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June 30, 2009
EveryBlock releases source code (it was a requirement of their funding from the Knight Foundation)
Hype Machine detects cheating on charts, names names (one of the bands responds in the comments and gets schooled by Anthony) [via]
Ze Frank on black, white, and shades of green (I'm loving this series)
China bans gold farming, real-world sale of virtual goods (Eurogamer estimates 1 million Chinese gold farmers with worldwide trade worth more than US$10 billion annually) [via]
The Pirate Bay sold to publicly-traded Swedish gaming company (Brokep's statement is delusional; being acquired will almost certainly kill the site)
Michael Rubin's "Droidmaker" book now available for free download! (authoritative 518-page history of Lucasfilm, the creation of Pixar, and much more) [via]
June 29, 2009
Jason Rohrer interviewed about "selling out" to make iPhone and ad games (he recently switched from free, open-source games; also, EA claims Spielberg's LMNO isn't cancelled)
Nedroid's Cosby Experiment (view all 190 Cosbys)
How the NYT kept their reporter's Taliban kidnapping off Wikipedia for seven months (they collaborated with Jimmy Wales directly to freeze the entry; NPR asks if it was ethical) [via]
David Fincher may direct Facebook film, adapted by Aaron Sorkin (possibly starring Michael Cera or Shia LaBeouf as Zuckerberg; this sounds familiar) [via]
Quarrygirl's undercover investigation of non-vegan ingredients used at L.A.-area vegan restaurants (outstanding blog reporting, with industrial food testing from 17 different restaurants and research into suppliers)
June 28, 2009
James Barnett's oil paintings of landscapes from video games (looking at the paintings, I felt like I'd actually visited those locations in real-life) [via]
WSJ interviews Brenda Brathwaite about "Train," a board game about the Holocaust (not all games need to be fun) [via]
June 27, 2009
How Rob Manuel accidentally started a Michael Jackson moonwalk flashmob (I'm in London right now, and I've seen several massive vigils and tributes on the streets) [via]
Top teams join forces to win Netflix Prize (check the leaderboard for the first score to break the 10% improvement threshold) [via]
Wired on the success of Nike+ (backstory on how it works and the Hawthorne effect; simply measuring something can change its behavior) [via]
June 26, 2009
Imeem to delete all user-added photos and videos, with five days' notice (with no way to back up videos at all) [via]
Shnabubula's chiptune tribute to Michael Jackson (also: Virt's incredible VRC6 cover of Thriller)
June 25, 2009
Metafilter user highlights 20 years of Elvis Costello's "adenoidal" voice in the NYT (Stephen Holden and Neil Strauss have a limited musical vocabulary) [via]
June 24, 2009
Flashterm, free telnet client for the web (I love his gallery page, full of BBSes)
Peter Nitsch's Flash port of AA-Lib, image-to-ASCII art library (the demo is fun; also: his real-time video conversion to ASCII) [via]
Simon Willison's four lessons from the Guardian's journalism crowdsourcing experiment (they deliberately made it game-like to encourage participation) [via]
June 22, 2009
Ze Frank's That Makes Me Think Of... (first of a series on Time.com, reminiscent of The Show) [via]
Paul Lamere on procedural video remixing with the Echo Nest API (this is way awesome, the mashup possibilities are endless)
June 19, 2009
Anil Dash on the first rapper vs. the first blogger ("all of blogging is hip hop")
Pixar grants dying 10-year-old girl's last wish to see "UP" (prepare to weep) [via]
June 18, 2009
Guardian crowdsources investigation into MPs' expenses (brilliantly using readers to dig through 700,000 documents to aid their investigation)
Paul Lamere's Passion Index for measuring band's true fans (he looks at the number of plays per listener for a simple metric)
Sudden Impact (cliche supercut of TV/film characters suddenly hit by moving vehicles)
June 17, 2009
How to enable iPhone OS 3.0 tethering on AT&T's network (not as flawless as I thought; it disables Visual Voicemail, but you can check manually until the new hack's out tomorrow)
Ross Racine's incredible artwork of aerial views of fictional city maps (drawn freehand in Photoshop, they contain no photos or scanned material)
TED interviews Clay Shirky about Iran and Twitter (related: Clay's TED talk from last month at the State Department)
Shaun Inman releases Fever, an elegantly designed feedreader (PHP/MySQL app, it recommends stories in your feeds based on link popularity)
Ze Frank's Art Hour (he still makes me giggle)
Microsoft IE8 contest insults other browsers (tarnished Chrome, boring Safari, and old Firefox; "get rid of it, or get lost")
Alice and Kev, the story of being homeless in Sims 3 (start from the beginning and keep reading; his writing is outstanding) [via]
June 16, 2009
SomethingAwful user's "urban exploration" of his neighbor's house (also known as "trespassing")
Chris Messina's scathing critique of Opera Unite (sending all traffic through Opera's proxies creates more centralization instead of less)
Google asks 50 random New Yorkers, "What's a browser?" (only about 8% knew; Rocketboom got very different answers on the NYU campus in 2005)
Play Mario Off, Keyboard Cat (Internet meme plus chiptunes equals Waxy love)
Sweet Juniper on Andrew WK's "Destroy Build Destroy" kid's show ("It's official: Andrew W.K., world's best babysitter.")
