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September 30, 2009
Cabel Sasser and the Kashiwa Mystery Cafe (cafe as collaborative art)
Sophie Blackall's illustrated Craigslist Missed Connections (the NYT interviewed her about the project) [via]
September 29, 2009
Nerdrock band uses entire Zork walkthrough as lyrics ("I hate grues.") [via]
Google Docs adds free OCR conversion API (throw it into the OCR toolbox)
Os Gameboys' Super Mario Bros. medley (this Brazilian band does the best live Mario cover I've ever seen) [via]
OKCupid's analysis of race and religion in online dating (more fascinating dataporn)
September 28, 2009
Ed Champion edits every product mention from a single Jay Leno show (related: Bill Hicks on Jay Leno)
Fall on Your Sword's Back to the Ship (from the creators of Shatner of the Mount, mashing up the brilliant audio from the Kasper Hauser comedy podcast)
We Are Colorblind (design patterns for colorblind users; one of my favorite examples and how they fixed it)
September 27, 2009
Dan Bull responds to Lily Allen's anti-filesharing drama (in case you missed it, Techdirt was at the center of the drama)
September 24, 2009
Pomplamoose's cut-up Single Ladies cover (loving their other covers, too) [via]
DocumentCloud adds MSNBC, New Yorker, Trib, WaPo, and more to primary-source news database (the entire list is incredible, and all the code is open along the way)
Hipster He-Man (illustrator envisions Masters of the Universe meets American Apparel)
One sentence contained in every HTML tag in alphabetical order (almost, view source to see where he cheated) [via]
No Signal (massive supercut of cell phone cliches in modern horror films) [via]
September 23, 2009
Nokia to buy Dopplr? (I feel mixed emotions with acquisitions lately; thrilled for the team, sad for the community)
Cabel Sasser remixes the Windows 7 Party marketing video (from the company that brought you the Microsoft Songsmith commercial)
September 22, 2009
ASCIIpOrtal released for Windows, Mac, Linux (I mentioned it when it was just a mind-bending screencast)
Flickr gallery of the Sydney dust storm (is there life on Mars?)
Chrome Frame plugin turns Internet Explorer into Chrome (Alex, you sly dog)
Paul Ohm on anonymization and reidentification of the Netflix Prize 2 dataset (don't miss Paul's research paper, which explains even innocuous movie ratings can reveal your political, religious, and sexual leanings) [via]
September 21, 2009
Icycle, ride a tricycle naked through the next Ice Age (Flash game with gorgeous art direction)
September 19, 2009
Emoji Dick (using Kickstarter to hire Mechanical Turkers to translate Moby Dick to a CC-licensed book of emoji icons)
September 18, 2009
Fan replaces nearly every sound in Half-Life 2 with his own voice (reminds me of Petra Haden's acapella version of The Who Sell Out) [via]
SquarePixelz, collection of five vintage videogame films (hasn't been updated since April 2008, but these all look great)
September 17, 2009
Time Fcuk (very quirky lo-fi platformer by Edmund McMillen)
Deep Green, the pool-playing robot (don't miss the augmented reality pool at the 2 minute mark) [via]
List of all 22,802 spawnable objects in Scribblenauts (and the developer says it's not even a complete list)
September 16, 2009
Scientists cure colorblindness in monkeys with gene therapy (exciting news, since I'm red-green colorblind, along with 8% of all white males)
Monetizing the Hate (Dooce publishes her hate mail; for the full effect, read the backstory and turn off AdBlock) [via]
Incredible, awesome, amazing Apple keynote (supercut of every superlative) [via]
Christopher Niemann's Good Night and Tough Luck (very funny painted infographics from Abstract City, his illustrated blog)
September 15, 2009
Khoi Vinh's Craigslist redesign for Wired (also: Craigslist redesign from SXSW 2006)
Nick Montfort's Interactive Fiction suggestions for Fall 2009 (updated list of ten games, a perfect primer to the genre)
Modern Pixel Art (hand-drawn subpixel renderings of favicons; see also: his teeny, tiny typeface)
Lukas Biewald demonstrates CrowdFlower (just launched today, amazing tool makes crowdsourcing tasks dead simple)
OK Cupid analyzes 500,000 intro emails to give online dating advice (self-effacing terms made men's messages more appealing, but didn't affect women's) [via]
September 14, 2009
