Ads via The Deck
March 31, 2011
Congressional budget cuts threaten open government websites (Sunlight Foundation gives some ways to help)
Neesful Katamari (rolling up 8-bit classics)
Creepy, Windows/Linux app maps locations from shared online photos (like Firesheep and Please Rob Me, making stalking user-friendly only makes the world worse)
"Our lives are spent trying to pixellate a fractal planet." [via]
March 30, 2011
BlockBattle (relentless multiplayer Tetris game, made with JS and Tornado)
G4TV admits to manipulating Reddit (more sock puppets in the news: the Koch Bros. with Wikipedia, and the US military with social media networks) [via]
Quadrocopter Ball Juggling (piloted by two computers, tracked by overhead motion capture) [via]
Madmanimation (Mad Men titles redone with jQuery/CSS3)
March 29, 2011
Jeff Koons Must Die!! (destroy famous artwork with a rocket launcher)
Anil Dash consults an expert on the actual dangers of radiation exposure ("risk of harm is a function of both dose and dose rate")
37signals profiles Coudal Partners (how they moved from client work to projects like Field Notes, Jewelboxing, and The Deck)
3eanuts (removing the fourth panel reveals the despair in the Peanuts universe)
I Can Has Cheezeburger acquires Know Your Meme in seven-figure deal (a headline I never expected to see)
March 28, 2011
text align: centaur; (apparently, some mods at Hacker News have no sense of humor)
GIRP (from the creator of QWOP)
Paul Baran, R.I.P. (don't miss Stewart Brand's 2001 interview with him for Wired) [via]
March 26, 2011
Swoopo quietly files for bankruptcy (one of the nastiest websites ever goes under)
Leonard Lin's SXSW 2011 postmortem (agree with everything in here; related, Gruber's similar conclusions)
March 25, 2011
Data Science Toolkit (handy collection of web services, bundled as a self-contained VM or Amazon AMI)
Microworld, short 1976 film about microprocessors (narrated by William Shatner; project this on the walls at your next geek event)
Last Night Never Happened (rollback Facebook/Twitter activity after a night of oversharing) [via]
Rob Beschizza's compilation of classic arcade game deaths (he made the lo-fi "Mad World" remix by tweaking a MIDI file in Reason)
March 24, 2011
Safety Maps (I made one)
Rebecca Black's Gang Fight ("Friday" interpreted by a bad lip reader) [via]
Pica Pic (Hipopotam's playable simulations of classic handheld electronic games)
March 23, 2011
Sword & Sworcery released for iPad (if you have an iPad, you really, really want to buy this immediately; here's a review)
Brandon Boyer's GDC microtalk on the games he loves (incredibly passionate talk, every game he mentioned is worth seeking out)
Eleven very short stories about SXSW (short fiction (or is it?) by James Mitchell)
No Time to Explain (shows how clever writing can transform a simple Flash platformer)
PhantomJS (headless Webkit lets you script a browser without display) [via]
March 22, 2011
Chess Without Turns (turning a thoughtful game into a 30-second brutal deathmatch) [via]
Real-time visualization of Firefox 4 downloads (how it works, with open code; oh, and the browser's pretty great too)
Wired Magazine's feature on Kickstarter (great article spotlights the manufacturing projects created by the community)
Stephan Tillmans' Luminant Point Arrays (photos of tube TVs at the moment they're switched off) [via]
GDC releases classic game postmortem videos (a goldmine: Out of this World, Maniac Mansion, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Prince of Persia, Populous, Pitfall!, Pac-Man, Marble Madness, Elite, Doom, and Bejeweled) [via]
Julian Assange: Houseguest (a reenactment)
March 21, 2011
Everyday for iPhone (inspired by Noah Kalina's Everyday project)
The Brother IntelliFax 2800 App Store (Wonder-Tonic's winning pitch for this year's Worst Website Ever at SXSW)
EveryBlock launches first major redesign (as a first-time homebuyer, I've come to really love EveryBlock's hyperlocal feeds)
Stick a Dickbar on it (related: Marco Arment on why the Quick Bar is so frustrating)
Ze Frank replays The Show (for the fifth anniversary, he's now doing daily commentary about each video)
March 20, 2011
James Face (Oli Beale likes to subtly modify his friend's Facebook photos)
xkcd's radiation dose chart (with help from a senior reactor operator at Reed Research Reactor)
Kutiman's "My Favorite Color" (a return to form, his first video like Thru-You in two years)
March 18, 2011
Albert Wenger on the NYT's pay fence and Kickstarter (I'd be much more excited about the NYT's plan if it was around benefits vs. limits)
March 17, 2011
Bloomberg feature on the history of Twitter (good interviews, covers the early Blogger and Odeo days) [via]
