Waxy.org: Links Archives: April 2009

Lessig adds more details about the Warner Music DMCA request against him (oddly, none of the music in his presentation appears to belong to Warner)

Twitter launches integrated search for everyone (also: Twitter's admin section was hacked yesterday and screenshots were leaked; always interesting to see internal tools)

Android app turns G1 phone into a metal detector (using the internal digital compass) [via]

Recreating fear of heights in augmented reality (reminds me of this room-sized 3D demo, where you can see the subject's reflexes kick in)

Handmade grade-school book about the Apple //c from 1985 ("The most nesasary step to useing the computer is learning to program.") [via]

Rick Astley writes about Moot, 4chan, and the Rickrolling meme ("I find it bonkers, by the way!") [via]

Interview with Dutch director of "What's In The Box?", Half-Life inspired short film (he made the video himself for about $150; click the icon on the bottom-right for subtitles)

Bandcamp easter egg turns traffic stats into Defender playfield (a closer view of the gameplay towards the end of their screencast)

Flickr's Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson working on social gaming startup (in other Flickr news, George Oates joined the Internet Archive and Rev. Dan Catt's off to the UK)

Rod Stewart joins Jeff Beck on stage for first time in 25 years (soundboard recordings of "People Get Ready" and "I Ain't Superstitious")

Adventure 2600 Reboot (the classic Atari game remade in 16-bit graphics with new sounds; interview with the creator)

Motion Theory's Google Chrome ad (gorgeous animated evolution of browser UIs, plus greeked versions of popular Google sites)

Dan Gurewich's Real Life Twitter (he seems to be missing the self-consciousness gene)

Swine Flu amino acid sequence as ambient music (related: Has Madagascar Closed Its Port?) [via]

EveryBlock releases free iPhone app (look up health code violations at dinner and which street you're likely to get mugged on the way home)

Dreamhost's history of WebRing (sold for $3.5 million to Geocities, vested to $100M in Yahoo stock by 2000, and bought back for $10,000)

The White House joins Flickr (incredible detail in the high-res versions, you can almost read his notes)

Google adds public data visualizations to search results (announced right before the Wolfram Alpha demo) [via]

Warner Music files DMCA request against Larry Lessig presentation (still unclear which one, but I'm not sure it matters; he's the king of fair use)

Farbs' resignation letter to 2K Australia (best resignation ever, from the creator of ROM CHECK FAIL, who's gone full indie)

Google's What's Popular (algorithm surfaces trending links culled from YouTube and Google Reader) [via]

Nizmlab, surfacing the best of YouTube and Vimeo (fed up with YouTube's most popular, they built an elegant community site) [via]

Type Nesting, photos of birds nesting in storefront signage (they seem to prefer capital Rs and As) [via]

How 4chan defeated reCAPTCHA to win the Time 100 Poll (Paul Lamere breaks down the brute force hack, optimized to crank out 200 votes per minute)

Jason Scott's progress update on mirroring Geocities (in 48 hours, Archive Team's already saved over 200,000 Geocities sites)

Jeff Jarvis on journalism's original reporting vs. redundancy ("Do what you do best and link to the rest.")

Face mining demo using vintage Star Trek episodes (white polygons in the videos represent faces that were detected but unmatched)

Infographic timeline of Evel Knievel's jumps (up until his last failed jump, which inspired Happy Days to jump the shark)

Windosill, Vectorpark's new exploration game for Mac/PC (holy cow, this is amazing; if you're a fan of Vectorpark, try and buy this immediately) [via]

NYT on Internet startups throttling or blocking global users (YouTube and Facebook may lower video quality for certain countries)

Shadow Physics gameplay demo (also: Miegakure, an experimental game in four dimensions) [via]

4chan creator handily wins the TIME 100 poll (interesting spin on their broken poll; "Doubting the results is kind of the point.") [via]

Scratching vinyl with augmented reality (also: spinning records on the iPhone)

Honda Insight's immersive ad on Vimeo (it caught me by surprise)

