Waxy.org: Links Archives: January 2009

Coca Cola's Avatar ad for the Superbowl (love the augmented reality HUDs)

Censored Bill Hicks performance airing tonight on Letterman (Hicks's retelling of the appearance; his mom's appearing on the show marking the 15th anniversary of his death)

Huffduffer, podcasting found audio around the web (I've been loving it lately; it's like Give Me Something to Read for audio)

Spreadsheet of artists, bands, and record labels on Twitter (Lazyweb: turn this into a Twitter aggregator with music and popularity info from Last.fm; update: Google Spreadsheets is having issues)

Ma.gnolia suffers severe data loss, no timeline for recovery (bookmarks may be permanently lost, updates here)

Big Fat Whale's list of Internet Anti-Memes and Non-Sensations (that STD-tracking Facebook app sounds like Lia's Sickr concept from Worst Website Ever)

Detroit News story of a frozen body found in an abandoned elevator shaft (nobody but the reporter called the police, and it took three 911 calls and 24 hours for them to arrive)

World of Goo's Kyle Gabler gives the Global Game Jam keynote (starting today, 2,000 people worldwide will be building free games in only 48 hours)

Cash4Gold tries to bribe Cockeyed.com not to talk about them (a former employee explains how the scam works in detail)

Pseudo-3D videoconferencing with a generic webcam (tying together head tracking with background subtraction)

Mattias Geniar on Academic Earth, online classes from top colleges (like iTunes U, but with complete transcripts, course materials, and web-based video) [via]

Henry Hey's musical accompaniment to Bush's last press conference (from the creator of Palin Song)

Velato, an esoteric programming language that uses music as source code (I think its Hello World program is more listenable than the one for Fugue) [via]

Telescopic Text (like Blueful, another playful experiment with storytelling on the web) [via]

iPhone app uses photo recognition to solve Rubik's Cube (quite possibly the only iPhone app that mentions Laplace transforms and blob detection) [via]

LÖVE, a lovely 2D game engine in Lua (as Why points out, the documentation and tutorials are fun)

Perfect Balance (note that you can rotate the blocks) [via]

Very Small Array's visual breakdown of Billboard's Hot 100 for 2008 (compare this to her chart of Pitchfork's Top 100)

Last.fm starts auto-correcting typos in artist and song names (their audio fingerprinting project finally surfaces with elegantly-designed tools)

A Life Well Wasted, a new podcast about videogames inspired by This American Life (first episode explores the recent death of EGM; RSS feed is here) [via]

Metafilter's history of the Resolute Desk, the President's desk in the Oval Office (did you know the Dept. of Homeland Security meets in the old barber shop?)

Dogster's Ted Rheingold on the quiet death of Yahoo! Pets (it's sad, even a maligned site like Pets had a tremendous amount of potential if done right)

Bay Area TV news report about "electronic newspapers" in 1981 (it took two hours to download the whole paper at $5/hour for Compuserve service) [via]

NYT launches Best Sellers API (if you're near NYC, their hack day next month should be great)

The White House on Vimeo (nice alternative to the YouTube channel) [via]

Muxtape relaunches as artist-friendly MP3 site (Justin also recently released I Hardly Knew Her, a minimalist Flickr browser) [via]

Softwear by Microsoft, their new clothing line (collaboration with Common and Urban Outfitters; this isn't very Microsoft-like) [via]

Blueful, a short story scattered across the web (trust me and just follow the links) [via]

Radio Aporee, field recordings with Google Maps (contribute your own audio to the geographical soundscape)

Ze Frank's Flash toy lets you draw with your voice (it's like Visual Acoustics, inverted)

Unofficial iTunes Store proxy running on AppSpot (this won't last long) [via]

Champion of Guitars, Guitar Hero as text adventure (with z-code, even) [via]

MAD Magazine goes quarterly with issue #500 (I have a strange feeling Cracked will get the last laugh)

