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January 31, 2011
Readability launches as subscription service (gorgeous design; 70% of fees go to publisher you're reading)
Al Jazeera English streaming live on YouTube (without question, the best coverage of the Egypt uprising)
Canvas launches first public release (if you're waiting for an invite, Techcrunch posted screenshots)
Speak to Tweet (Google and SayNow's free service to tweet voice messages by phone from Egypt)
Keanu Reeves on the "Sad Keanu" meme (found on Know Your Meme's monthly review) [via]
10 Google Commandments (more at Commissioning) [via]
Axe Cop: The Movie (based on the brilliant webcomic written by a five-year-old boy)
Conductor (Alexander Chen turns the NYC subway system into an HTML5 string instrument)
Sarien.net gets Activision's official approval to simulate Sierra games (browser versions of each initial game in the series are fine; sequels and iPad port are not)
January 28, 2011
Al Jazeera's live stream of the Egypt protests (good context at Reddit and Metafilter, and Xeni has a great roundup; liveblogging at the NYT and Guardian)
Nate Silver on approval ratings and re-election odds (modeling a president's chances based on historical approval ratings)
January 27, 2011
Egypt government shuts down all Internet access ("an action unprecedented in Internet history") [via]
Traps [via]
Making a BoingBoing API with FluidDB in an evening (dumping 64,000 posts into their public shared database; read ntoll's intro to FluidDB)
January 26, 2011
BBC Radio's Secret History of Social Networking (the first episode covers BBSes and the first web-based social networks) [via]
Zero Punctuation on Minecraft (it hit one million copies sold two weeks ago)
Live-action LittleBigPlanet adventure in one take (love the a cappella music and effects) [via]
Ivan Guerrero premakes Pixar's "Up" as a 1960s film (he also made a shot-by-shot breakdown) [via]
Print Stuff (Guido Tamino wants the world to send things to his inkjet printer) [via]
Kevin Smith's screening experiment for Red State (skipping all existing middlemen to show his film city-by-city at $70 a ticket)
January 25, 2011
White House's interactive State of the Union 2011 (the speech is basically a geek call-to-arms)
Boing Boing releases complete dump of every post (time for me to update my Boing Boing stats)
January 24, 2011
Cathode, vintage terminal emulator for OS X (looks great in full screen)
Wolfenstein 1-D (the legendary FPS converted to a single-pixel line)
MIT researchers demonstrate 15 fps holographic display with Kinect (one guess what film they referenced for their tests)
Foursquare's 2010 activity visualized (useless fact: 224 Wendys checked in at a Wendy's last year, but only one's a mayor)
January 23, 2011
Nancy Duarte visualizes MLK's I Have A Dream speech (categorizing each phrase by present vs. future tense and subject matter on a timeline) [via]
January 22, 2011
Security guard's photos from the Back to the Future set (posted in 2007, but somehow, I've never seen these before today) [via]
They Were There (a 30-minute short film about IBM by Errol Morris with music by Philip Glass) [via]
January 21, 2011
The Dow Piano (a bit more upbeat: Music of Currency Exchange Rates) [via]
CNN sportswriter tracks down his online haters (this sounds like a reality show waiting to happen) [via]
ScentScape to add smells to games and videos (revenge of the Digiscent iSmell; finally, we'll be able to smell 4chan) [via]
Infocom acquires Movable Type and the Six Apart brand (no, not that Infocom)
January 20, 2011
Tracking streaming vs. rental availability for 2010's box office hits (only four of last year's top 50 are streaming on Netflix, but 25 films for rental on iTunes)
Horoscoped (meta-horoscope derived from 22,000 scraped horoscopes)
Dan Provost's postmortem on making the Glif (all the tools used for two guys to take a physical product from idea to mass market in five months)
Cowclickification (Ian Bogost takes his parody of Facebook Games to the next logical level)
January 19, 2011
Evan Roth's Mashed Up Mashup (mashing up Girl Talk with Girl Talk) [via]
Starborn (a five-minute interactive story; type the capitalized words to play) [via]
January 18, 2011