Newsmap 2.0 (back with a new design, including real-time search, permalinks, and news photos) [via]

RotatSpin (I vanquished the crab lord with a mere 238 deaths) [via]

Rhett Dashwood's Google Maps Typography (every location is in Victoria, Australia) [via]

Scientists find potential cure for honey bee colony collapse (another human-made disaster averted) [via]

Random Reruns, get a random show from your Hulu subscriptions (injecting some serendipity to Hulu, now it just needs channels and a TV Guide)

Yeti Knight Adventures (from the creator of Buffalo Bill's Lotion Challenge) [via]

Yahoo! to close GeoCities later this year (someone call the Archive Team)

Ian Bogost simulates the CRT display in an Atari 2600 emulator (he asked five computer science students to modify Stella, and the results are fuzzy gold) [via]

Game Developers and Porn Stars (though I suspect money's more of an incentive for porn than in game development) [via]

Typographica's Favorite Typefaces of 2008 (Stag Dot is a gorgeous alternative to pixel fonts) [via]

Kottke's In Defense of Twitter (inspired by Dowd's dumb interview; Geoff Manaugh and Rex argue the media's threatened by new writers, again)

Auto-Tune the News (don't miss Katie Couric at 1:20) [via]

Alice Marwick on Foursquare and prescriptive social software (with its badges and other incentives, it encourages a particular style of social behavior)

241543903, photos of people putting their head in a freezer (inexplicable, until you read this note from David Horvitz) [via]

PhD Comics on the cure for cancer (related: The Bride Was Beautiful) [via]

Last Year's Model ("saving the planet through sheer laziness" or maybe not)

Maureen Dowd's ridiculous interview with Twitter's founders (they were funny and graceful under idiocy)

YouCube, make an interactive cube from YouTube videos (for example, try Oo De Lally, David After Dentist or Douche Cubed)

McSweeney's "Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era" (with slight modifications, I think this class would be a massive hit) [via]

Sarien's web-based multiplayer ports of classic Sierra games (Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry so far; here's how it all works) [via]

Jeff Veen's Designing for Big Data (great 20-minute talk covering the history and best practices of data visualization )

BirdFeeder, prototype client for an open decentralized Twitter (don't miss his presentation, explaining why Twitter is like CompuServe mail)

NYT's Saul Hansell researches the costs of broadband Internet providers (they want to add fees to cover increased usage, but their costs are actually going down)

Interface design concepts for Firefox as a URL library (an iTunes-like treatment for URLs, combining bookmarks, feeds, and history) [via]

NYT on Wired's J.J. Abrams-edited Mystery Box issue (the puzzle was solved by Steven Bevacqua; the whole issue is great) [via]

The Brain-Twitter Interface (focusing on flashing letters creates measurable brainwaves) [via]

History of Rainn Wilson's Twitter feud with Sockington (unfortunately, it's led to over 100 threats; Rainn's toned it down recently)

Casual Profanity's liquid sculpture made from plastic tubing (see also: the Superfluid Skirt) [via]

Kara Swisher announces changes to AllThingsD's Voices section (in response to my article, they removed the comments/Share links and changed the wording; compare then and now)

Adam Berg's Carousel, short film capturing a frozen moment in time (you can scrub through it on the official site)

Inspired Bicycles: Danny MacAskill (breathtaking in parts, it's like watching parkour on a bike)

Braid artist David Hellman releases game's art assets (the wallpapers are lovely) [via]

Bohemian Rhapsody played by vintage computer hardware (Atari 800XL, TI-99/4a, 8" floppy, 3.5" hard drive, and HP ScanJet 3C as Freddie Mercury) [via]

MailChimp used Mechanical Turk to rank 25,960 templates (interesting approach, combining algorithmic design with human filtering)

Jason Fortuny ordered to pay $74k for Craigslist sex baiting prank (he never showed up in court; I wonder if any of the hundreds of others affected will bother)

Little Big Cremaster 1 (Little Big Planet levels inspired by Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle; also: Little Big Cremaster 4) [via]