Pac-Man Dungeons, Pac-Man as a text adventure dungeon crawl (more elaborate than Pac-TXT, with a map and better writing)

Listable, create and share lists with JSON, SQL, and plaintext output (Andre Torrez scratches an itch with App Engine)

John Resig explains how the Greasemonkey CAPTCHA solver works (step by step)

Greasemonkey: Neural network in Javascript solves Megaupload's CAPTCHAs in the browser (weak captchas, but still impressive; the author explains why cracking reCAPTCHA is much harder, with more discussion on Reddit) [via]

Mr. Tweet, user recommender for Twitter (shockingly well done, doesn't require a Twitter password)

How to use emoji icons in SMS on the iPhone without hacking your phone (a $1 app unlocks the Japanese keyboard, along with 461 picture characters to confuse your friends) [via]

The Boxxy Story, Part 2: The Fall of Boxxy (along with the first part, some of the best research on Internet culture I've ever seen)

Kevin Kelly on access vs. ownership for digital goods and services (for the flipside, see Jason Scott's argument against the cloud)

Google's Ajax APIs Playground (over 170 code samples for eight APIs)

Judging a stranger by their tweets (Dolores Labs asks Mechanical Turkers to rank the top 200 users, and plotted the results)

Waferbaby's The Setup (Daniel Bogan's interviewing writers, coders, and musicians about their computer setup) [via]

St. Petersburg Times' Obameter, tracking Obama's campaign promises (brilliant example of database-backed journalism)

Wired on the outdated IT infrastructure in the White House (the Mac-savvy team found PCs "outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software")

Chewbacca trapped in nightstand (like the geek version of a Virgin Mary sighting, in a steering wheel, trash can, vacuum, faucet, bathroom door, or toilet)

I Can Read Movies (covers for imaginary film-to-book adaptations, inspired by Mossy's movie poster remakes)

37 Signals' Movie-to-Website Title Mashups (It's A Wonderful Lifehacker, the Fark Knight, Face/Book/Off, and many more)

Google search volume dropped while Obama spoke (a similar dip happened on Flickr and Last.fm, but Twitter exploded during his oath)

Mat Honan geocodes his life for Wired (funny, I was with Mat when he twittered from Greens and the mentioned awkwardness ensued)

YouTube Street Fighter (short side-scroller built with YouTube annotations)

The Electronic Playground, a massive archive of pinball and arcade game cameos in film and TV (highlights include Charles Bronson with Marble Madness, Michael J. Fox with Death Race, David Hasselhoff playing Atari 2600, and Starsky and Hutch playing Pong)

Visiting the Obama inauguration site in Fallout 3 (instead of Secret Service, the Mall is patrolled by enemy super-mutants)

2D Boy's Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler talk about developing World of Goo (some insight into the creative process of my favorite game of 2008; the free soundtrack was just released)

The Onion: Bush Dies Peacefully In His Sleep (a fitting finale for their series of news briefs)

Why I'm Happy, Why I'm Not Satisfied (Ill Doctrine on the work ahead)

Twitter's traffic on inauguration day (five times the normal traffic with only slight delays) [via]

Whitehouse.gov's Old and New Robots.txt Files (all third-party content's licensed under Creative Commons and there's a Twitter account, too) [via]

Tom Taylor's Microprinter, a web-connected receipt printer for daily notifications (it pulls data from Google Calendar, iCal, BBC Weather, and Dopplr daily)

Seattle Times on The Game, a large-scale treasure hunt in 2002 that went wrong (the original version of the game inspired the movie 1980s screwball comedy Midnight Madness) [via]

Marble Madness speedrun in 2:35 (related: the original Marble Madness design documents) [via]

The Story of Boxxy (well-written story of how one girl inadvertently launched a 4chan civil war; yesterday, her channel was hacked and videos deleted) [via]

Belkin employee paid Mechanical Turkers to write positive product reviews (Belkin's CEO responded, saying it was a rogue employee)

danah boyd's dissertation on social networks and the American teen (an essential read, she interviewed and observed hundreds of teens across 16 states, tracking the rise of Myspace and Facebook in the process)