Big Picture creator Alan Taylor moves to The Atlantic (I interviewed Alan the month it launched; it now gets 8M pageviews monthly)
January 17, 2011
Aled Lewis' Make Something Cool Every Day (my favorite: Haters Gonna Hate-Bit) [via]
Das Racist's Who's That? Brooown! (playable ode to 8-bit and EGA-era gaming)
Plastic.com to shut down one month after 10 year anniversary (get nostalgic with the 2001 press release; I love the Kurt Andersen quote) [via]
ProPublica's guide to scraping data (using free tools to get structured data out of messy HTML, PDFs and Flash) [via]
Music for Shuffle Mode (he hid the transition glitches by incorporating them into every track) [via]
Pong, Breakout, Pac-Man, and pinball played with living paramecium (the full videos go deeper, with several more games)
January 15, 2011
"Still Alive" in Minecraft (note blocks are new in beta 1.2) [via]
January 14, 2011
Clay Shirky celebrates 10 years of Wikipedia (it has its faults, but it's still a collective wonder)
Gizmodo on one MMO's attempt at crowdsourced justice (self-managing communities are difficult to design; I hope they pull it off)
Grand Theft Auto Frictionless (setting the wheel friction to a negative number wreaks havoc with physics) [via]
Death Wears A Snuggie (first-person account of manning a Wyoming nuclear missile silo) [via]
January 13, 2011
Jeopardy practice match with IBM's Watson supercomputer (with Watson's answer certainty displayed in real-time)
Gabriela Herman's Blogger Portraits (reminds me of Phillip Toledano's portraits of gamers and phone sex workers)
bieber.ly (update: cease and desisted already! ) [via]
Every Line of Dialogue in The Lost Boys is "Michael" (all 114 of them; added to the list) [via]
January 12, 2011
Google Translate for Android adds real-time conversation mode (the Babel fish is near)
Nominees for Reddit's Best of 2010 Awards (an amazing community, the comment nominees are brilliant)
reblololo's Studies 1 (also, Mona removed)
A Day in the Future (everything is amazing)
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? (or: how technology can make even 22-year-olds feel old)
January 11, 2011
A gadget's life (interactive graphic tracks the lifecycle of popular tech adjusted for inflation) [via]
Google Chrome to drop support for H.264 video (kind of baffling, considering Flash is built into their browser)
Why Twitter challenged the secret Wikileaks subpoenas (as Wired said, "Twitter beta-tested a spine") [via]
January 10, 2011
oops, found video of camera drops (old, but new to me; brilliantly edited, winner of the Vimeo Awards Experimental category) [via]
Notabilia (visualizing Articles for Deletion debates on Wikipedia) [via]
NASA, The Frontier Is Everywhere (promo video made by a fan frustrated with the agency's communication skills) [via]
Dot Dot Dot (kinetic typography of a dramatic reading of a dumb review of a silly game)
Kinect 3D statues in Minecraft (more detail on the original site, which is getting hammered) [via]
The Kickstarter Awards: By the Numbers (stats from 2010, with the biggest projects, most prolific creators and backers, and more)
Google Science Fair Experiment (another Rube Goldberg machine from the geeks at Syyn Labs)
January 7, 2011
Glengarry Glen Sith ("Always. Be. Choking.")
Energy and Dynamic Braking (aka hypnotic high-speed footage of stuff dropping on squishy stuff)
French kids play with vintage technology (at 2:35, playing with the "old CDs," a DJ is born)
January 6, 2011
Why Wasn't I Consulted? (Paul Ford on the Web as a customer service medium)
January 5, 2011
RIP Bill Zeller (Matt Haughey and Metafilter eulogize a talented, but troubled, programmer)
James Van Der Memes (reminds me of Eric Conveys an Emotion)
January 4, 2011
Daytum released for iPhone (free and lovely) [via]
The Best Cover Songs of 2010 (with MP3s for each)
Pogo's Joburg Jam (the first of his World Remix project)
January 3, 2011
Works that would been public domain this year under pre-1978 copyright law (as always, a depressing read)
JWT's 100 Things to Watch in 2011 (via Fred Wilson, who has a good eye for this kind of thing) [via]
Metafilter's Year in 2010 Infographic (the community wrote 86 million words last year, over 400 Moby Dicks) [via]
January 2, 2011
Pogo remixes the real world (I love his work and this project sounds brilliant)