Waxy.org: Links Archives: August 2009

NPR on the end of Reading Rainbow (after a 26 year run, thanks Levar)

Pretweeting (virtual stock exchange for Twitter trends) [via]

Moldover's circuit board CD packaging (headphone jack and light sensor makes a portable musical instrument)

Dooce's washer saga (less about the power of Twitter, more the failure of customer service)

Worldwide Lexicon's Firefox Translator (automatic language detection and translation, with community editing tools)

Morph by Skylined (real-time ASCII art Javascript demo)

Google search for "ASCII art" (and it's actually text, too)

Yelp iPhone app adds augmented reality easter egg (in other iPhone news, Apple approved Spotify and Facebook 3.0 is out)

LA Times profile of Jani, a 6-year-old girl with early onset schizophrenia (her father's blog is simultaneously heartbreaking and terrifying) [via]

Visualization of time travel plots in popular TV and film (the source data's in the Google Spreadsheet)

Tile Drawer (drop-dead easy way to run your own OpenStreetMap install on EC2 with custom styles)

Wikipedia to trial moderated edits for articles about living people (the debate is archived here; Jason's predictions are slowly coming true)

The Pirate Bay forced offline by Swedish authorities (they've moved ISPs, but it's still down for me)

Typedia, encyclopedia of typefaces (created by an all-star team; long look into the logo design and great use of Flickr machine tags)

Bill Wyman on why newspapers are failing (his solution is deep local coverage, the only area newspapers weren't made redundant by the web) [via]

xkcd's Tech Support Flowchart (so true; the only thing holding newbies back is the fear of making it worse)

Gabe Askew's fan-made video for Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" (lovely cut-out art direction, I want to play a game in this universe)

8-Bit Trip, insane stop-motion Lego film (like a real-life PC demo)

Ultimate Muscle Roller Legend (mildly NSFW) (the fusion of a number of Japanese memes from 2chan and Nico Nico Douga)

Bokode (very clever barcode design uses out-of-focus photos shot from a distance) [via]

The Boy Who Heard Too Much (Rolling Stone profile of a young, blind phone phreaker) [via]

4chan users launch embarrassing attack on Christian Facebook users (using passwords from a Christian university, they've been posting fake entries on Facebook)

tldr, app to visualize discussions on Reddit (don't miss the gallery) [via]

Paul Ford's Unicode Table for You (go vote for his SXSW panel, while you're at it) [via]

Tipjoy shuts down (they argue it's the lack of official support that stifled growth) [via]

Kit Williams reunited with Masquerade's treasure after 30 years (the original treasure hunt had a bitter ending) [via]

Twitter adding geocoded tweets (this should make real-time news reporting much more viable)

Uncanny parallels between Avatar and Delgo (these screengrabs show a striking similarity)

Tanaka's Friendly Adventure on Kongregate (collect them all! don't miss the hand-drawn map)

The Grownup's Guide to Indie Rock (guide to new music for the layman, written by a 57-year-old convert)

Study finds smaller banner ads more effective than skyscrapers (plus, 94% less likely to make you want to gouge your eyes out) [via]

Mark Pilgrim's preview of Dive Into HTML 5 (just gorgeous) [via]

Pirate Bay torrent archive spawns a clone (fully functional backup created by a fan)

One-time stock photo model tracks her own sightings (related: Unsolicited Commercial Love Story and The Everywhere Girl)

Newly-discovered Disneyland home movies from 1956 (incredible quality; did you know they had a Space Bar?) [via]

Longest Poem in the World (aggregating tweets that rhyme, compiled into an ever-growing poem with 344,000 verses) [via]

Matt Thompson on the missing parts of news coverage (too much focus on "news" and not enough context)

Codepad (like Pastebin with a built-in compiler/interpreter; examples: Hello World, 99 Bottles) [via]

Fig. 8 (elegant Flash game inspired by architectural blueprints and diagrams) [via]

Aaron Zinman's Personas (barcode visualization of "how the Internet sees you")

John Resig's eulogy for _why (he treated his online presence like a temporary sand mandala; don't miss the song)

Hacker/artist _why the lucky stiff deletes projects, online presence (still no clues why he killed his blog, Twitter, Hackety Hack, Why's Poignant Guide, Shoes, Try Ruby, and more)

Shnabubula's alternate-reality Super Mario World medley (live jazz improvisation using classic SNES sample sounds)

Neven Mrgan on Zingerman's product illustrations (staggering amount of love put into an online store)

Internet University (if websites were cartoon characters) [via]

Joanne McNeil on the Daily Death (I've wondered this myself, the effects of a microcelebrity culture aging)

Dinosaur Comics meets Twitter (reload for new ones)

Songs from The Point! (Nilsson tribute with songs by Martha Wainwright, Andrew Bird, DeVotchKa, and Nada Surf)

Kind of Bloop released! (Bygone Bureau wrote a great behind-the-scenes feature about the album)

MSNBC acquires EveryBlock (wow, congrats to the team)

Pirate Bay backup archive available on Pirate Bay (21GB dump of 873,671 torrents on the site, packaged by a user concerned about the sale)

