Waxy.org: Links Archives: October 2010

Archive Team releases massive Geocities archive (at 641 gigs, officially the largest torrent on The Pirate Bay)

Dead Drops (USB drives cemented into NYC walls for anonymous, public filesharing)

Firesheep, simple session hijacking on public networks for Firefox (the ethics of making it easy for non-techies to spoof Twitter/Facebook/etc accounts is being hotly debated)

Reddit users list the most expensive mistake they've ever made (hard to beat the Google one, but plenty of great mechanical mishaps in the comments)

Corporate Climber (one of Pixeljam's best; I recommend taking the fiery door)

MuckRock (tool to browse, track, and facilitate FOIA requests)

Anil Dash on types of app stores (with some preliminary data on the size of each)

Comics artist Steve Lieber takes on 4chan comics sharers, everyone wins (check out the sales boost after being bootlegged)

Penny Arcade community recreates Bioshock's Rapture in Minecraft (quite possibly the most insane construction project I've seen so far)

Dalton Caldwell's lessons from the death of Imeem (great talk covers the challenges facing both music startups and a dying music industry)

Super Twario turns Twitter into a side-scrolling platformer (related: Littlecosm)

Get Home (also good: Thomas Was Alone)

Swivel founders interviewed about its closure (unfortunately, the infoviz platform had less than 10 paying customers)

Lying to My Kids (related: Michael Buffington's Scandalous Lies I've Told My Children)

Frank Chimero's How to Have An Idea (related: Olly Moss shares his process behind a poster design)

Gene Simmons threatens Anonymous (not surprisingly, his site's still inaccessible)

Coachelletta, tilt-shift video of Coachella 2010 (interview with the creator on how it was made) [via]

Echo Nest adds personalization APIs (the potential applications for this are huge)

Unfunny Things takes on The Oatmeal (in hindsight, this is unfair; I wish every SEO would quit their job and start making original content)

Tate Modern fills Turbine Hall with 100M porcelain sunflower seeds (hand-crafted by 1,600 Chinese artisans over two years)

Diminished Reality (German researchers demo real-time object removal from live video)

MovieReshape, manipulating body proportions in arbitrary video footage (incredible video demo from this year's SIGGRAPH Asia) [via]

99chan user claims to spend two years in prison for armed robbery, tells story (gripping read, but Metafilter users are calling this one a troll; lots of questionable details) [via]

Frames of Reference, physics instructional film from 1960 (don't miss the elaborate setup at 17:05)

Infinite Blank, collaboratively-drawn 2D platformer for Mac/PC/Linux (reminds me of Minecraft multiplayer meets MS Paint)

Antoine Dodson performs Bed Intruder Song at the BET Hip-Hop Awards (his first live performance, with Michael Gregory on backup)

Adam Saltsman breaks down the mechanics of Canabalt (when the game starts, the character's running over 20 miles per hour in game scale)

New footage of Eric Stoltz in Back to the Future (all the scenes will be on the Blu-Ray rerelease of the trilogy)

OK Cupid crunches the numbers on the gay vs. straight divide (debunking stereotypes about both orientations, and confirming some others)

Minecraft Interstate (sped up 8x, it's a half-hour minecart trip in real-time)

Canvas Rider (HTML5 Line Rider with community-created levels)

Processing.A4 (Basil Safwat ports a Processing script to cardboard, pen, and paper)

Austin Seraphin goes starwatching with an iPhone (fascinating audio demonstrates what it's like to be blind and spotting constellations)

WonderTao (mashing up Alice in Wonderland and the Tao Te Ching with Markov chaining) [via]

Google develops cars that drive themselves (1,000 miles autonomously, 140,000 miles with occasional human control)

Soylent, Microsoft Word add-on uses Mechanical Turk to crowdsource editing (ask turkers to change paragraphs to past tense or fix your grammar)

MongoDB lead's postmortem on Foursquare's extended downtime (they weren't monitoring and hit RAM limits, and Mongo's hard to recover from failures)

How the Glif iPhone stand went from bits to atoms (free CAD software, short-run 3D printing and injection-moulding, and Kickstarter to fund it all)

Dinner Date (upcoming game about being stood up for a date) [via]

Disney's California Adventures to open Flynn's Arcade recreation (with classic arcade games and custom-minted tokens)

Hollerado's "Americanarama," human 8-bit music video (love the bass tablature at the 1:40 mark and Guitar Hero at 2:30) [via]

Reddit users note tacky BP America sponsored posts on Digg (the article seems to be gone from Digg)

Mirrored Las Vegas hotel turns into parabolic solar cooker (Wired's Rhett Allain runs the numbers; make your own!)

Software Evolution Storylines (a new visualization from the creator of code_swarm) [via]

Textagon (another fun Adam Mathes project)

Mr. Doob ports a classic IE6 effect in HTML5 (lulz) [via]

Uffie's "Difficult" (very similar to Gondry's Kylie Minogue and Chemical Brothers videos)

.ly registrar pulls Violet Blue's domain for offensive content (and they're now saying domains under 4 characters are for Libyans only)

0boxer (Chrome/Safari extensions add simple game mechanics to Gmail) [via]

xkcd's updated Map of Online Communities (view it large)

Peter Freitag's Private Stages (the opposite of bubbling?)

Father and son send weather balloon to space, record results (best dad ever)

Adam Rogers on what Batman taught him about parenthood ("Bwana Beast did not die in vain.")

River of the Net (stream of ten-second videos uploaded by users, by Ryan Trecartin and David Karp) [via]

St. Petersburg Times' wonderful obit, written in response to anonymous online troll (touching article about a 48-year-old dishwasher's life)

Visualizing.org (GE and Seed Media's new infoviz site, including a db of data sources)

NYT on the cause of the DJIA "Flash Crash" in May (unintended effects triggered by a Kansas firm's automated $4.1 billion sale)

Games for Change Festival posts talk videos (day two is over here) [via]

Notch announces major Minecraft update for Halloween (new monsters, craft a watch and jack-o-lanterns, catch fish, biomes, and more)

You're Stealing It Wrong: 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles (Jason Scott drops some computer history knowledge at Defcon)

Jonathan McIntosh's Right Wing Radio Duck (exceptional remix mashes up classic Disney cartoons with Glenn Beck audio into a coherent narrative)

Seaquence (experimental music sequencer in a Petri dish) [via]

Marc Hedlund on why Wesabe lost to Mint (learning from a startup failure)