Kottke.org's roundup of new footage of the Hudson River plane landing (this also gives me a chance to point to Kottke's new redesign; older designs here)

Paul's SXSW Artist Catalog, annotated with the YouTube and Last.fm APIs (brilliant, SXSW should replace their official list with this immediately)

Jorma Dances to Fleet Foxes during SNL rehearsal (see also: Jorm Dances to My Chemical Romance, Death Cab, and Arcade Fire)

How to use Amazon EC2 for BitTorrent (update: turns out this is actually pretty expensive)

Google releases open-source Blog Converters project (hold up, Google has a Data Liberation team!? )

YouTube offering download links on selected videos (high-quality MP4 files, starting with all Change.gov videos; for everything else, there's KeepVid)

New law threatens handmade children's toy and clothing crafters (used toys are now exempted, but Etsy sellers are rightfully panicking; some endangered toys) [via]

Google search results for "KH(Ax)N" for x=1 to 100 (see also: hmmm, Oh Shiit, and Daaaamn, and X Girls Y Cups) [via]

Seattle Post Intelligencer writes its own obituary (naturally, the staff reporters covered the announcement of the paper's sale in detail)

Hotel for Dogs undisclosed ad on I Can Haz Cheezburger (the community saw right through it, in their own unique way; does editorial integrity apply to LOLCats?) [via]

Thought bubbles in Brooklyn (found on Urban Prankster, edited by Improv Anywhere's Charlie Todd) [via]

Measuring gravity in the Super Mario Bros. universe (as game hardware increases from the NES to Wii, Mario's gravity is getting closer to reality) [via]

Melt-in-the-Mouth Cookies, a brief history (Justin obsessively researches a family recipe back to the 1940s) [via]

Microsoft Songsmith takes on The Police's "Roxanne" (more classics here, including Wonderwall and What's Going On) [via]

Dopplr's visualization of Barack Obama's travels in 2008 (they're also generating these annual reports for every Dopplr user) [via]

Dennis Crowley on the death of Dodgeball (the site's original cofounder vows to build a replacement after it's closed for good) [via]

Superuseless Superpowers (though nothing really beats the powers of Section 8)

Google closes Dodgeball, Google Video uploads, Google Notebook, Google Catalogs (and they're ending development on Jaiku and open-sourcing the code)

Melodie, the one-year-old videogame expert (hell, I didn't even know five of them) [via]

Legends of Zork (the Zork franchise is being revived as a browser-based MMO from the creator of Trukz)

DeWitt Clinton takes a Twitter sample (he estimates about 23% of the userbase is active and connected, about 1.2M people) [via]

Giant Bomb releases game database API (they're doing some interesting community stuff, mixing wikis with traditional game journalism) [via]

Ben Terrett on "Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet" (they printed 1,000 copies of a newspaper filled with tweets, blog posts, and miscellaneous writing from last year)

Weezer's Pork and Beans, alternate video (much more chaotic with nearly twice the memes, including Badger Badger and Leeroy Jenkins cameos)

Dan Bruno on the rhythm battle system in Mother 3 (one of the harder songs has a 29/16 time signature)

Interview with a former adware programmer (the lengths they went to avoid detection were pretty incredible)

The Hype Machine's Zeigeist 2008 (now that the whole thing's up, well worth checking out; all 50 top albums are streamable)

Pretty Loaded, an archive of Flash preloaders ("strange, this site never finishes loading") [via]

New York Mag on the new programmer-journalist movement at the New York Times (the NYT seems like the only paper that's innovating like a high-tech startup)

The Evolution of Dance 2 (like the New Numa and Hamsterdance 2, you can't recapture the magic)

Commercials appear on YouTube's most viewed list (since the strangeness last year, they've started moving to a broader Most Popular algorithm)