Jake "virt" Kaufman's AAA sound design for vintage videogames (sequel to his realistic Super Mario Bros. audio)
Notch shares some of his pre-Minecraft games (success is rarely overnight; like Ze, it takes feedback and iteration over time)
Ze Frank's The Show debuted five years ago today (it's worth revisiting them all) [via]
SMBC on old computing and the snug blanket of nostalgia (his NYC book launch on May 8 donates all proceeds to DonorsChoose)
Paul Graham shares his email exchanges with Fred Wilson over Airbnb (fascinating glimpse into the thought process)
NYT announces their paywall, effective March 28 (Nieman Lab outlines their big challenges)
March 16, 2011
An Open Letter to Jon Bon Jovi (responding to his claim that "Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business")
How Fred Wilson missed Airbnb (great story about the Airbnb team, Obama O's cereal, and a whole lot of hustle)
NYT editorial on the abuse of Bradley Manning (a State Department official was forced to resign after critical comments about his treatment) [via]
Jeri Ellsworth makes $10 alternative to $4k bus alert system, gets harassed by contractor (even non-anonymized people lose their minds in YouTube comments)
Chatroulette Love Song (I wonder if he skipped everyone with less harmonious names) [via]
Jack Dorsey's Twttr stories (his earliest archives from Twitter's development, more on Twitter)
Horrifying first-person video as tsunami sweeps Japanese city (also: InFocus feature on the recovery efforts) [via]
Topspin opens publicly, available to every musician (powerful toolset for bands was invite-only for years; Ian writes about the change)
Matt Haughey's SXSW talk on community lessons learned from Metafilter (fasincating glimpse into the site's moderation techniques and homegrown tools; how it was recorded)
OkTrends asks, what if there weren't so many white people? (more data porn, plus guitars with knives)
Kat Hack (turn any Web page into an HTML5 Katamari Damacy) [via]
March 10, 2011
Mr. Rogers' Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1997 Emmys (don't miss Esquire's eloquent description of the moment) [via]
What if you'd bought Apple stock instead of their products? (spoiler: you'd be rich) [via]
Dreamhost CEO shares his heartbreaking, preventable homebirth story (a huge warning to anyone considering home births) [via]
Instapaper goes social with 3.0 version (sharing, editor's picks, and browsing your friends' likes) [via]
Browser DNS prefetching harmful for sites with many subdomains (a single meta tag reduced Deviant Art's DNS queries by 10 billion per month) [via]
Ushahidi launches open-source location service (roll your own Foursquare; here's the requisite SXSW example running on Crowdmap)
MIT Media Lab's new logo is a Processing sketch (identity by algorithm) [via]
Is Scoble In This Room? (breakout app of SXSW 2011)
Bytejacker goes to GDC 2011 (great episode; interviews with the creators of Sword & Sworcery, Indie Game: The Movie, and Cave Story) [via]
The Smartest Dog in the World (Graham Annable is a genius) [via]
The Content Farm launches new website ("written by people with a passing knowledge") [via]
Kellan predicts the year of the anti-social SXSW (software scoped to friends-only favors intimacy over serendipity)
South by Southwest Homesick Blues ("Don't need Zuckerberg to know when the bubble blows") [via]
Chicago Tribune feature on Kickstarter and crowdfunding (some great stories about how it's impacting Chicago artists)
Clay Johnson on why he joined Expert Labs (yay, crazy excited to work with Clay; also: I made a video intro to ThinkUp)
March 9, 2011
Lanyrd releases Chrome/Firefox extension to instantly hide all SXSW tweets (if you're not in Austin, you're going to need this)
NYT on the Groupon clone cottage industry (Yipit, an aggregator of 335 daily deals sites, spawned 20 copycats itself)
Jason Kottke introduces Stellar.io (I've been playing with it for a while, and it's great for surfacing interesting stuff)
The Like Log Study (analyzing 45 million Facebook reactions to 100k+ articles from 45 news sites)
Colbert interviews Dan Sinker, the journalism professor behind @MayorEmanuel ("time vortexes are funny things"; the whole thing needs to go to print) [via]
Windows 7's Microsoft Paint executable interpreted as audio (surprisingly listenable) [via]
TIME's video feature on the indie gaming scene (nice trend piece interviews the people behind Babycastles, Area/Code, and Osmos)
Thanks for Trumpet Winsock (used the essential Windows app in the mid '90s? make it right by paying for it now)
Lanyrd adds Firefox/Chrome extensions to see SXSW sessions in Twitter (hey, that guy in the second screenshot looks familiar)
