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October 30, 2009
GameCity Squared's 15-Pixel Megamix (extremely minimalist interpretations of 12 different games)
October 29, 2009
Lauren McCarthy's Happiness Hat (it measures your smile and stabs you if you're not smiling sufficiently) [via]
October 28, 2009
Auto Tune de Nieuws (needs an angry Dutch gorilla)
Facebook prank memorializes living person (the Facebook team should allow an email veto, or at least require better documentation) [via]
2D Boy's pay-what-you-like World of Goo results wrapup (don't miss the breakdown by OS and country) [via]
FreeForm's short film on the Open Internet (impressive set of interviewees, directed by Jesse Dylan of Yes We Can fame)
Using Flickr as a paintbrush (coloring overhead maps based on the dominant colors of photos taken on the ground) [via]
October 27, 2009
Football Hero, three-story-tall Guitar Hero controlled with soccer balls (they used pressure pads with Arduino boards wired up to Frets on Fire) [via]
Chris Ware's Halloween cover and comic for the New Yorker (the masks that grown-ups wear)
Interactive Fiction Competition 2009 (14 of the 24 nominees are playable online; Emily Short has a list of reviewers, as well as her own)
John Resig on the serious spam issues with Google Groups lists (if you want to know which areas of big companies are being ignore, watch for spam taking over)
October 26, 2009
Amazon launches Relational Database Service (MySQL 5.1 with automated backups)
Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer's "A Piece of My Mind" (new to me, love the sound; if you like that, try his chap-hop medley) [via]
Graphic history of newspaper circulations from 1990-2009 (related: the Christian Science Monitor is finding success after killing their print edition) [via]
Facebook games analyzed by an MMO player (interesting, though cynical, perspective of the underlying mechanics)
Playing guitar-less Guitar Hero with a muscle-computer interface (they should add a heart monitor that triggers star power when things get intense)
Google's Social Search experiment goes live in Labs (a little module with content from your Reader subscriptions and Gmail contacts)
Brandon Boyer's feature on Machinarium's concept artwork (if you haven't already, buy it for PC, Mac or Linux)
Jonathan Puckey's tool-assisted Delaunay vectorization portraits (don't miss the video at the bottom showing a conversion) [via]
Facebook memorializes profiles for people who have passed away (they no longer show up in Suggested Users and privacy's increased)
October 25, 2009
xkcd's homage to Geocities (Yahoo! Ate My Balls)
October 24, 2009
A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database (authoritative source for arcane timezone trivia)
Explaining the math behind ASCIIp0rtal (surprisingly understandable) [via]
October 23, 2009
iPhone game developer looks at piracy rates for their app (vaguely related: World of Goo's pay-what-you-like sale results)
October 22, 2009
Hosting Your Windows 7 Torrent Party [via]
Google Reader adds personalized sorting and recommended items (so far, the "magic" sorting is pretty great)
Torley's review of the Plogue Chipsounds VST plugin (faithfully recreates 9 vintage sound chips, including the 2600, C64, and NES; on sale for $75)
October 21, 2009
TSA responds to the "TSA took my son" blogger (blogger insisted first video was altered, they responded with raw footage from nine angles)
Everything is Terrible's Internet for Kidz (the web sure looked different back then)
Small Worlds (short, lo-fi exploration game that exposes the map as you play)
Flickr adds face tagging (great implementation, I hope it makes its way to the API)
October 20, 2009
ChinaSmack on Happy Farms, an insanely popular Chinese MMO (they were forced to limit signups to 2 million users per day)
Google Street View Guys (Dan Meth imagines life as a Street View driver) [via]
iRobot's morphing blob robot takes its first steps (hmm, this seems familiar) [via]
Mark Pilgrim on his publisher's reaction to the resale of his GNU-licensed book (funny, the copyright notice from the print version is completely contradictory) [via]
October 19, 2009
Snarkmarket's Robin Sloan posts Twitter's #5,000,000,000 tweet (technically, they stopped using sequential IDs in March 2007)
Pixar intro parody (nice touches abound, like the prison inmates) [via]
Translating Picture Books: Where the Wild Things Are (academic paper dissects the German, Swedish and Finnish translations and the visual cues they used)
October 17, 2009
Brandon Hardesty Discovered Something Amazing! (AMAZING!)
