Waxy.org: Links Archives: December 2008

Wikipedia over DNS (loony hack serves summaries of Wikipedia articles; also available as JSON and JS)

Leap year bug caused every 30GB Zune to crash at 2am this morning (as strange as the Android bug that ran every keystroke as root)

Metafilter's exhaustive tour of the early origins of Adult Swim (the Cartoon Network breathed new life into old cartoons, while constantly trying to find the next big thing)

Infochimps' massive scrape of Twitter's friend network (Twitter gave their blessing on sharing the 56-million records, which includes 10M tweets and 220k hashtags)

The Lonely Island's We Like Sportz (the sequel to Just 2 Guyz)

Niall Kennedy documents the undocumented Google Reader API (whoops, this was three years ago; here's an updated version)

Sakurako Shimizu's Waveform Jewelry (the "I Do" wedding band and Atari chip ring are cute, too)

Fimoculous' 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008 (an incredibly well-researched list, with related recommendations for every entry)

DJ Earworm's United State of Pop 2008 (mashing up the top 25 singles of the year into a single song and video)

Twit 4 Dead, four Twitter bots fight zombies in real-time (watch their collected activity here)

Facebook sentiment mining predicts presidential polls (like StateStats, Facebook Lexicon is tons of fun)

Giganews reports Usenet upload growth since 2001 (note this doesn't reflect Usenet popularity, but most likely the rise of huge Blu-Ray and HD rips)

List of Starbucks employee jargon (culled from the Starbucks Gossip blog)

Rocketboom covers the history of the Lip Dub (the Know Your Meme series is consistently well-researched and fun to watch)

Jennifer 8. Lee on the history of General Tso's Chicken (different cultures each localized their own versions of Chinese food around the world) [via]

Top 20 freeware games released by Cactus, this year (is Jonatan the most prolific game developer alive?)

Paul and Storm finish their 25 Days of Randy Newman (hosted on Bandcamp, and now with the solo piano track used in each song)

AutoPager, infinite scrolling for Firefox (love the idea, but too clunky for everyday use) [via]

Net Cafe archives, dot-com nostalgia TV show from 1996-2002 (Sergei Brin in 2000 at the newly-opened Metreon, Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing, awkward Webby broadcasts, and hundreds of dead dot-coms) [via]

The Offworld's best indie and overlooked games of 2008 (also: Gamasutra's top 5 indie games)

Left 4k Dead (lo-fi zombie shooter in 4k of Java) [via]

NORAD's Santa Tracker on Twitter (they just passed through Kazakhstan; also tracking on Google Maps and in 3D on Google Earth)

ScummVM adds support for 7th Guest (I didn't realize they expanded into non-Scumm engines last year, including the Sierra AGI games)

Double Fine's Psychopedia, official Psychonauts encyclopedia (they've been adding rare concept art and unseen videos daily)

Achievement Unlocked (meta-game where unlocking achievements is the goal) [via]

Map visualizations from BBC's Britain from Above (incredible work, from FlowingData's best infoviz of 2008) [via]

Twitter Venn (lovely visualization using Venn diagrams for keyword relationships)

Lore Sjoberg's Secret Origins of Santa Claus ("by the year 2100, Santa will be a genetically-engineered cyborg half-Yeti who can transform himself into a pure datastream")

Digging into groupsquatting on Facebook (one company registered Class of 2013 groups for 250+ colleges; the CEO responded in the comments)

Most Images Of Fish Sandwiches Looked At In One Minute (from the Universal Record Database, an open alternative to Guinness for stupid human tricks)

Aviary, web-based image editing suite, goes public beta (their blog and Hall of Fame shows off the power of the apps)

Touch Arcade reviews Rolando for the iPhone (the consensus is it's the best, most fully-realized game released so far)

Pitchfork interviews The Lonely Island (they talk about music, their new album, and their creative process at SNL)

NY Times' Represent, find your elected representatives in NYC (allowing community contributions and expanding this to the whole country would be brilliant)

