Waxy.org: Links Archives: December 2010

Charlie Stross's Reasons to be Cheerful (a brief look back at the 2000s)

Clay Shirky on Wikileaks and the globalization of journalism (even Shirky's "half-formed" thoughts are essential reading)

The Last Roll of Kodachrome Produced (Dwayne's Photo in Kansas developed the final rolls) [via]

Canabalt goes open-source (the game engine's free under MIT license, art and sound copyrighted)

Windows XP simulation recreated in LittleBigPlanet 2 beta (the BSOD is a nice touch) [via]

The Joy of Stats, hour-long BBC doc on infoviz (hosted by Gapminder's Hans Rosling, featuring Stamen, David McCandless, Peter Norvig, and Sep Kamvar) [via]

HaikuLeaks, cablegate poetry (automated with HaikuFinder and this Cablegate parser) [via]

Amanda Palmer's Labyrinth with Sock Puppets (featuring Neil Gaiman as David Bowie With A Mullet)

The Senate in Pixels (also: The Presidents, The Supreme Court, The Beatles, Indiana Jones, and Hitchcock films ) [via]

Andrew Sorenson's Variations on a Christmas Theme (made with Impromptu, a Scheme-based language for live coding performances; more examples) [via]

4chan sex survey responses (not exactly scientific, but still a fun read) [via]

Yahoo!locaust (devastating critique of Yahoo from a digital archivist's perspective) [via]

Legend of Zelda prototype found and ripped (that early Game Over music is creeping me out) [via]

Books of Adam (for fans of funny, wordy autobiographical comics, a la Hyperbole and a Half)

Leaky World (also: Uncle Sam vs. Wikileaks, The Wikileaks Game, and Wikileaks: The Game)

IndieGames' Top 10 Indie Games of 2010 (great list with some obscure picks)

Metafilter on Starship Titanic (don't miss the long comment by Yoz about the remarkable secret role-playing community, still alive after 13 years) [via]

Human Drum Machine, interactive YouTube video (also, a YouTube piano)

Pwned by the Owner (how Zoz recovered his stolen Mac, across the country two years later) [via]

Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks and Cablegate (long, brilliant) [via]

Flight of the Navigator WebGL demo for Firefox 4 (stunning open standards demo with real-time Twitter/Flickr integration to show off beta 8, released today; video explanation)

Dueling Cameras (Noah Kalina and Adam Lisagor, locked in battle) [via]

Christopher Nolan's hand-written Inception timeline notes (don't miss the scanned interview with his brother)

Shaun Inman scratches an 8-bit itch (his Nintendo sound file player is now available on the App Store)

Hidden (awesome app for tracking lost or stolen Macs, free until January)

Jaron Lanier on Wikileaks (I haven't been a fan of his grumpy essays lately, but this was a thoughtful counterpoint)

Good One (a supercut of laughter in the movies) [via]

Jennifer 8. Lee on raw data, APIs, and the growth of "Little Brother" (part of Nieman Labs' predictions for journalism in 2011)

Gawker CTO's memo to employees about the Gnosis hack (painful to read; short version: if you taunt 4chan, prepare for the worst)

Google Books Ngram Viewer (some good examples, like charting the presidents)

Researching the rise of spam on Mechanical Turk (you'd think Amazon would use MTurk to identify and remove spammy tasks) [via]

Last.fm's Best of 2010 (they also released all the aggregate data for you to play with)

Word Lens, augmented reality translation for the iPhone (don't miss the jaw-dropping demo, text recognition and in-place replacement in real-time)

Yahoo! to close or merge Delicious, Upcoming, Fire Eagle, more (I'll write more about this soon, I think)

Flipboard adds support for Google Reader, Flickr (great update to an already great app)

Favimom, a Javascript RPG played with favicons ("kottke.org used Blogospheric Pressure! boingboing.net took 3 damage")

We're Not in Kansas Anymore (added to the supercuts list)

Glenn Greenwald on Bradley Manning's inhumane treatment in detention (seven months in solitary) [via]

DanKam, an augmented-reality iPhone app for the colorblind (I'm red/green colorblind, and it works shockingly well)