Autotune the News takes on JFK's inaugural speech (everything sounds better autotuned; see also: Winston Churchill and MLK)
Opera Unite (web server hosted in the browser using Opera's proxy servers for a simple URL; file sharing seems the most useful)
Shnabubula's alternate-reality versions of classic videogame music (Super Mario Bros. in a blender)
Alex Payne's Open Ideas (he's publishing his notebook of "someday" ideas, and they're all winners)
June 15, 2009
PS22 Chorus covers Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" (don't stop believin', kids)
Weird Al's "Craigslist" (Doors style parody featuring Ray Manzarek on keyboards, directed by Liam Lynch) [via]
BREADBOX64 (a Twitter client for the Commodore 64/128) [via]
John Martz's IE6 denial message for Momentile.com (new candidate for best error ever)
Diorama, stereoscopic 3D game for the iPhone (I want to see this on the Wii with head tracking) [via]
Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princesses photo series (what happens after the fairy tale's over?)
List of most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com (more accurate stats since they removed the irritating double-click behavior in October)
June 14, 2009
Backbars, Greasemonkey script adds ambient bar charts to social news sites (unobtrusively visualizes popularity on Metafilter, Delicious, Reddit, Hacker News, etc) [via]
Hunch.com, decision-making engine, opens to the public (Caterina's new project is weird and good; worth checking out: the stats methods in the API and their cred system)
Nelson Minar on building social capital in multiplayer games (using an avatar creates a barrier to real-life interaction)
June 13, 2009
E_B_A tells the story behind the "Suing for Hotlinked Images" screenshot (the 2005 conversation is making the rounds again on Digg, Reddit, and Fark, without the followups)
140+ versions of Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson in The Sims 3 (also: Boxxy, Tay Zonday, and Rick Astley all living in one house) [via]
Simon Willison's thoughtful essay on Facebook usernames and OpenID (he also notes that they're not doing an HTTP redirect, instead relying on JS) [via]
ARhrrrr, augmented reality first-person shooter on a handheld (runs on a prototype Nvidia Tegra dev kit; "orange Skittles act like proximity bombs") [via]
June 12, 2009
Ian Bogost on cascading failure from Google's malware detection (Twitter uses it for spam detection, which caused Ian's account to be suspended) [via]
Image: Facesquatting (fixed) (Mat Honan's collecting more examples)
Fleet Foxes singer on the beneficial effects of filesharing on music (he argues that free access to music history creates better musicians)
Mythbuster Adam Savage's Colossal Failures (great talk from Maker Faire on how his failures have changed him) [via]
The Simpsons Minus The Simpsons (hand-editing out the main characters, frame by frame)
Rob Matthews' printed hardbound edition of Wikipedia's featured articles (and it only represents less than 1/1000th of the total articles) [via]
Jim Rossignol on the Fermi paradox and why the aliens stayed home (our grandkids might find space exploration boring compared to next-gen virtual worlds and networks) [via]
Microsia, gorgeous sound game/tool for Windows (feels like an in-depth, HD version of Electroplankton) [via]
Windosill demo, now playable online (the first half of the game from the creator of Vector Park) [via]
June 11, 2009
Trending Topics, tracking Wikipedia zeitgeist (a completely open-source clone of Wikirank built on Hadoop and EC2) [via]
Daily Show visits the New York Times (I don't think they deserved this treatment; the NYT preemptively responded) [via]
Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store (must-read short fiction on data visualization, Google book scanning, and immortality)
Microsoft's Project Natal demo on Jimmy Fallon (Gavin Purcell says the bright red suits weren't for edge detection, but just being silly)
Slate on orphaned tweets (people who post once to Twitter and never return) [via]
Chinese government to require all new computers to ship with "Green Dam" filtering software (ostensibly to remove porn, but it also monitors activity and allows full government control over Internet usage)
June 10, 2009
Evaluating Google vs. Bing with Mechanical Turk (same as my experience, Google has a slim lead for most queries)
Bygone Bureau's feature on the indie gaming scene (interviews with the creators of Gravity Bone, You Have to Burn the Rope, and The Graveyard)
