Waxy.org: Links Archives: December 2009

Adam Parrish on The Joking Computer (a bot that can make up bad puns)

Anil Dash on the perceived vs. actual value of Twitter's suggested user list (most new users aren't active or engaged, so clickthroughs and replies don't change with the influx)

Demo of Proswitcher, multitasking for jailbroken iPhones (the only thing that makes me jealous of the Pre) [via]

DJ Earworm's United State of Pop 2009 (mashing up Billboard's Top 25 of 2009 into a completely new song)

PVRBlog's The Decade of DVR (Matt Haughey gets some help from web superstars for his last post before the transition)

Tuper Tario Tros. (Mario meets Tetris mashup, with a challenging ending)

Robin Sloan's Annabel Scheme (brilliant novella about quantum computing and the digital occult)

Slate on Sweden's Christmas Eve tradition of watching a Disney clip show (in 1997, over half the country watched the animated special, first aired in 1958) [via]

CrowdsMachine (find popular links across all your feeds, and surface a new feed of the results)

Reverse engineering Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton (someone do DJ Shadow and the Avalanches next!)

Alma (haunting short film by a Pixar animator, only viewable for a short time) [via]

4chan founder to speak at TED (I fully expect Anonymous to show up)

Yahoo! to close MyBlogLog next month (what a waste)

Fimoculous's List of Lists 2009 (related: Kottke's best of the decade lists)

Jonathan Zittrain's "Minds for Sale" (great talk on crowdsourcing and the fine line between volunteering and exploitation)

Metaplace closing January 1 (horrible shutdown procedure: ten days' notice during the holidays to save everything manually)

Wired on the Duke Nukem Forever saga (like the Phantom Menace, the lack of constraints can lead to disaster)

HP's face-tracking software is racist (in their official response, they blame "insufficient foreground lighting") [via]

Every day the same dream (think outside the box) [via]

Ed Piskor releases Wizzywig Volume 1 and 2 for free download (fictional comic history about the hacking/phreaking scene; I bought both and am anxiously awaiting Volume 3) [via]

Chris Dixon's anatomy of a bad search result (great followup to Paul Kedrosky's original post about trouble in the Google ecosystem)

Multiplayer Basketball (even a simple basketball game becomes compelling with multiple realtime players)

_why's Estate (an archive of artist/coder _why the lucky stiff's known works) [via]

Swedish Pirate Party launches public Etherpad service (using the newly open-sourced code base)

Pomplamoose, "Always in the Season" (a new Christmas carol, with Anton Patzner on violin and Zoe Keating on cello)

Browser Pong (only works in modern browsers, uses HTML5 audio)

Matt Haughey defends the use of Twitter during personal tragedy (I wonder how much of the criticism stems from perceptions of Twitter as frivolous)

70-minute video review of the Phantom Menace (more than half the length of the film itself)

Dresden Codak's Lantern Season (every one of Aaron Diaz's comics are fantastic; don't miss The Sleepwalkers and Fabulous Prizes) [via]

Michael Johansson's obsessive-compulsive sculpture (packing feats and ordinary objects reassembled to look like model toys)

Kleptones to release new album for free on January 1 at midnight (so exciting; I still think Night at the Hip-Hopera is the best mashup album ever)

Google Maps India evolves driving directions to use local landmarks (street names are often unknown, so they just describe what you'll pass by)

Reddit community forms largest Secret Santa gift exchange ever (4,500 members spent $115k on gifts; here's an interview with the founder)

Mag+, digital magazine UI design concept (the most thoughtful and realistic I've seen)

OK To Go (a collage of hyperspace scenes in film) [via]

Facebook Data team releases study on user ethnicity (they compare it to the demographics of the Internet and United States)

Google Browser Size (this would be great for Analytics, to view your community's actual screen sizes)

Let's Enhance (montage of zoom in and enhance scenes; I blame Ridley Scott) [via]

Plotter Drawings from the 1960s (from the Digital Art Museum) [via]

Desaturated Santa (she should hang out with pixelated girl and polygon guy)

Nifflas releases Saira (PC exploration game, like the Knytt series with a more elaborate storyline and gameplay)

Craigslist unblocks Yahoo! Pipes (good to hear, thanks Jeremy)

Colbert joins Alicia Keys on New York State of Mind ("I own this town from 41st to 47th")

The LOST Underground Art Show (from the gallery that started Crazy 4 Cult 3-D)

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins of "Friendster" Civilization (they were acquired last week for $26M by a Malaysian company; the pre-IPO Google offer could've been worth $1B today) [via]

Brandon Boyer's top 10 indie and iPhone games of 2009 (my top 10 would be virtually identical; I haven't played Saira yet, but soon)

Bygone Bureau on the best new blogs of 2009 (they asked several people, including me, for our favorites)

Capitol Records sues Vimeo over lip dubs (mind-numbingly stupid, the videos are free viral ads for their catalog; related: ASCAP demanding fees for Guitar Hero parties)

How MC Frontalot quit smoking with Dungeons & Dragons (roll a D20 saving throw whenever the GM tries to poison you (i.e. when you feel like smoking)) [via]

Todd McHatton's Christmas Songs (my brother-in-law's free holiday EP, for fans of Van Dyke Parks and Nilsson)