Scene.org Awards 2009 winners announced (the best of the demoscene; you can view or download every entry on Pouet) [via]

Covered, a blog with modern artists covering classic comic books (I love the realistic Donald Duck, Richard Sala's Batman, and Gustavo Deveze's frenetic Action Comics 1) [via]

The Pac-Man Dossier (an exhaustively researched and well-written guide, with gameplay details I've never seen before) [via]

CMU's ClueWeb09, 1 billion website crawl available for researchers (massive 25 terabyte dataset shipped on four 1.5 terabyte drives; get this up on AWS!) [via]

Swedish court finds The Pirate Bay guilty (a year in jail and $3.6M in damages)

Hacklab's laser engraver plays the Super Mario Bros. theme (here's the Ruby code and homegrown ASCII tablature that makes it work) [via]

Super Mario 3 "Rainbow Riding" LUA hack for FCEUX emulator (you only control Mario indirectly, skip to 1:00 to see how fundamentally it changes gameplay) [via]

Dash Shaw's Bodyworld (serialized in 12 chapters, surreal online comic from the creator of Bottomless Belly Button) [via]

Spreadtweet, Twitter disguised as an Excel spreadsheet (I love his other work, including a playable Snake on his homepage)

Amazon's Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game (five years later, these reviews still make me laugh)

Chino Otsuka's digitally adding her modern self to her childhood photos (time travel with Photoshop) [via]

Kottke digs up The Wire's original pitch, draft outline, and three scripts (a must-read for any fan of the show)

Vulture's history of bloggers depicted in film and TV (they forgot Mr. X)

Track 4chan's Twitter race to beat Ashton Kutcher and CNN to 1M followers (their @basementdad account, created yesterday, is gaining 700-900 followers per minute)

4chan users discover Twitter, mass-following a new account (the NSFW thread on /b/ (cache) is interesting, they've shared code for fake account creation)

Ken Jennings took H&R Block up on their offer (they did his taxes for free, because of the "unpleasantness")

Paul Lamere interviews a 4chan hacker about the TIME poll manipulation (custom Windows apps, Perl scripts, and proxies to submit thousands of votes per minute)

Sweet Juniper's photos of an abandoned Detroit block (every entry on his site is magic, including his TIME tour, abandoned zoo, stealing books, and thoughts on scrappers) [via]

Digg drops the DiggBar for all non-Digg users (which, really, they should've done in the first place) [via]

American expat shows Saudi government's hand-censored version of Katy Perry CD cover (though the last photo looks Photoshopped; maybe they're printing new booklets instead?)

Canvas visualizations of sorting algorithms (absolutely beautiful, based on Aldo Cortesi's original visualizations)

Nancy Cartwright is your insufferable crazy aunt (except that my crazy aunt never donated $10 million to Scientology)

Clay Shirky on the failure of #amazonfail (outrage has its own momentum, even when circumstances change)

Rocketboom spins Know Your Meme off into new site, community (their meme database is like a safe for work alternative to Encyclopedia Dramatica) [via]

We Didn't Start the Flamewar (very potent Diggbait) [via]

Amazon employee blames French office for AmazonFail glitch (they say it's strictly internal, debunking Weev's claims)

Erik Kastner's Super Ear Man Bros. playthrough (he makes a suicidal game look easy)

4chan manipulates all 21 top results on the TIME 100 Poll (not content to just push Moot to the top, they rearranged the results to spell a message)

Birdhouse, a Twitter notepad for the iPhone (for people who take Twitter way too seriously; don't miss the intro video) [via]

Elevated, winning 4k PC intro at Breakpoint 2009 (mind-blowing real-time terrain generation in 4,096 bytes; download it) [via]

Dork Yearbook (Joel Johnson's Boing Boing Gadgets entry became its own site) [via]

Valleywag on Weev taking credit for #amazonfail controversy (remember him? this guy's skeptical, but it still seems plausible to me)

Blogger Training Gym (stick and move, kid)

Urlesque's top 100 most iconic Internet videos (and they interviewed me about their #1 video)

