Waxy.org: Links Archives: November 2009

Hollywood vs. New York (scenes of NYC getting destroyed in film, set to Rhapsody in Blue) [via]

Internal disputes kill the CrunchPad (Arrington claims Fusion Garage decided to sell it without them; I'd like to hear their story)

Automatic Mario cover of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" (the amount of work here just hurts my brain) [via]

Roger Avary taken off work furlough, back in prison after Twitter notoriety (too bad, it was shaping up to be a great read)

David McCandless visualizes the safety/efficacy of the H1N1 vaccine (a ton of research boiled down into simple charts; see also: Kottke's explanation of how it's made)

A Life Well Wasted episode 5: "Help" (the best gaming podcast interviews Desert Bus for Hope, plus a lovely Olly Moss poster)

Waze turns crowdsourced mapping into a game (agree with the commenter, it's unfortunate they're not contributing to OpenStreetMap)

27b/6's David Thorne responds to a client about spec work (he's on Twitter)

Wikileaks releases 573,000 private pager messages from 9/11 (a massive privacy breach, Declan McCullagh's trying to find the source; Reddit users are discussing the interesting ones)

Quake 1 ported to Flash with Alchemy (ported by Michael Rennie, source is on Github)

Neven Mrgan's Pie Guy, impressive web game for the iPhone (installed from a webpage, swipe controls, and works offline; 3GS only, older iPhones are too slow)

An academic history of chiptunes (related: 8bitcollective visits CSIRAC, a digital computer that made music in 1951)

Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young singing the Fresh Prince theme (was hoping for Neil himself, but this is a great impression)

Director/screenwriter Roger Avary's tweeting his experience of life in jail (he's on a work furlough, tweeting during the day and serving his sentence at night)

Bioshock cosplay at the Georgia Aquarium (the drill actually works, and the costume's for sale on eBay; how it was built)

McSweeney's: Has Bell Invented the "Telegraph Killer"? (Gizmodo circa 1876)

Simon Willison on Node.js (best explanation I've seen of why it's exciting and how it works)

Nicovideo Redirector (search or watch Nicovideo without registration) [via]

Back to the Future DeLorean mod for Crysis (including support for time travel and flaming tire tracks)

Regretsy gets a book deal (the anonymous author turned out to be April Winchell, collector of audio oddities)

Google Chrome OS Demo (a world without a local filesystem and apps; also, the Chrome UI concept video) [via]

Patrick Moberg's Internet Vices (funny, Tumblr feels more like beer than wine to me)

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's "Heaven Can Wait" (Keith Schofield's surreal video and insane treatment were inspired by FFFFOUND and Reddit, but maybe too explicitly) [via]

YouTube adds machine-translated automatic captions (starting with some partner channels, but auto-timing is available to everyone today)

Microsoft tries to patent Edward Tufte's sparklines (they were recently added to Excel)

Leonard Lin's Retweet Avatars for Greasemonkey (a subtle change, but a big improvement)

Web-ops god John Allspaw leaves Flickr to join Etsy (he's the last of the original Ludicorp team to go) [via]

Laptop Steering Wheel Desk (don't miss the product photos)

Interview with Ralph Eggleston, Pixar's production designer on WALL-E (from last February, but new to me; I didn't know the Axiom had three passenger classes)

NSFW: Animated pixel-art video for Flair's "Trucker's Delight" (warning: very offensive and sexist, but the attention to 16-bit detail by director Jérémie Perin is incredible)

NY Observer on Anil Dash's new government 2.0 incubator project (Expert Labs debuted at Web 2.0 today, funded with a $500k grant from the MacArthur Foundation)

Google's Dan Morrill explains how the Droid autofocus breaks every 24.5 days (this gets second-place for quirkiest Android bug) [via]

Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter on Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns (his style of comedy usually makes me uncomfortable, but this made me laugh)

The Pirate Bay shuts down their tracker for good (they're switching to DHT instead)

How Darren at Link Machine Go found Belle de Jour's identity five years ago (Brooke was part of the early UK blog scene)

ICU64, real-time visualization of Commodore 64 memory (the developer also posted videos of Paradroid and Boulder Dash) [via]

Russell Davies on pretending and "barely games" (his SAP prototype looks like great ambient fun) [via]

NYT Magazine on the indie gaming movement (nothing new here, but good overview with a wonderful closing anecdote from Cactus)

Tim O'Reilly on the pending War for the Web ("more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform")

Jason Scott rounds up Geocities' top 10 most popular MIDI files (along with a torrent with 51,000 MIDIs rescued by Archive Team)

Matt Haughey on the discovery of his brain tumor, treatment, and the Internet's response (there were about 1,000 #mathowielove tweets in 24 hours)

Belle de Jour reveals herself after six year of anonymity (only six people in the world knew, she only told her parents yesterday) [via]

Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd (great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from) [via]

Rogue Amoeba stops iPhone app development after App Store idiocy (I'm with Marco, the only fix is allowing external apps, but it's unlikely) [via]

Numb3rs on IRC ("Luckily, I speak l33t.")