Lag (an animated tale of high latency) [via]
March 8, 2011
Anatomy of a Crushing (Maciej's entertaining postmortem of the mini-exodus from Delicious to Pinboard) [via]
Slipstream, Chrome addon hides tweets by user or keyword (not going to SXSW? you're going to need this) [via]
URL Hunter (experimental game played in the browser's location bar) [via]
Foursquare releasing 3.0 for iPhone/Android tonight (now with recommendations, an overhauled leaderboard, and new ways to explore)
Tinted Sheen, browser blocker for Chrome and Firefox (block all references to you-know-who)
Adobe's Wallaby, experimental converter from Flash to HTML5 (for Webkit browsers only; before and after) [via]
Koalas to the Max (built with d3.js)
d3.js, Javascript library for manipulating data-driven documents (some of the examples are jaw-dropping)
The Million Song Dataset (massive data dump from Echonest and Musicbrainz; this is begging for some large-scale infoviz)
moviebarcode (expanding on Jason Salavon's film averaging) [via]
The IF Theory Reader (free book collects thought-provoking writing about interactive fiction) [via]
March 7, 2011
Auto-Tune the News takes on Charlie Sheen (last two links about him ever, honest: NYT gets meta and, importantly, his history of violence against women)
You Are Listening to Los Angeles (ambient music meets LAPD police scanner) [via]
Yu Suzuki reveals how Shenmue was meant to end (Gamasutra has a post-GDC writeup of his Shenmue postmortem; also: the Another World, Marble Madness, Cave Story and Maniac Mansion postmortems)
Bluetooth fingerless glove lets you talk to your hand (reminds me of SixthSense's feature to snap photos by making a frame with your fingers) [via]
TED video of Anthony Atala printing a human kidney (starts at the 9:20 mark)
Jacob Gilbreath's kinetic type treatment of Conan's farewell message (expertly done student project) [via]
Digitalkoot (Captcha-like games help digitize Finland's National Library archives as you play)
Bestselling Kindle author Amanda Hocking on reproducing her success ("This is literally years of work you're seeing. And hours and hours of work each day.")
Black history charts from 1900 (hand-drawn by students from W.E.B. Du Bois' sociology class, they look like modern infographics) [via]
Situationist (iPhone app by Benrik creates serendipitous encounters with strangers)
FUCK YEAH NOUNS
March 6, 2011
Play against the NYT's Rock Paper Scissors robot (with a sneak peek into what the computer thinks you'll do next)
Reddit interviews a 4-year-old boy (the dad did the same thing last year; it's like the Internet's version of the Up series)
Make TV profile on kinetic wave sculptor Reuben Margolin (related: the work of Theo Jansen)
37 Signals' Jason Fried on how to make money (a quick dip into Jason's psyche in six personal anecdotes)
March 4, 2011
Help Archive Team save Yahoo! Video (7TB saved so far, they need geeks with bandwidth/storage and cash for hard drives ASAP)
Tissue engineer prints a new kidney on TED stage (also: self-driving cars; this week, the future is in Long Beach)
Marble Run, collaborative HTML5 marble game (winner of the Mozilla Labs gaming contest, with code on Github) [via]
March 3, 2011
Reddit interviews Ken Jennings ("I can't go anywhere in public where there might be old people, like Hallmark stores or cemeteries.")
Gina Trapani on the case against drop-down identities (related: the controversy over making gender a text field in Diaspora)
Warner Bros. acquires Blade Runner prequel/sequel rights (there should be a law forbidding sequels to universally-loved 30-year-old films)
Full Text RSS Feed (build a full feed for sites that only provide excerpts) [via]
The Double Slit Experiment in Minecraft (is the chicken a particle or a wave?) [via]
Snapshots from a rock n' roll marriage (achingly personal story of the breakup of a Black Keys' marriage) [via]
March 2, 2011
Installing every version of Windows from 1.0 to Windows 7, in order (surprisingly entertaining, window colors were retained from Windows 2.0 to Windows 2000)
Esquire's profile of Ray Towler, a Cleveland man wrongly convicted to 30 years in prison (no amount of money can make this right) [via]
Apple introduces iPad 2 (thinner than an iPhone 4, 9x faster, two cameras, cover, same battery life, same price)
Mitoza, surreal web toy (then the evil eggplant opened an ice cream store inside of the giant egg...)
March 1, 2011
placekitten (your source for placeholder images of kittens)
Thom Yorke Smashes Dead Fish on Washer-Dryer ("sorry. I like farts a lot. I'm from the fart generation.") [via]
Lanyrd's Guide to SXSW Interactive (I'm putting on Worst Website Ever again this year with an amazing lineup)
Sheen Family Circus (bi-winning)