Michael Buffington asks Mechanical Turk to write his personal bio (the results weren't great, but inspired him to make it better)

Know Your Meme on the Yo Dawg/Sup Dawg image macro (including Xzibit's response to the meme on Twitter)

Boing Boing tracks "lololol" variations on Google (including the loolol, a lol with 100 o's) [via]

Adam Curtis on the modern rise of "Oh Dear"-ism in TV news (from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, a BBC show about the news media; full episodes here) [via]

Comparing word frequency in TV/movie scripts to Craigslist's M4M personal ads (NSFW language; the jargon's interesting, from HWP to DDF)

Yelp to allow businesses to respond to negative reviews (accountability for reviewers and owners is good, but could lead to an all-out war)

Braid released on PC today (despite the false alarms, it's now up on Steam)

Kanye West responds to South Park parody (amazingly, it seems to have led to a minor revelation for him about his own ego)

Engadget's Screen Grabs (ongoing series of gadgets appearing in TV and film)

Chris Ainsworth's advice for Wizards of the Coast (they recently stopped D&D PDF sales to thwart piracy, always a bad plan)

Roo Reynolds visualizes his web browsing history (he analyzed data from MeeTimer, a lovely Firefox extension for self-tracking)

Super 耳男 Bros. ("z" to jump; insanely masochistic gameplay, watch the full walkthrough) [via]

Josh Poehlein's Modern History (collages made exclusively from YouTube screengrabs, artifacts and all) [via]

Techcrunch releases new photos of their prototype tablet (I'm simply amazed at the progress they've made)

John Gruber's guide to blocking the DiggBar (curious that it's not on the Digg homepage yet, even with ~~600~~ 1,100 diggs)

McSweeney's guide to understanding Twitter ("Twitter founders Bob Timpei and El Segundo have begun working in earnest with Germans")

LA Times talks to former Area 51 workers to debunk UFO myths (in 2007, the CIA declassified 50-year-old documents about the OXCART program)

Aaron Meyers' Spore Skeletons in augmented reality (here's a video of it in action; Aaron makes cool stuff) [via]

Shadow of the Colossus being developed for feature film (could be great or awful; the game's about love, sacrifice, and 16 big-ass boss battles) [via]

The Tools Artists Use (like The Setup for illustrators) [via]

Pong in Street Fighter IV and other consensual play modes (Cat and Mouse in Project Gotham Racing sounds like a blast, too)

Spike Jonze's "Everyone Poops" (he's transformed another children's classic) [via]

Dustin Glick's The Browsy (a cautionary tale heavily inspired by Dr. Seuss) [via]

NYT blog posts added to the Times Newswire API (also, they announced their new Real Estate API two days ago)

Everything Is Terrible's compilation of bad introductions (amazing videoblog of original VHS rips; the first post set the tone, recreating a VHS viral he'd seen in college)

Nate Silver's prediction model for gay marriage bans, state-by-state (bans are losing support at a rate of 2 points yearly; by 2012, almost half would vote against it)

MPA to challenge Newzbin in court (baffling since they only host metadata, but not the actual files)

Reddit interviews Mythbusters' Adam Savage (also: Digg interviews Trent Reznor)

Mad Scientist Labs builds Ironic Sans' concept Bulbdial Clock (an LED sundial with moving hour, minute, and second hands)

Hand-crafted miniature sets from classic TV shows (my favorites are Family Ties, Three's Company, Price Is Right and Pyramid ) [via]

Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face (The Onion built a dedicated website for the game, with an online Flash demo)

Effing Hail (Flash game in the form of weather infographics in a textbook; awful music, though) [via]

Perry Russerts, Umbrella Theif (a wonderful yarn)

Andre Michelle's ToneMatrix (like Electroplankton meets the Tenori-on) [via]

The Beatles entire catalogue remastered, to be released alongside Rock Band (wait, what's this "CD" they speak of?) [via]

8-Bit Tarot Cards (the nearly complete deck is a thing of beauty, but sadly out of stock)

Flickr's Aaron Cope walks through building maps from scratch (using Stamen's EC2 image for an instant map stack; yet another reason to vote for them in Icon's poll)