Japanese live-action recreation of Super Mario Bros. (from the same show that brought us Matrix Ping Pong) [via]

Google responds to the "boiling water" energy usage report (they claim 1,000 Google searches produces as much CO2 as an average car driving 0.6 miles)

Globulous goes free (one of my favorite multiplayer distractions drops the restrictions for free players)

Color Blind Gamer (like 8% of all white males, I'm red-green colorblind and encounter these accessibility issues often)

Bastard Tetris in Flash (good luck getting even a single row)

The Remnants, post-apocalyptic web comedy featuring Ze Frank (unfortunately, they only made the pilot)

Desert Bus reborn as a 4k Java app (though it doesn't tow you back to the start if you veer off the road, like the original)

Google discusses their new favicon (I like the student-submitted one much better)

Lawrence Lessig on the Colbert Report (it was already remixed into a song) [via]

Rockman 2 Neta, hack to fight every Mega Man 2 boss at once (amazingly, it's beatable; inspired by The Last Days of Dr. Wily?)

Runnin' with the Songsmith (Microsoft, meet Diamond Dave)

11-year-old Steve Martin appeared in Disneyland Dream, 1956 home movie (the vintage video was the first home movie named to the National Film Registry)

Microsoft Songsmith (a great idea marred by a huge lapse of judgment by the dev team, who act in the promo video) [via]

Gravity Bone, surreal spy novella as a free indie FPS game (if you have a PC, you need to try this; it's only a ten-minute time commitment, but so worth it) [via]

Burger King asks users to delete 10 Facebook friends for a free Whopper (over 10,600 people have been unfriended so far) [via]

Amy Bennett's oil paintings inspired by scale models (more on her site, including the story behind the work)

Kottke's Best Links of 2008 (somehow, I missed several of these; every link is worth reading)

NYT launches Congress API (I really hope there's a contingency plan to keep this amazing work online in case things go bad)

Amazon customer uploads own photos to Customer Images (I wonder if Thinkgeek has this problem with Customer Action Shots)

The Dial-Up Kid (comedy at 9600 bps)

Autonomous Katamari (how long will it take the Prince to roll up a room with random paths and an Arduino?)

Tumbarumba, short-fiction anthology as a Firefox plugin (the screencast explains how the plugin subtly changes the pages you read) [via]

Google blocks other search engines from indexing LIFE photo archive (the images are free for personal, non-commercial use, so I'm confused why Google agreed to restrict them in this way)

Crayon Physics Deluxe finally released today! (the final trailer shows how far last year's IGF grand prize winner has come; related: the iPhone version)

Trailer for Objectified, a documentary about modern industrial design (Gary Hustwit's followup to Helvetica) [via]

Independent Games Festival 2009 finalists announced (looking forward to Blueberry Garden and Night Game)

Livejournal's engineering and support staff laid off? (looks like a job for the Archive Team)

NYT profiles R, a powerful language for stats computing and infoviz (Brendan says it's "both brilliant and insanely quirky," which sounds about right)

Twitter hacker explains how he compromised celebrity accounts (just like yesterday's MacRumorsLive hack, a weak dictionary password was to blame)

The Perils of Zero-Gravity Videography (Matt Harding discovers hard drive-based camcorders don't work in zero-gravity) [via]

Screenshot: 4chan hacks MacRumorsLive during Apple keynote (the 4chan thread shows how they found the admin interface, password hashes, and finally cracked a user's password)

xkcd's Guide to Converting to Metric (even Liberia and Myanmar are mostly metric, compared to the U.S.)

Crowdsourcing an Ethical Dilemma (Dolores Labs uses Mechanical Turk to answer the Trolley Problem)

Stamen's Mike Migurski on extreme programming vs. interaction design (the linked interview is great)

Jason Scott on the closure of AOL's online communities (like physical evictions, there need to be laws protecting community data in the event of closure)

JPG Magazine to stop publishing, turn off website (with only three days notice; here's the response from Derek and the JPG community)