The Pianocktail, a piano that mixes drinks based on what you play (here's video of it in action, and the development blog from conception to its Monday premiere) [via]

Yahoo! Query Language (structured data from Yahoo! Search, Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, and more using a SQL-like syntax)

Mightier, indie game lets you design levels with pen and paper (print the puzzles out, solve them, and scan it with your webcam) [via]

Paul Graham on the end of credentials (he argues that a free market's focus on performance eventually makes degrees irrelevant) [via]

Michael Bywater writes about his father's dignified death (I spoke to him earlier today; this is why his Infocom article for Wired was postponed)

Brady Forrest on the incredible growth of Open Street Map (it's unfortunate that Google Map Maker is competing with OSM, rather than contributing to an open web)

YouTube adds new HD section (plus, a much larger player for HD videos)

Flickr adds snow, Santa hats/beards for the holidays (I'll leave it to you to figure out how to use both)

Australian court allows legal papers served via Facebook private messaging (first court papers ever served on a social networking site?) [via]

New HD videos of Noby Noby Boy gameplay footage (try the "Download" link if the stream isn't working; related: Phat Knits)

Most Emailed News (aggregating popular articles from major newspapers and magazines) [via]

13-year old Guitar Hero phenom's flawless win on "Devil Went Down to Georgia" (the most impressive GH video I've ever seen; he won the Guinness record in May) [via]

Evolution of the WordPress interface from 2003-2008 (I'd love to see the same thing for Movable Type)

MTV greenlights CollegeHumor TV show (rumored back in February, sounds like CHTV stretched into a full show)

James Surowiecki on why newspapers are hurting ("We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free.") [via]

Twelve Days of EFF (animated tribute to the EFF's amazing work this year)

Chris Han's Love Songs, mashup of 33 songs with "love" in the title (watching the fullscreen output from Ableton Live is strangely hypnotic) [via]

Flickr designer George Oates on her insane layoff from Yahoo! (she was in Taipei when she got the call; her last Flickr blog post about The Commons was just posted yesterday) [via]

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes (documentary about his obsessive research, now archived at the University of the Arts London)

Siam Waxy (I think I should change my logo)

1UP's exclusive preview of Noby Noby Boy, new game by Katamari Damacy creator (Wired has more screenshots, mostly taken from the adorable official site)

MusicBox, mapping and visualizing music collections (the demo video gives a great overview of the software, created for her thesis at MIT) [via]

Parry Gripp's Young Girl Talking About Herself (Nerf Herder's lead singer is making minute-long pop gems inspired by YouTube culture) [via]

The BennyHillifier (add "Yakety Sax" to any YouTube video) [via]

People who inspired pop songs (the Metafilter thread mentions more, including Dave Couiler)

Antville's Best Music Videos of 2008 (the best music video community nominates their picks for their yearly awards)

Snowstorm, customizable Javascript snow for your website (breakable Christmas lights, too)

I Love Katamari comes to the iPhone (very slow once the ball gets big, but how could I not buy this?)

New York Times' Year in Ideas 2008 (love the selections, not fond of the un-weblike layout that's hard to link to)

Rara Racer, meta racing game in the form of a YouTube playthrough (very clever, the narration reminds me of Night of the Cephalapods)

Parkour in the 1930s (from Gizmo!, a 1977 documentary about oddball inventions) [via]

Chef, an esoteric programming language where source resembles recipes (try the Hello World Souffle, discussed in Nick Montfort and Michael Mateas' paper on weird languages and code aesthetics) [via]

Jeff Atwood on Swoopo, the most evil shopping site ever (it's a money-making machine, preying on hope and desperation)

RoboCop Rap (you down with OCP?) [via]

Jessica Delfino's I Wanna Be Famous (old, but new to me) [via]

Metro Rules of Conduct (Flash game simulates the awkwardness of avoiding eye contact on public transit)

Fetal monitor lets baby twitter kick activity from the womb (the result ends up here) [via]

Michal Kosakowski's Just Like the Movies (the WTC attacks retold as a pastiche of scenes from hundreds of pre-9/11 movies) [via]