Visualizing SF Trees, Crimes, and Cabs with subtractive blending (Stamen's Shawn Allen explains how it was made in the comments) [via]

Gizmodo's Pirate Code of Conduct for BitTorrent (in case media companies are wondering, these align to the ethical guidelines for most people I know)

highDEAS (like Halfbakery for the fully-baked)

NYT on Hearst's RealAge "test" marketing 27 million medical histories to drug companies (naturally, Hearst also owns Oprah Magazine; Gordon predicted this back in 2007)

Amanda Palmer on how Twitter is changing her relationship with fans (she's been actively trying to get dropped from her label)

Paramount surprises hardcore fans by debuting new Trek film in Austin (they thought they were watching a new reprint of Wrath of Khan, until Nimoy himself broke the news)

Boxee officially releases new API (the latest release added a new Mozilla-based browser, fixed Hulu streaming, and Pandora support)

A Visit to id Software in 1993 (home video includes 20 minutes of Romero playing a pre-release version of Doom) [via]

BashReduce (Last.fm's MapReduce in an 160-line Bash script) [via]

DeepLeap, the word game (a John Resig experiment on the old Deepleap dev domain) [via]

Super Luigi Bros. (living in the shadow of a famous brother; also: a day in the life of a Goomba) [via]

Joshua Schachter on the dangers of URL shorteners (interesting that Archive Team is already working on crawling the TinyURL db)

How xkcd's Randall broke his laptop trying to turn off Google's SafeSearch (fortunately, there were no sharks nearby)

IF YOU'RE NOT INDIE, F**K YOU (inspired by Samberg, the unpunched guy is Dan Paladin) [via]

UK village mob blocks Google Street View car ("how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent?" )

The Music Explaura, powerful music discovery engine (explains each recommendation and lets you steer suggestions by shifting tag weights or popularity) [via]

Things iPhoto Thinks Are Faces (finding faces in cookie dough, trees, watches, buttons, church, and pants)

Conficker Eye Chart (clever way to instantly diagnose PCs for the virus, unless they're on a proxy)

TinyURL/Bit.ly decoder for Greasemonkey (resolves 13 different URL shortening services, so no more mystery links from Twitter)

Amazon announces Elastic MapReduce service (instant Hadoop cluster, pay only what you use)

Get Down, Goldeneye N64 glitch becomes Japanese meme (more on tilting and the crooked cartridge trick; hundreds of variations on YouTube, mostly from Nico Nico Douga) [via]

Google reveals details about its custom server hardware and datacenters ("It was our Manhattan Project") [via]

Valleywag on layoffs at Wired.com and Ars Technica (including Lore Sjöberg and Leander Kahney; they cut 25% back in November)

FileFront saved, original founders buy it back from Ziff-Davis (unfortunate timing, the community's still suspicious) [via]

LeechBlock, Firefox extension to block access to sites you love too much (a more flexible, cross-platform SelfControl; can block Google Reader but allow Google)

Legends of Zork goes live (not a joke, though the early reviews are pretty bad) [via]

IJD: Paul Lamere on Echo Nest's new "goodness" API (simulates a Pitchfork music critic, and the demo actually works)

Wrong Tomorrow, database of provable predictions (Maciej hopes to hold pundits accountable)

Blogoscoped rounds up Google's April Fools worldwide (I like the Street View panda)

First! (dammit)

IJD: SEOmoz launches Webfluence, user-generated search engine (what Google would look like if run by SEO jerks; add or remove any result)

IJD: Google Chrome adds 3D web browsing (amazingly, it actually works with real anaglyph red-blue glasses)

IJD: YTMND rebrands as Dogchan (warning: not safe for anyone)

IJD: Improv Anywhere's Best Funeral Ever (poking fun at the criticism they received for Best Gig Ever)

IJD: YouTube videos appear upside-down (add "flip=1" to any YouTube URL)

Guardian UK to stop print edition, switches to Twitter only (Internet Jackass Day in effect)