Waxy.org: Links Archives: January 2012

Nano quadrotors flying in formation (don't miss the figure 8 pattern at the end) [via]

Bootstrap 2 released (here's the announcement)

Jeff Atwood on the risks of unmoderated communities (left to their own devices, popular online communities get taken over by cheap, easy gags) [via]

How and why J.D. Roth sold Get Rich Slowly (interesting tale of a founder selling his site, but unable to share the details for years)

Yahoo lays off in-house Flickr support team (from what I hear, it was done with 10 minutes' notice to Flickr management)

Mapstalgia (videogame maps drawn from memory)

Shit Programmers Say (strikingly similar to Shit Rocks Say)

Impressions of Corporate Logos by a 5-Year-Old ("a cheetah, a cheetah, a cheetah")

Bellbot (web app that beeps when you get new signups or sales)

ScratchML (markup language for recording and replaying turntablism)

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? (nice piece of Quora fiction) [via]

David Carr on Kickstarter's film funding at Sundance (10% of the festival was funded on Kickstarter, with two optioned by HBO)

Why ten-year attendee Mike Pusateri's skipping SXSW this year (I made the same decision to skip this year; I may regret it, but it just wasn't fun last year)

MegaUpload's user data set to be destroyed by Friday (collateral damage in the copyright war)

Blogging declines across the Inc. 500 (too bad; Twitter and Facebook aren't a replacement for longer-form communication)

ChatChat (Terry Cavanagh's multiplayer game about being a cat) [via]

Identifying Ice Cube's "Good Day" (process of elimination)

Milkshake (an open-source WebGL music visualizer based on Milkdrop)

Typographica's favorite typefaces of 2011 (returning after a two-year break)

Pirating the Oscars, 2012 (now with 10 years of data; I'll republish the article here tomorrow)

Colbert interviews Maurice Sendak (a national treasure; part two)

Warby Parker's Annual Report (lovely design) [via]

Mario meets Tim from Braid (with cameos from Limbo and Super Meat Boy)

Bootstrap 2 ready for testing and feedback (here's the awesome preview, with responsive design, new plugins, and tons of new components)

Method of Action's color matching game (love the colorblind mode)

One Hour Per Second (visualizing the incredible rate of YouTube uploads)

Nelson Minar on Microsoft 1995 vs. Google 2012 (Google will be in trouble if their strategy succeeds, or if it doesn't)

Get Money, Turn Gay (new Auto-Tune the News starring Joseph Gordon-Lewitt and Vermin Supreme)

Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory (finally listened to this stunning This American Life episode; it led to this response from Apple)

Focus on the User (hack by Twitter, Facebook and Myspace devs shows how Google sacrifices relevance for Google+ promotion) [via]

Plancast post-mortem (sad to hear they're ending development, it showed potential)

Jonathan Coulton on MegaUpload and the overblown threat of piracy (essential reading, along with Tim O'Reilly's post from earlier this week)

Anil Dash on the history and future of web protest (related: Marco Arment on stopping the next SOPA)

Congress puts SOPA/PIPA on hold, Rep. Lamar Smith finally caves (nice work, Internet)

State of the demoscene, 1991-2011 (a long decline since the mid-1990s) [via]

Star Wars Uncut: The Director's Cut (the final edit of the amazing, crowdsourced Star Wars remake that won an Emmy)

TorrentFreak on the legal files lost in the MegaUpload shutdown (I'm sure top men are working on returning those files) [via]

Wat (simple nerd test: do you laugh harder at the photos or the code output?) [via]

Supreme Court rules Congress can re-copyright public domain works (noooooo)

Twitter buys Summify, shuts it down (until it's integrated into Twitter, try Percolate, which I use daily)

Feds shut down MegaUpload in global operation (here's the indictment; Swizz Beatz was their secret CEO?!)

Zapatou's mashup of 71 "Rolling in the Deep" YouTube covers (man, I wish Kutiman would do a Thru-You followup)

@grammer_man, a Twitter bot that corrects misspellings (using word lists from Wikipedia; some great responses so far) [via]

Where does Congress stand on SOPA/PIPA? (updated constantly; more Republicans now oppose it, but Democrats still support it 40-34)

Republic, Lost (essential Lessig lecture on "striking at the root" to fix government) [via]

Sal Khan's explanation of SOPA and PIPA (hands down, the fairest and clearest explanation of the goals and risks I've seen for the layperson)

Amit Gupta found a bone marrow donor! (and saved future lives, thanks to the international donor drives)

PIPA supporters violating copyright (including cropping out credits)

Clay Shirky's TED talk on defending our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)

Herpderpedia (hoping some of them channel their anger into picking up the phone)

