November 2009 - Waxy.org

November 30, 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 #

November 29, 2009

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

November 27, 2009

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

November 25, 2009

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 #

November 24, 2009

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 #

November 23, 2009

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 #

November 22, 2009

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 #

November 20, 2009

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) #

November 19, 2009

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) #

November 18, 2009

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 #

November 17, 2009

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 #

November 16, 2009

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" #

November 14, 2009

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) #

November 13, 2009

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 #

November 12, 2009

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 #

November 11, 2009

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