Waxy.org: Links Archives: January 2010

HacKey, chart popular keys in your Last.fm favorites (38% of my favorite songs are in C) [via]

Kate Beaton illustrates the Gorey book covers (so good)

Echo Nest previews new APIs (the search_tracks method sounds amazing)

Bram Cohen takes on Freenode (even if the policy's dumb, this isn't the way to handle it)

How to Report the News (from Charlie Brooker's News Wipe) [via]

The Virtual Piano (way more fun than it should be) [via]

Alaska Nanooks 2010 Hockey Intro (true to the spirit of the original, though more polished)

Comedian asks New Yorkers to carry him across Manhattan (155 people carried him 9.4 miles in below freezing temperatures) [via]

Steven Frank on the iPad and a generational shift in computing (the single smartest essay I've read about the iPad yet)

xkcd's Spirit (NASA's own WALL-E)

Brandon Boyer asks indie game all-stars about the iPad (new music apps, cocktail-style gaming, and more complex game genres)

J. D. Salinger, dead at 91 ("Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.")

Rafe Colburn on the iPad and the closed future of consumer computing (I'm concerned it'll shift creation to consumption; even the iPhone was better on that count)

The Prisoner's Dilemma recreated in Mechanical Turk (gauging altruism and how priming changes behavior)

Anil Dash on geek attention on the iPad vs. tonight's State of the Union (a little perspective)

Apple iPad official promo video (starts at $499, unlimited AT&T 3G for $30/month; see Gizmodo's roundup and hands-on)

Nieman Lab's interactive calculator for estimating effects of newspaper paywalls (uses some best guesses from the NYT as an example, though 60% seems insanely optimistic)

David Cole on metagaming and boundaries in reading the web (thoughtful and cleverly designed) [via]

If Global Warming Is Real, Then Why Is It Cold? (cliche watch from editorial cartoons and the funny pages)

Directed Edge opens up recommendations API for free non-commercial use (the first recommendations service worth using)

Roman Cortes' 3D coke can in pure CSS (view the source and the can label)

App.itize.us (the iPhone app blog I've been waiting for, carefully curating underrated gems from the App Store)

Lookwell (new-to-me 1991 pilot starring Adam West, created by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel)

Bandcamp starts record "unlabel" with first vinyl release (no ownership over music, just recouping costs and splitting profits with the artists)

Wisconsin jail bans Dungeons & Dragons (the inmate was serving time for killing a man with a sledgehammer; a new trend?)

Confessions of a Book Pirate (a voracious reader, each book takes him at least 5 hours to scan, OCR, and proofread)

Weird Al directing his first feature film for Cartoon Network (he's writing and directing in the live-action movie, but will only cameo) [via]

Gnop (control the ball) [via]

Robin Sloan on telling stories with interfaces (riffing off the Google Search Stories ads)

Vanishing Point (I'm waiting for real-time music visualizations like this) [via]

VVVVVV (Terry Cavanagh's brilliant new platformer built around a single game mechanic)

CNN's 360° video of Port-au-Prince (don't miss the second and third videos) [via]

YouTube's Music Discovery Project (Pandora-style playlists based around an artist)

Caleb Larsen's sculpture perpetually sells itself on eBay (here's the currently active auction) [via]

OK Cupid's myths of profile pictures (more amazing data diving)

Zeldman on posthumous hosting and the fragility of the creative web (maybe a nonprofit focused on archiving individual authors? Archive.org's wonderful, but it's darkweb)

Joseph Ducreux, 18th century French artist turned 4chan meme ("I've acquired 99 predicaments, but a wench is not one of them") [via]

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are engaged (that's a celebrity couple I can get behind)

The Sixty One undergoes major redesign (compare with the old version; some beautiful, risky decisions)

Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers (Wu Tang vocals with beats built from Beatles samples)

Lukas Ketner's retro style artwork for GET LAMP (from the artist behind the Panic Atari 2600 boxes)

New York Times to charge for frequent access next year (subscribers get unlimited access, everyone else can view a set number of articles per month)

Charting the Beatles (gorgeous work visualizing collaboration, song keys, work schedule by month, and more) [via]

General Larry Platt's "Pants on the Ground" (I can't get this out of my head, so you'll suffer too; the General was a crusader in the Atlanta civil rights movement)

Caterina Fake on participatory media (a rebuttal to Jaron Lanier's paranoid WSJ op-ed)

GameSetWatch's Best of the 2009 Demoscene (if you have a PC that can handle it, watch it real-time instead of the videos)

OK Go explains why their new YouTube video can't be embedded (a microcosm of the current state of the music industry) [via]

WSJ writer follows a man trying to rescue his family in Haiti (the story's being updated in real-time on Facebook)

Baratunde Thurston speculates how MLK might have used Twitter ("I just became mayor of The Albany Jail on @foursquare!")