Book Titles If They Were Written Today (many more in Kottke's comments) [via]
Infinite Mario AI contest winner releases source code (don't miss the slo-mo video of the mouse-controlled AI as it analyzes every possible path in real-time) [via]
September 13, 2009
Philadelphia shutting down all public libraries in October (discovered via the Internet Archive's new blog) [via]
Facebook pranks Techcrunch with a working "fax this photo" feature (I'm late on this, but it's still hilarious)
Stamen and Radian 6's MTV VMA visualization of Twitter activity (as I watched, the Kanye bubble exploded because of this debacle) [via]
Justin Hall on shutting down PMOG and starting Dictator Wars ("If someone can't figure out what to do in the first five minutes... you are hosed.") [via]
September 11, 2009
Everything Is Terrible's Advanced DOS Strategies (always format b:)
UK PM issues official apology for persecution of Alan Turing (the result of a petition from 31k British citizens, including Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry)
Llamasoft's vintage footage from 1980s computer conventions (feels like E3 circa 1986)
September 10, 2009
How one team tracked down missing Wired reporter Evan Ratliff (part of the contest published in last month's Wired; another perspective from the ground) [via]
September 9, 2009
Google's undocumented embeddable PDF viewer (death to Acrobat Reader!)
September 8, 2009
Birds on the Wires (transcribed from nature) [via]
Designing a Popularity Algorithm (with examples from Hacker News, Reddit, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon) [via]
Adam Mathes compares "new entry" UIs on blogging services (only Wordpress and Twitter have inline posting tools on the homepage)
The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions (phone call trumps text message trumps Twitter)
September 7, 2009
O'Reilly ends Etech conference (very sad to see it go; I heard the last one was great though sparsely attended)
September 5, 2009
C64 emulator for the iPhone approved by Apple (as far as I know, the first official emulator in the App Store)
Piano instrumental version of Auto-Tune the News #2 (at 1:38, very thin ice; also: The Gregory Brothers on CNN)
Gawker crowdsources Russian translation of GQ's Putin article (Conde Nast's gone to great lengths to keep the article hidden) [via]
September 4, 2009
MC Frontalot releases "Diseases of Yore" single featuring Jonathan Coulton (how could I not link this? a song about medieval medicine) [via]
The Beach Boys' rehearsals from 1967 (related: isolated vocal tracks)
Extensive photo study of corridors in sci-fi movies (apparently via myself)
Japanese programmers' hidden gossip in 8-bit Famicom games (one message wasn't discovered until 2007) [via]
What the Internet Knows About You (exploiting the old CSS :visited trick)
Ben Fry visualizes changes to Darwin's Origin of Species over time (changes across six editions and 13 years; more on the project)
Smule and T-Pain release auto-tune app for the iPhone (as seen in Auto-Tune the News)
September 3, 2009
Ben Lee, Lou Barlow release new Noise Addict album for free (using Bandcamp, their first new album in 13 years) [via]
Derek Yu's Spelunky hits 1.0 (free procedurally-generated platformer for Windows, highly recommended) [via]
Infomercial Hell (from Everything Is Terrible, who also recently released a DVD) [via]
September 2, 2009
Auto-Tune the News #8 (featuring T-Pain; yes, really)
AT&T dumps Kevin Mitnick as a customer (rather than fix their security issues, they asked him to leave)
GameCyte on the history and psychology of game achievements (a year old, but new to me)
Robin Sloan's Google Adwords experiment for naming fictional characters (testing to see which names are most compelling to random Google users)
Verizon the latest ISP to close free Usenet access (joining AT&T, Time Warner, and Sprint; only a handful of paid feeds will be left, which will be easy for the RIAA/MPAA to attack)
Media outlets paying sources in Dugard (one source claimed her Facebook page was hacked by reporters) [via]
September 1, 2009
Sunlight Labs (opening government through code and design; check out the projects and vote for ideas) [via]
Canabalt (atmospheric, one-button platformer; just needs checkpoints and more story)
David McCandless visualizes recent swine flu activity (using data from the Guardian Datastore)