Christmas Light Hero (former Disney Imagineer wires his house to play "Cliffs of Dover," with a Wii and 21,268 lights) [via]

Health insurers paying Facebook gamers virtual currency to oppose health care reform (strangely, the writer quotes a Gmail error as an official response) [via]

Nelson Boles' "This one time..." (otherworldly hand-drawn animation; mood feels like Kevin Huizenga meets Grickle)

Gina Trapani on Dan Bricklin's Note Taker for the iPhone ("30 years after VisiCalc shipped: Another app from me that starts out on Apple hardware")

Matt Haughey selling PVRBlog.com on eBay (180,000 RSS subscribers, no reserve! )

Interactive Fiction Competition 2009 winners announced (several are playable online, but not the winner)

Teux Deux (elegantly-designed to-do list by Swiss Miss and Fictive Kin) [via]

SMBC on the future of generational prejudice

Super Pork and Beans All-Stars (fanmade megamontage of ten years of web memes)

GET LAMP now available for preorder for 25% off until December 31 (an unbelievable deal, the text adventure documentary will be released on two DVDs in March)

Brandon Boyer's top 10 console/handheld games of the year (skewing heavily towards the innovative, quirky, and otherwise underappreciated)

NYT's 9th Annual Year in Ideas (Kickstarter made the cut!)

Kotaku profiles a young mom addicted to Xbox achievements (she's addicted to grinding through terrible games for the ranking)

TW1TT3R ART (ASCII art in 140 characters) [via]

Jason Louv argues that 4chan is the future of human consciousness (a dystopic take, but there's some truth in here, especially related to attention)

The Web Is Large (very funny mashup of tech digerati quotes out of context)

Facebook's new privacy controls default to publicly viewable (expect a large-scale userbase freakout and real-world repercussions)

Pixeljam's Mountain Maniac (it's like an angry, bearded pachinko for the Atari 2600)

Norman Rockwell's photographic inspiration (I never knew his illustrations were drawn from staged photos) [via]

The Manhattan Tongue Project (funny, these look older than 1998 to me)

"Mysterious letters" flood Pennsylvania town (the art project frightened some residents, reminiscent of Boston and Ohio)

Panic's lost applications for the Atari 2600 (incredible retro artwork and game boxes; I've seen these in person and they're ridiculously accurate)

Target point-of-sale system uses game mechanics to speed checkout times (cashiers have informal speed contests and sometimes cheat using a "suspend" function) [via]

SiON, Flash 10 software synthesizer (chippy music and sound effects without samples, uses MML for describing music; try it out here) [via]

Google Chrome launches Mac/Linux betas and support for extensions (how long before an ad blocker tops the charts?)

Virgin Galactic unveils first commercial spaceship ($200,000, cheap! don't miss Branson's introductory video) [via]

Crunchpad renamed to JooJoo, goes on sale Friday for $499 (Fusion Garage claims no contract with Arrington existed at all; note that TechCrunch isn't covering the news at all)

Dean Allen elaborates on why he shut down Favrd (a peek into the dark and needy side of social media; I just wish he'd left the archives online)

WPA Cracker, cloud-based WPA cracking service (400 CPU cluster runs a network capture through 135 million words in 20 minutes ) [via]

Google tests real-time search from Twitter, Facebook, news sources (try it here; it's like a live, expanded version of this Greasemonkey script I love) [via]

Beatles 3000 (reminds me of Idiocracy's Time Masheen (amazingly, not on YouTube))

Dean Allen shuts down Favrd without notice (good discussion on Zeldman's entry)

Effect Games (web-based toolkit for making and sharing hosted JS games; see the platformer tutorial for an example)

Phoenix on La Blogotheque's Take Away Shows (directed by Vincent Moon in Paris)

Michael Jackson anonymously co-wrote music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (a gaming urban legend confirmed; here's some audio samples)

Paul Spinrad's unpublished 1988 Ayn Rand "interview" for Wired (culled entirely from quotes from her published work, interviews, and marginalia)

Said the Gramaphone's 75 Favorite Songs of 2009 (great list, wonderful writing, and a 315MB download)

Sports Illustrated's design concept for a tablet-based magazine (also, the NYT's Article Skimmer is a more practical experimental UI for online news)

Google launches Public DNS service (lookups are permanently logged but not shared inside Google; 8.8.8.8 is a great IP)

CutCopyPasteGnome (other games I've enjoyed recently: The Next Floor, Saut, and Continuity)

Too Much Joy's Tim Quirk details a Warner Bros. royalty statement (is the lack of transparent accounting due to malice, stupidity, or both?) [via]

Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson no longer identifies with right-wing (feels more like he shifted his own priorities, from foreign policy to science)

Craigslist blocks Yahoo! Pipes (Pipes makes it hard for them to stop commercial use of the feeds, but this is excessive) [via]

Mark Coleran's portfolio of fake interface design for films (I liked his comments on designing the Bourne Identity UIs)

Google Zeitgeist 2009 (Paranormal Activity was the fastest-rising U.S. query this quarter!?)

Khoi Vinh on the design of Basic Maths, his new Wordpress theme (I love seeing his design process)