ASCIImeo, Vimeo videos in text (the block mode is my favorite)

Visual timeline of Crayola color changes from 1903-2010 (Crayola's Law: "The number of colors doubles every 28 years")

2010: Living in the Future (1972 futurism for kids)

Frank Cifaldi's annotated Mr. Gimmick playthrough (obscure NES gem I'd never heard of, the annotations are expertly done) [via]

Google Australia censors Encyclopedia Dramatica in search results (offending someone is a really low bar)

Oink founder cleared of fraud charges (still amazed he was pulling in over $200k in donations a year)

Acme Novelty Library in Chinese (beautiful, well-integrated translations) [via]

Nick Montfort on the origins of the word "Zork" (zork the fweep)

Retro Sabotage's Jumping

Dispersion of sound waves in ice sheets (when nature acts artificial)

Gordon, an open-source Flash runtime in Javascript (SWF v1 support only, with no sound or video naturally, but still) [via]

Google to stop censoring Chinese search results or close China office (they imply the Chinese government intercepted Gmail accounts of activists)

John Kricfalusi's 1998 illustrated letter to a young cartoonist (he's answering questions over on Reddit) [via]

The Kickstarter Awards: Best in Show (fourth and final installment, highlighting the best of Kickstarter so far)

Al Gore requests a typeface tweak (the VP has an eye for type usability) [via]

What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google (the answers match up nicely) [via]

Maciej Ceglowski on six months of Pinboard (by charging a small fee, he's earned enough to work on it full-time) [via]

100 Games Cupcakes (here they all are in one image) [via]

Gumby creator Art Clokey dies (don't miss Gumbasia, his pioneering Claymation film from 1953 that predated Gumby)

Python script takes a webcam snapshot when code commits fail (and posts your frustrated face to Twitter)

Russell Davies on RIG's dataviz Christmas ornaments (the more Twitter followers, the larger the snowman's head)

Newspaper Club announces prices for custom-printed papers (UK-only for now, includes delivery; examples: Last.fm's newspaper charts and Rev. Dan Catt's photo paper)

Zach Gage's Antagonistic Books (from the creator of temporary.cc, a book that burns itself when opened and another that can't be closed) [via]

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (Wherefore the nihilist weeps and cries for 'fair'?)

The Third & The Seventh (a nicely shot, but otherwise unexciting short film, until you realize it's 100% CGI)

Roger Ebert on losing the ability to eat, drink, and speak (his journal's been consistently great lately)

Blink-182's Tom DeLonge tries to sell Vampire Weekend a social network ("call it a space cam")

Boing Boing's guide to the IGF 2010 finalists (videos and descriptions for all 20)

Project 880, summary of James Cameron's original Avatar treatment (more backstory, new characters, and more depth)

Vintage Ad Browser (Philipp Lenssen collected and categorized over 120,000 images from online and offline sources)

The Kickstarter Awards, Part 1 (highlighting the most successful, popular, and prolific projects from our first eight months)

Metafilter community on the tragic death of Brad Graham (I still can't believe he's gone)

Rex's 30 Best Blogs of 2009 (thoughtful list following some interesting trends)

Volker Shreiner's Counter, short film from 2004 (found footage from classic films counts down from 266, mostly using door numbers) [via]

One Frame of Fame (crowdsourced music video, judged by Mechanical Turk and rendered with new frames hourly)

15,740 self-proclaimed social media gurus on Twitter (gurus, ninjas, and experts) [via]

Daniel Raffel's favorite new geek projects of 2009 (an unusually great list) [via]

Spam Assassin scores any email in 2010 as spammy (they hardcoded a regex for 2010-2099 as "grossly in the future")