Machinarium (new point-and-click adventure from the creator of Samorost and its sequel)
October 16, 2009
Neven Mrgan's tale of the phantom Mint.com account (he deleted his account with confirmation, and they kept both his login and financial details active)
Raphaël, JS vector graphics library (interactive charts and animation, and works perfectly on the iPhone)
Reenacting Pulp Fiction with Google Wave (also Wave-related: a believable defense of Wave for team collaboration)
October 15, 2009
Scott Baio is a Twitter jackass (I hate sharing a last name with that guy)
NYT on San Francisco Panorama, McSweeney's one-off newspaper (don't worry, the $55 price is for a year's subscription) [via]
Jason Scott's The Atomic Level of Porn (great NSFW talk covers the early history of digital porn, including teletype, BBSes, and games)
6-year-old boy floats away in homemade helium balloon (at this moment, the scary live video shows him flying through the Colorado skies; update: he wasn't inside)
October 14, 2009
The Billion Dollar Gram (relative spending visualized, with data on Google Spreadsheets)
Metafilter user's story of creating the first "Under Construction" animated GIF (includes a perfectly preserved animated GIF archive)
Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, and the Computer (includes Bukowski's poem about the 16-bit Intel 8088 chip) [via]
October 13, 2009
Artwiculate, a Twitter word game (extra points for playing the game without your friends realizing it)
Chris O'Shea's Hand from Above (augmenting reality with pure silliness) [via]
Ubisoft's career choices for girls (depressing)
What's Easier to Understand Than Google Wave? (warning: turn your sound off first) [via]
10/GUI (clever UI concept replaces the mouse with 10-finger multitouch) [via]
Guardian gag order lifted after social media explosion (#trafigura is still a trending topic on Twitter)
Google launches Building Maker (crowdsourcing 3D buildings for Google Earth by making it playful)
October 12, 2009
Guardian gagged from reporting parliament debate (reporting on their inability to report; it seems to be related to this issue) [via]
Swoopo Profits Greasemonkey Script (exposing how much money they're duping people for)
Derek Powazek on SEO (from the comments: "SEO consultants are just web designers who are incapable of doing the other 90% of the job")
Visualizing the safety of the HPV vaccine (in short: extremely safe, but costs $360 so insurance companies are fighting it)
October 10, 2009
Boing Boing Classic (Justin decided to do something about their recent redesign; update: he stopped updating it)
Team Fortress 2's Prop Hunt mod (funniest mod I've ever seen; one team spawns as props and has to hide from the other team)
October 9, 2009
Jason Scott on the Geocities' Under Construction image archive (Geocities closes forever in only two weeks)
BitTorrent communities using CSS history hack to ban users (first time I've seen the technique used for banning; it works in every major browser)
Game Informer's exclusive coverage of Epic Mickey, Warren Spector's dystopic Disney game for the Wii (the new concept art with Small World, Magic Kingdom, and Haunted Castle references is insane)
October 8, 2009
Volkswagen turns a Stockholm subway staircase into a piano (66% more than normal chose the stairs over the elevator) [via]
The Art and Motion of Beatles: Rock Band (the MK12 chapter videos are each amazing)
Brandon Boyer on the end of Offworld, my favorite gaming blog (fortunately, he's writing columns for Boing Boing and working on a big new project)
October 7, 2009
Video: Generating speech with a piano (here's a similar project explaining how it was done) [via]
October 5, 2009
Gizmodo on Photosketch (jaw-dropping tech demo turns stick figures to Internet photocollages; the paper has more examples) [via]
Law & Order SVU features Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (used as a forensics tool)
Aaron Swartz posts his FBI file (opened after Aaron downloaded 19M court documents for Resource.org)
FTC requires bloggers to disclose freebies or payments for reviews (regulating blogging for the first time) [via]
October 2, 2009
Rev. Dan Catt interviews Kids on DSP (their new "reactive album" is built on RjDj, changing music based on your input)
Dark stalking on Facebook (on teasing private information out of FQL, even for users with maxed-out privacy settings)
Google removes Pirate Bay homepage from search results (update: it was a mistake)
October 1, 2009
Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe (accurate, entertaining, and occasionally insightful primer on gaming history; all six parts)