Prank War 8: The Skydiving Prank (hard to say if life-threatening situations are funnier than public humiliation)

301 Works, Internet Archive works to preserve URL shortener data (the shorteners will provide regular backups and hand over data on closure, though TinyURL's conspicuously missing)

Quizipedia (simple game with trivia scraped from Wikipedia entries)

Kill Screen, funding a new art magazine about videogames (sounds like the English analogue of Amusement I was hoping for)

Auto-Tune the News on Kanye, Charlie Bit Me, and Balloon Boy (if you're in NYC next week, go see them perform live)

EyeWriter (F.A.T./Graffiti Research Lab project lets paralyzed artists draw with their eyes)

Know Your Meme on the Autotune meme (special appearance by guest memeologist, Dr. Al Yankovic) [via]

Nicholas Felton's visualization of 13 years of CNN.com traffic (the three biggest days, in order, were the 2004 election, 9/11, and the 2008 election) [via]

Christian Swinehart's epic Choose Your Own Adventure visualizations (everything here is amazing, from the animations to the playable visualization of Meretzky's Zork: The Cavern of Doom)

Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer (like the Two of Us short film, Beatles alternate-history fiction inspired by this SNL sketch)

Typekit launches (huge embeddable font collection, reasonably priced, and very well executed)

The Big Pictr (Flickr photos in the style of The Big Picture) [via]

Twitter's new Trends API will use Yahoo's WOE for locations (also used by Flickr, this cements the CC-licensed WOE data as the web's placename database) [via]

The Beatles Never Broke Up (mashup of Beatles solo albums with a backstory; related: Stephen Baxter's short story, The Twelfth Album) [via]

Paul Rogers draws Name That Movie ("Six drawings per movie, in sequence, no movie stars") [via]

NYT on confusion over how Kiva loans work (nonprofits carefully balancing effective marketing and donor expectations)

Microsoft COFEE, digital forensics tool for police, leaks online (available where you'd expect; sounds like common Windows network utilities with a simple interface)

NYT visualizes the unemployment rate for different demographics (48.5% of young black men without a high school degree; 3.6% of college-educated white women over 25)

Another World level ported to Javascript (in other emulation news, a NES and Gameboy emulator in JS and SNES9x ported to Flash) [via]

Blocktronics' ANSI art tribute to RaDMaN (powered by Viewtronics, Peter Nitsch's gorgeous new Flash 10 ANSI viewer) [via]

Aaron Straup-Cope leaves Flickr, joins Stamen Design (one of my favorite geeks joins one of my favorite companies)

Unreal Engine 3 development kit now free for non-commercial use (huge announcement, along with the recent free release of Unity Indie)

The Big Picture's series on Martian landscapes (Kai's Power Tools in real-life) [via]

Preview of McSweeney's Panorama, their one-shot newspaper (as expected, looks incredibly great) [via]

The Grant-Pattishall Award (congrats, Kellan!) [via]

Birdhouse for Your Soul (Greg Knauss finds one small piece of the historical web)

Google open-sources Closure Tools (JS compiler, along with Google's huge widget library) [via]

Video montage of actors speaking the movie's title (great comments with some missed opportunities; "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to The Taxi Driver?")

The Morning News' Cloud of Atlases (impossible to guess, but look at all the pretty colors)

American Airlines fires UX designer for explaining why their UX isn't great (a lapse of judgment from both American Airlines and an employee who cared too much)

Overheating, photo series of gadgets thrown through walls (from issue 6 of Amusement, the incredible French gaming culture magazine) [via]

Ricardo Autobahn's The Golden Age of Video (insane pop culture video mashup)

The Last Days of Gourmet (sad photo series, reminds me of the dot-com carnage photos)

Put This On (first episode of Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor's Kickstarter-funded video series on clothing)

Jono Bacon's The Art of Community released for free download under CC license (looks fantastic and worth buying) [via]

Eric Testroete's papercraft portrait Halloween costume (incredibly creepy, like videogames leaking into the real world) [via]

Mark Pilgrim's history of the IMG element (told through annotated conversations from 1993) [via]

Every vandalism edit to Nickelback's Wikipedia page (I wonder which edits managed to stay in the longest without detection)

Mike Pusateri's Halloween costume data collection (for the fifth year, he's collected every costume name; this year, "nothing" spiked to #2)

XKCD's movie narrative charts (here's a more serious attempt at Primer's timeline)