chop Shop's The Internets meme t-shirt, annotated — all the memes are found, thanks to help from ChopShop #

Limbo Of The Lost – An Astonishing Tale — full list of plagiarized works; don't miss the Photoshop competition, including this one #

The Onion AV Club interviews Jonathan Coulton's iPod — this is a great format for interviewing musicians (via) #

Penny Arcade on Lego fruit snacks — unfortunately, the bottoms are flat so they don't stack nicely (via) #

Edith Macefield, Ballard woman who refused to sell her home, passes away at 86 — wonderful story; I'm not the only one who was reminded of The Little House #

June 19, 2008

Girl Talk's Feed the Animals, outstanding illegal mashup album — I gave $20 towards the inevitable legal costs; preview it on Hype Machine, partial sample list on Wikipedia #

First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival from 1979 — MP3s for the entire vinyl LP; I love hearing digital through an analog medium #

Earliest recordings of computer music revealed — on an Ferranti Mark I in 1951, before Bell Labs and Daisy but after the CSIRAC #

Firefox 3's robot easter egg — if you don't want to be spoiled, just type "about:robots" in the location bar #

Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno predict unthinkable futures from 1993 — "it costs half a day's pay to drive your car into the downtown area of a big city" #

Twittering Teddy, Teddy Ruxpin modded to speak real-time tweets — a fun hack, equal parts terrifying and irritating #