Last.fm's three founders announce their departure (they're leaving at the end of the month, close to the two-year anniversary of their acquisition)
Anil Dash on the future of Facebook usernames (entirely plausible; until Simon writes his up, I'm linking to Chris Messina's thoughtful essay)
June 7, 2009
Blind Search, compare results from Google, Bing, and Yahoo (in my queries, Google has an edge over Bing with Yahoo far behind)
Flixel, a free Actionscript library for building complex games without Flash (used to create Gravity Hook and Fathom, and includes the full source for Mode)
June 5, 2009
Joystiq on Scribblenauts for the DS (its absurdly large vocabulary lets players summon anything from a Kraken to a jackelope)
Alabaster, an interactive fiction fairy tale edited by Emily Short (multiple authors, procedural illustrations, and a tremendous amount of dialogue)
NYT publishes a new photo of the Tiananmen Square "Tank Man" (fascinating to see an iconic moment from a completely new angle) [via]
June 4, 2009
Ron Gilbert plays Secret of Monkey Island, 20 years later (his random thoughts and memories about making the game as he played through)
Ask Metafilter on musical cliches from TV and film (also, Kick Ass Classical ranks the top 100 classical songs by pop culture exposure)
Pocket Retro Game Emulator ($100 handheld plays NES, SNES, GBA, Genesis, and Neo Geo ROMs natively (and most likely illegally)) [via]
June 3, 2009
Google Squared goes live, structured data search (the quality is spotty, but it's still fun to play with; badly missing sorting and data export)
Dave Eggers on the death of print (he's conflating literacy with print, but I'm very excited to see his newspaper prototype) [via]
God Texts the Ten Commandments ("no omg's")
Han Solo, P.I. (don't miss the side-by-side; see also: Star Wars in the style of Macgyver, Dallas, and Airwolf)
The Beatles Rock Band animated intro, by Gorillaz animator Peter Candeland (incredible detail and hidden goodies in the newly-released HD version) [via]
Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions ("the more you ignore it, the cooler you look"; it's almost a supercut)
Ask Metafilter on books that people proselytize (Aaron Cohen compiled a list of books and authors, ordered by most mentions)
June 2, 2009
JD Salinger sues over unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel (a fictional version of Salinger appears as a character in the book) [via]
John Martz's hand-drawn versions of famous album covers (more here and here)
Valve releases plugin to import Sketchup 3D models into Source maps (bring any object from Google's 3D Warehouse into a first-person game)
China blocking Twitter, Flickr, others in preparation for Tiananmen 20th anniversary (I find it fascinating how Chinese citizens view the GFW as an inconvenience or necessary evil)
Johnny Chung Lee reveals he worked on Project Natal (all my doubts about the technology just flew out the window; it is very real)
Steve Wiebe's live E3 attempt to break Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong record (he just started) [via]
June 1, 2009
Dan & naD, a palindromic sketch (related: the What Song Is This? series) [via]
Chris Messina on Michael Moore's advice to Obama on GM (the actionable excerpt from Moore's original essay)
Kevin Kelly's Internet Mapping Project (hand-drawn maps of each person's view of the Internet) [via]
IGN/Gamespy shutting down ClassicGaming.com on August 31 (Jason Scott broke the news last week, this includes all hosted sites)
MTV's new original animated series, DJ & The Fro (like a modernized Beavis & Butthead, mocking YouTube instead of music videos)
Microsoft announces Project Natal, full-body motion capture for the Xbox 360 (control games without a controller, plus gestural media browsing, face recognition and object scanning) [via]
Boone Oakley (ad agency uses interactive YouTube videos as their homepage) [via]
Twitcaps, stream of images posted to Twitter (the most popular list is a glimpse into Twitter's evolving demographics) [via]
Lou Romano's incredible concept art for Pixar's UP (don't miss the color scripts and animated tests; also: NYT interviews Pete Docter) [via]
Telltale Games to release Tales of Monkey Island, five short episodic games (and Lucasarts is remaking the original game with new graphics and sound!)
Crush the Castle (addictive little Flash game, knocking down ragdolls on balancing structures)
xkcd inspires 4chan to turn /b/ into Twilight fan forum (in response to this excellent comic) [via]
David Lynch's Interview Project goes live (interviews with ordinary folks conducted on a 70-day road trip across America; directed by Lynch's son)