40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes (a good way to start every workday)

Is This Your Paper on Single Serving Sites? (academic essay on the trend, with a spreadsheet of 133 sites with their registration dates)

Library of Congress releases report on success of Flickr Commons (the project was pioneered by the brilliant George Oates, Flickr's lead designer who was laid off earlier today)

Bleed the World (flawless Band Aid parody)

Sol Sender on the evolution of the Obama '08 logo (the rejected logos are fascinating, especially the speech balloon) [via]

The Majesty of Colors (reminds me of I Wish I Were the Moon) [via]

Dennis Jerz on Google Maps' "Report a Concern" wording on Street View (also: saying "I'm sorry" is an implied admission of guilt, which is why CEOs never, ever say it)

WordPress 2.7 released (the one-click software upgrade and plugin browsing is just gorgeous)

Cartoon Particles (Disney characters deconstructed into component 3D parts) [via]

David Rosen's design tour of Knytt Stories (like his World of Goo tour, explains the graphical, audio, and gameplay decisions that make the game special) [via]

Image Evolution, evolve your own image with Javascript (a Canvas-based reimplementation of the Mona Lisa genetic programming hack)

Yahoo! closing Brickhouse by end of year (management would be better served firing themselves)

How the Perceptron music recommender weights its data sources (using mixtapes and Myspace top friends is clever; give it a try)

ATMachine's House of LucasArts and Sierra Oddities (including the comprehensive evolution of Indy game maps, Guybrush and Elaine, LeChuck, the LucasArts logo, and a rare Japanese Maniac Mansion)

Anil Dash on his night sleeping in the Guggenheim (ever since I read Basil E. Frankweiler, I've wanted to do this)

Popular Science magazine archives from 1872-2008 on Google Book Search (they've expanded into magazine archives, including Popular Mechanics, Mother Jones, Dwell, and New York)

Google's Native Client, run x86 apps in the browser (their open-source alternative to Java or Alchemy for Flash) [via]

Text Message Disaster (I'm only posting this so I can link to the parody) [via]

Things Bears Love (Overweight Hikers, Drunks, and Team Building Exercises)

8-Bit Jesus (holiday chiptunes inspired by NES games) [via]

Genetically evolving a car in real-time with Flash (here's one iteration after a few hours; the author discussed it on Reddit) [via]

How GoDaddy secretly profits from expired domains (they auction off popular expired domains, and quietly keep the rest for themselves)

Pulitzer Prize extended to online "newspapers," but not online "magazines" (the distinction is meaningless, but this is still a step in the right direction)

Blog comment spam on Mechanical Turk (what does it take to get rid of these idiots?)

Evolving the Mona Lisa (using only 50 randomly-sized translucent polygons) [via]

The Lonely Island's Jizz in My Pants on SNL (Jorma and Akiva finally appear on-screen in the first single off Incredibad, their debut album coming in February) [via]

Wikiscanner2 beta (Virgil's using a new technique for identifying more organizations and conflicts-of-interest) [via]

WSJ on Elvis Costello's "Spectacle" on the Sundance Channel (I've been waiting for a show like this, about the love of music, my entire life)

POTOtoo, Pirates of the Amazon recreated as a Greasemonkey script (let's see Amazon try forcing these 60 lines of Javascript offline)

Kim Rugg's alphabetized newspaper front pages (meticulously compiled with a razor, steady hand, and plenty of patience) [via]

Amazon orders Amazon/Pirate Bay Firefox extension offline (what right does Amazon have to control how we browse their site? are they going after Greasemonkey next?)