Fuck Yeah, Tumblr (inspired by my link, topherchris annexed the name and made a best-of-Tumblr tumblelog)

NYT on the Homeland Security seizures of music blog domains (the DHS ordered Verisign to switch nameservers, which makes all .com domains vulnerable; related: F.A.T.'s Seizure Solidarity)

Twitter's 2010 Year in Review

Flowing Data's 10 Best Visualizations of 2010

Gen I.'s Filmography 2010 (stunning mashup of 270 films released this year) [via]

Visualizing Facebook (intern creates a gorgeous map of connections) [via]

So You Want to Be A Journalist... (related: the WSJ interviewed the CEO of Xtranormal today) [via]

60 Best Tumblr Blogs of 2010 (I need a tumblelog of great new tumblelogs; too bad the obvious name is taken)

very small array's Top 100 Movies by Location (both real and imaginary)

TorrentFreak's snapshot of the public BitTorrent universe (about 30M unique people trading 12,000 TB of unique files, 76% of it video)

IBM's Watson to challenge Jeopardy champions in February (bonus points if it cracks jokes)

Humble Indie Bundle #2 is live (pay-what-you-like for five of the best indie games ever, DRM-free for Mac/PC/Linux)

Brief Analysis of the Gawker Password Dump (they cracked 190k hashed passwords in under an hour; 99% were alphanumeric)

4chan Declares War On Snow ("Operation: Frozen Vengeance")

Gawker hacked, source code and 1.5M user passwords released (some were encrypted but easy to brute-force, so change your passwords! also: the torrent, the readme, and an interview with the group)

Eskmo's "We Got More" (more genius by Cyriak) [via]

Sour's "Mirror," personalized music video (I highly recommend letting it access your Twitter/Facebook accounts)

Portal Done Pro (ridiculous 15-minute speedrun; the audio commentary explains every glitch) [via]

Better Names (for Baby) (some great suggestions, from Astroyd to Zob)

Mashup Breakdown's annotated Night at the Hip-Hopera (for my money, still the best mashup album ever made) [via]

Mining of Massive Datasets (PDF) (free, great textbook from a Stanford CS course)

Intellectual Ventures sues McAfee, Symantec, others for patent infringement (invention extortion)

One Chance (related: You Only Live Once)

Doodling in Math Class (by "recreational mathemusician" Vi Hart)

The Twitter Hulks ("HULK REALIZE HULK SEE LOTS OF OTTO PERMINGER IN SCORSESE.")

All Of Billy Joel's Greatest Hits Played At Once (courtesy of WonderTonic, which is down in the great Tumblr downtime of 2010)

Inception in Real-Time (compressed into four minutes) [via]

Michael Jackson DS game bleats vuvuzelas when pirated (Wikipedia lists more amusing copy-protection schemes)

Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior (great companion to the Pac-Man Dossier) [via]

in a cab

Satromizer OS (glitch art for the iPad, coming soon; see also: Satromizer for iPhone) [via]

Agent 008 Ball, HTML5 game using Canvas and Audio (more about the design process; related: Ben the Bodyguard)

Ask Reddit on culturally untranslatable phrases (don't comb your hair, you're not going to be in the picture)

Torrentfreak on Tubeify, a YouTube music player (brilliant hack built on Last.fm and Billboard data; I got my invite within an hour of applying)

My Holiday Party (designer Everett Hiller has fun with his holiday party photos) [via]

First-person remote-control helicopter tour of NYC (apparently legal under 400 feet for non-commercial use) [via]

Long Felix Salmon essay on the history and future of Gawker (serious inside baseball; Nick Denton explains the redesign, Anil says they're still blogs, play with it here)

Shop Vac (incredible fan-made kinetic typography for a Jonathan Coulton song)

Why is Scrooge McDuck in Germany named after a 7th-century Frankish king? (a Wikipedia deep dive)

Google tweaks algorithm in response to NYT DecorMyEyes story (negative user reviews now affect results)

Fast Company profiles Boing Boing (time to release another data dump so I can update my stats)