Ars Technica on how ICANN's fees killed domain tasting (from 17 million withdrawn domains in June 2008 to only 58k last month) [via]

Timeline visualization of global media scares (from Y2K to swine flu)

Offworld's gallery of vintage videogame factories (imagining the real-life locations where Tetris's blocks and Sonic's gold rings were made)

Dinner at El Bulli (a travelogue in comic format with video) [via]

Yahoo shuts down Term Extraction API (with a quiet three weeks' notice to developers) [via]

Nieman Journalism Lab's series on the AP's online strategy (asked about Associated Repress, the AP's lawyer said that I'm "wonderful")

Q-BLOCK, 3D pixel art drawing tool (drag to rotate the objects)

Tiny Sketch (Processing competition with submissions limited to only 200 characters)

RECAP, Firefox extension open-sources public court records (if you've ever dealt with PACER, you'll know how vital this is)

District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's short films and commercials (don't miss TempBot and Tetra Vaal; District 9 is 95% positive so far)

Artist Jon Rafman on Google Street View as art (more of his captures on his site)

Know Your Meme's t-shirt shop (YA RLY)

Multitask (87 points on the first try) [via]

How a Macworld cover is made (timelapse of the photography, Photoshop, and magazine design) [via]

NYT Mag cover story on the making of The Beatles: Rock Band (great discussion of the difficulties and appeal of rhythm games) [via]

Second Skin, documentary about the real lives of MMO players (looks great, only available free until the end of tomorrow) [via]

BackUpMy.net, online backup of blogs, tweets, mail, and photos (yes, a cloud service that backs up your cloud services) [via]

Silent Conversation (game that plays with text and words as side-scrolling platforms)

How the Soduko Grab sudoku solver for iPhone works (simple explanation of a practical use of computer vision)

Mike Sacks interviews Dan Clowes for McSweeney's (including gossip about his foibles with the New York Times during Mister Wonderful) [via]

Joshua Schachter's A Tiny Thread, very simple Twitter conversations (208 lines of Python on Google App Engine)

Google opens up next-gen search infrastructure for testing (try it out; seems speedy and seems to rank real-time results higher)

Visualization of a Choose Your Own Adventure book's outcomes (8 out of 42 endings were favorable)

Facebook buys FriendFeed (will it get sucked into the black hole, or help Facebook open up? Techcrunch says it's a talent acquisition)

Ars Technica on the worries of high-frequency algorithmic trading (used for years, it's accelerated since the Wall Street crisis)

Full House, Alternate Intro [via]

Tr.im shuts down, breaking millions of shortened links by year's end (we were warned; someone should call Archive Team)

Waterloo Labs' FPS with real-life guns and shovels (needs more crowbar) [via]

Ice T repairs a Macbook Pro (the YouTube comments are a nice blend of racists and PC/Mac wars)

You Only Live Once (more meta-gaming: This Is The Only Level) [via]

Reddit user compiles George Sodini's Internet traces (includes his Google search history, revealed by exploiting his webmail account) [via]

Kate Miller-Heidke's Facebook song (lyrics here) [via]

Steam's Indie Games weekend sale (curated by Braid's Jonathan Blow and World of Goo's Ron Carmel) [via]

Know Your Meme on Weegee (a brief mention of YouTube Poop, which deserves its own video)

Skulpt (client-side Python interpreter) [via]

Translation Party (Japanese-English translations until reaching equilibrium; more examples: don't panic and don't covet) [via]

Vacation '58 (John Hughes's short story that kicked off his long and wonderful film career)

Sincerely, John Hughes (touching story of his long relationship with a teenage fan turned pen pal)

1944 industrial film about making the Minneapolis Star-Journal (delightful look at how the news was made; the Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy in January)

John Gruber on Apple's censorship of the NinjaWords dictionary app (don't miss Phil Schiller's response which, while thoughtful, doesn't address the App Store's larger issues)

Your World of Text (infinite canvas for collaborative, real-time text; scroll around, explore, and add something) [via]

Mario AI Competition (built on a modified version of Infinite Mario Bros.) [via]

The Smoking Gun unmasks creators of Pranknet, destructive phone hoax group (lulz all around) [via]

Interview with Home of the Underdogs' creator, Sarinee Achavanuntakul (talks about the ethics of abandonware, why she gave it up, and the current revival) [via]

Sticky Light, interact with lasers without a camera or projector (someone needs to commercialize this, it looks like a wonderful toy) [via]

Eurogamer's feature on Tim Langdell's EDGE trademark trolling (they interview both Langdell and Mobigames, quoting emails between the two) [via]

Delicious adds Twitter integration, new search tools (if you don't like the new freshness, the old Fresh page is still around)

Flip Flop Fly Ball, Craig Robinson's baseball infoviz (Ballpark Orientation, Major League Fields, Ball Size Comparison and the Wu-Tang vs. E Street Band) [via]

Bygone Bureau interviews GOOD Magazine's infographic designers (some incredible work, though a few would give Tufte a seizure)

NYT's visualization of music purchasing trends by format (even without any visible axes, it's still understandable; from this op-ed on the rise of streaming)

Transparency Corps, Sunlight Foundation's crowdsourcing project (making government more transparent; check out the leaderboard)