Why Larry Lessig isn't at the center of the SOPA fight (the root cause of SOPA/PIPA is the corrupting influence of money on Congress)

Alexis Madrigal on the SOPA blackouts ("to solve this particular problem, Congress merely has to do what it does best: nothing")

The Day the LOLCats Died ("our web means more that lawyers, lobbies, and lies") [via]

FARK goes white to protest SOPA/PIPA (the video says it all)

Stop the Wall (great video from Reddit's Alexis Ohanian on stopping SOPA/PIPA, and a handy tool to make calls)

The Oatmeal on SOPA (love that he says he's pirated constantly, but that this is the wrong way to address it)

The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing (awesome research and charts from Horace Dediu)

Visualizing Twitter conversations about SOPA (nice graph work by Fred Benenson using Slurp 140, Google Refine, R, and Cytoscape)

BuzzFeed's 20 Images That Will Change Your Life (well played, BuzzFeed)

Algorithmic Search for Love (an automated supercut machine, it uses a locally-hosted film collection and caption transcripts) [via]

Reddit's technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP (Wikipedia, Reddit, Boing Boing, and others are all going dark tomorrow in protest; join them)

The Fixie Bike Index (tongue-in-cheek guide to measuring hipster cities based on used bike listings) [via]

Cut the Rope in HTML5 (smoothest game I've seen so far, how it was made; related: Command and Conquer) [via]

NYT on productivity and privacy (contrast that with Square's new office) [via]

Mark Otto on building Twitter's Bootstrap (Bootstrap 2.0 is shaping up nicely)

Jerry Yang resigns from Yahoo (I always liked Jerry, I hope he starts something new)

ClueDB (Joshua Schachter's repurposed his lifehack site into a daily email)

Elevator: Source (delightfully surreal co-op elevator simulator; watch the gameplay video)

Hello (Lionel Ritchie recreated with film clips)

Mocality's sting operation to catch Google Kenya's poaching their listings (missed this while I was out last week, some fantastic investigative work starting with unique user-agent/IP combos)

Dying Fetus - Grotesque Impalement (Radio Disney Version) (another brilliant genre-bending cover from Andy Rehfeldt; related: Justin Bieber as death metal)

Making Love to WebKit (try scrolling; the 3D header doesn't contain any images) [via]

Where the top 100 box office films of 2011 are streaming (Netflix only had four of the top 100, less than half the previous year)

Google Image Search recursion (the Universe, Google, and LulzSec are featured prominently) [via]

My Guantánamo Nightmare (also: Notes From a Guantánamo Survivor; commemorating its shameful 10th anniversary) [via]

Kickstarter's Year in Review 2011 (amazing look back, don't miss the interactive stats post with nearly $100M pledged last year)

Key Features (commissioned interactive fiction by Andrew Plotkin, with in-game objects available as MakerBot-printable designs)

The Restart Page (reboot sequences from retro GUIs) [via]

NASA goes open-source (finally, I can process National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project Sensor and Environmental Data Records!)

Kill Screen's top 25 games of 2011 (along with all the judges' ballots)

SOPA-supporting news networks uniformly ignored SOPA (CNN was the only network to mention it, once) [via]

horse_ebooks: This is a romantic story. If you do not (from a wonderful Tumblr of fanfic inspired by everyone's favorite spambot)

Vi Hart joins Khan Academy (my favorite mathemusician working one of the best online learning resources) [via]

Google penalizes Chrome homepage after paid links debacle (bizarre story of an ad buy gone awry and the self-flagellation that followed) [via]

@StealthMountain (the responses are hilarious)

Paypal hates violins (bizarre policy, I wonder what else they've ordered destroyed?)

Record MP3 (dead-simple utility for recording audio and getting a link, perfect for MTurk tasks)

Robot avatar brushes a cat remotely in virtual reality (using a Kinect, head-mounted display, Wii remotes, and treadmill for navigation)

Real-life Wipeout using quantum levitation (sadly, appears to be a rendered fake for a viral ad; but it's very doable)

Clay Johnson on confirmation bias and the election cycle (this should be an Internet law: "Anything we want to be true we can find online.")

Metafilter's Best Post Contest winners announced (some incredible entries, including Falco's career, Muppet Labs, and the untold story of Sesame Street's David)

js.js, a Javascript interpreter in Javascript (yo dawg; related: Narcissus, a more practical take on the same idea) [via]

Clean Your App Permissions (handy links to the popular app permission dashboards)

Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment ("writhe in pain and dislodge the eagle!")

Scrollorama (fun jQuery plugin for scrolling effects; related: Impress.js)

Code Year, learn to code in 2012 (free service from Codecademy sends an interactive coding lesson to you weekly) [via]

David Weinberger's Top Ten List of Top Ten Lists of Top Ten Lists