World of Warcraft is more secure than your bank (they're selling RSA key fobs to secure accounts)

Merlin Mann announces his new Amazon blog (just buy the camera, already)

BetamaXmas, celebrate Christmas in December 1988 (my god, even the TV Guide is in real-time)

Ze Frank on ideas and doing stuff (don't get addicted to brain crack) [via]

Video bootleg of Elvis Costello and Clover's "My Aim Is True" reunion (I didn't realize anyone had shot video! here's the backstory of the benefit show)

Jason Santa Maria asks designers to share their first websites (hilarious entries in the comments, including Veerle and Cameron Moll)

Flickr adds videos to iPhone-optimized site (works flawlessly; related: their lessons learned building a site for the iPhone)

Curb This (it's the new Yakety Sax) [via]

Remi Gaillard does Mario Kart in real-life (from the prankster who did the Rocky recreation and street soccer videos) [via]

Evan Williams on what Blogger should do now (some sound Monday morning quarterbacking from its former cofounder)

The Onion: Bush Dragged Behind Presidential Motorcade For 26 Blocks (latest in a series of briefs, including Bush Passes Three-Pound Kidney Stone, Crocodile Bites Off Bush's Arm, and Bush Tumbles Wildly Down Washington Monument Staircase)

Tina Fey's pinball past (she provided voices for the 1997 game Medieval Madness)

AOL to shut down Ficlets fiction-writing community (the small but dedicated community's shattered by the news) [via]

Music and the Market, academic paper compares average BPM to stock prices (he finds that the beat variance seems to predict future market volatility) [via]

Rob Reger responds to the Emily Strange controversy (this comment sums it up nicely)

Surfing for Seniors, instructional VHS video from 1997 (only the first 3.5 minutes, sadly) [via]

Prop 8: The Musical (starring John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Richter, Maya Rudolph, and Jack Black as Jesus)

Browse uploaded photos from Amazon's iPhone app on Mechanical Turk (150 current submissions, including pens, old sneakers, plants, and the inevitable naked guy reflected in a Macbook)

Amazon's Turk-powered app for the iPhone to identify product photos (a truly harebrained idea, since SnapTell does the same thing instantly using image similarity for all CDs, DVDs, books, and games)

Sony deleting user-created LittleBigPlanet levels without warning (the gaming world is about to revisit all the lessons Web 2.0 already learned, from Friendster to Facebook)

YouTube's new video thumbnails to be determined algorithmically (they'll be representative of video content instead of cleavage shots designed to drive click traffic)

David Recordon on building OpenID in the browser (the best way to drive mass adoption, since it's such a difficult concept to understand otherwise)

Image and video manipulation in Mathematica 7 (also, it supports built-in parallel processing on EC2)

Pirates of the Amazon, Firefox extension adds Pirate Bay links to Amazon listings (similar Greasemonkey scripts exist for Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB) [via]

Songbird hits 1.0 (very exciting release, though iPod touch/iPhone aren't supported just yet)

Whole Foods subpoenas New Seasons' financial and marketing records (the local Portland chain isn't even involved in the dispute)

Wired on how Dan Kaminsky and a set of DNS all-stars fixed a serious exploit (a dramatic retelling of "the largest multivendor patch in the history of the Internet")

The Guardian publishes six unreleased 999 emergency calls (insanely dramatic life-and-death scenarios, including a solo childbirth and near-death choking) [via]

Jason Nelson's "I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies." (an exploratory Flash game/poem with levels based on sites like Metafilter and Fark)

Design lessons from World of Goo ("show, don't tell")

Magic/Replace (spreadsheet manipulation built on the underrated DabbleDB; don't miss the demo) [via]

How Jeremy Keith's Flickr photo ended up in Iron Man (it was CC-licensed, but attribution in the credits costs money, so he signed a release instead)

Six Apart acquires Pownce, which will shut down in two weeks (unlike most acquirees, they thoughtfully built an exporter tool)

Lolcats postcard from 1905 (here's a completed auction for the same postcard)

Kottke on the "broken windows theory" applied to online communities (if graffiti can cause more crime, can the ugliness of a message board create more trolling?)

The Simpsons takes on Apple (a narwhal reference, too; full episode's on Hulu)

Give Me Something to Read (meatier articles bookmarked by Instapaper users; related: the toread tag on delicious)

Change.gov switches from copyright to Creative Commons (small decisions like these, made quickly in a time of transition, are inspiring)