Waxy.org: Links Archives: March 2012

1-Bit Camera for iOS (they set up a Tumblr for sharing photos)

Google introduces 8-Bit Maps for the NES (don't miss the promo video and Null Island; finally, some competition for 8-Bit City)

Cult of Mac on a creepy app for stalking women using shared location data (blame the app, not the sharer; Foursquare just killed their API access)

Minecraft Red Rock City timelapse (hypnotic construction of an epic virtual city)

Lost Prince of Persia source code discovered in dad's closet (in other Jordan Mechner news, The Last Express is coming to iOS later this year) [via]

Glitchr (Facebook page devoted to breaking their layout; related: tweets that break Twitter)

Face.com adds age detection to the face recognition API (it already supports identifying mood, smiles, gender, and glasses)

DuckDuckGo's query stats (happy to see a new search engine for power users emerge)

The Verge reviews Paper, a gorgeous drawing app for iOS (love their promo video)

Kickstarter digs into the impact of blockbusters on smaller projects (a rising tide lifts all boats)

Jeff Bezos plans to recover Apollo 11 rocket engines from the sea floor ("celebrity explorers" is an inevitable trend as space and ocean exploration tech advances)

NY Mag on the new young foodies (funny how "foodie" has become a derogatory term for some crowds)

Frank Cifaldi tries to track down the Super Mario Bros. release date (surprisingly difficult, nobody seems to have accurate dates)

Spotting anachronistic phrases in Mad Men using Google Ngram (related: his analysis of Downton Abbey's language)

The Impact of Kickstarter, Creative Commons & Creators Project (beautiful video from PBS's Off Book series)

Quora on watching characters in film based on people you know (including a long story from someone who was fictionalized in Like Crazy)

A Guide to Patterns and Forms in Trainyard (deconstructing one of my favorite iOS games)

Mega 64's Recut of Indie Game: The Movie (if this makes sense to you, and you live in PDX, you should come to the screening tomorrow)

Fame, a Twitter lottery (automatically follows and unfollows everyone in the pool to a random person daily)

Legit (git for humans)

Skills.to (Tasty Labs' new project to tag your friends and find like-minded people; here's me)

BrowserQuest (experimental HTML5 MMO using WebSockets and Canvas by Little Workshop and Mozilla) [via]

OMGPOP developer Shay Pierce explains why he didn't join Zynga ("don't join a company whose values are opposed to your own")

Pippin Barr's Epic Sax Game (love the 8-bit remix of the Eurovision performance)

Tambour (interesting free PC/Mac multiplayer game, attack an opponent with rhythm)

The Fourth Dimension for iOS (love the user reviews)

Racist Hunger Games fans disappointed on Twitter (warning: book spoilers in the screenshots)

Apollo 18+20, an interactive fiction tribute to They Might be Giants (38 games inspired by TMBG's Apollo 18, with every Fingertips game requiring only one move)

Michael Jackson vs. Chris Watson ("Beat It" audio resynthesized using only samples from nature recordings; more algorithmic remix here) [via]

Multiplayer Piano (built with socket.io by Brandon Lockaby)

Screenshots of Despair ("You have no friends.")

AppBlock (block your friends' Facebook apps from accessing your personal information)

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson reacts to being a meme (Watch out guys, we're dealing with a badass over here)

Pentametron (algorithmically-composed sonnets using tweets)

Fish: a tap essay (speaking of Robin Sloan, his newly-released essay-as-free iPhone app)

Nieman Lab on Gawker's editorial strategy (reminds me of Robin Sloan's stock and flow)

Stamen Maps (gorgeous, stylized CC-licensed map tiles using OpenStreetMap data)

Matt Haughey's Lessons from a 40-Year-Old (on "lifestyle" businesses and the risks of taking funding)

Passagebalt (Canabalt meets Passage)

Selfsurfing (Jonas Lund made a Chrome extension that clones his browser; watch him surf until noon tomorrow)

Big Lebowski F*cking Short F*cking Version Without F*cking (Wreck and Salvage remakes the Big Lebowski swearing supercut using the porn parody)

Aziz Ansari pulls a Louis CK (selling it himself as a $5 DRM-free digital download; built by VHX.tv)

wwwtxt (snippets of txt pulled from the net circa 1988-1994; also on Twitter)

How tweeting Deadmau5 led to one artist's big break (love everything about this) [via]

Making a particle system in HTML5 Canvas (playful real-time walkthrough using The Code Player; make your own!)

Girl Walk // All Day (entire 71-minute dance film set to Girl Talk's All Day, filmed in NYC and funded on Kickstarter)

water (live coding d3 sketchpad based on Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle; click a number and hold the alt key)

Free Indie Games (new blog of interesting games by VVVVVV's Terry Cavanagh)

ChirpClock (searching Twitter for mentions of the current time, every second) [via]

F.A.T. Lab's Free Universal Construction Kit (3D-printable adapters between ten popular construction sets; join Lego to Duplo to Tinker Toys to Lincoln Logs) [via]

Putting the I in Story (Matthew Baldwin's personal anecdote about Mike Daisey, and why personal matters)

Way (just download it, connect it to Twitter, and wait; one of the most intriguing games I've ever played)

Microscopic views of the iPad, iPhone, and other portable displays (including the oddball 3DS screen)

Austin Kleon on Bruce Springsteen's SXSW keynote ("Listen up youngsters: this is how successful theft is accomplished.")

This American Life retracts Mike Daisey's Apple/FoxConn episode (they devoted their whole new episode to the correction, here's Mike Daisey's statement) [via]

Browsing the web from behind the Great Firewall of China (perspective from a software developer trying to access tech blogs and other resources)

Militarizing Your Backyard with Python and Computer Vision (using OpenCV and Arduino to shoot squirrels with a water gun sentry) [via]

How Christian Marclay made The Clock (story behind the epic 24-hour long supercut)

The $8B iPod (funny TED talk on copyright math)

Slate on _why's disappearance and his impact on the world (relieved to see he's alive and well, but some think she went too far in publicizing his identity)

Twirdie (iPhone game played by guessing the frequency of Twitter search terms) [via]

Adam Savage on how simple ideas leads to major scientific discoveries (awesome seven-minute talk)

Real-time speech synthesis in 1k of Javascript (limited phoneme support, but still!) [via]

Kickstarter's Double Fine Day ($1.66M pledged to projects in a single day)

Why James Whittaker left Google (a thoughtful piece about the changes under Larry Page)

Dancefloor Diplomacy's "We Are Ready" (live mashup with 20 musicians and 38 songs with no samples)

Stratocam (explore the world through Google Satellite imagery, share shapshots of your own discoveries)

Machine Pareidolia (Greg Borenstein tests face-tracking software on inanimate objects; go buy his book!)

Encyclopaedia Britannica goes out of print (after 244 years)

Village Voice on the NYPD tapes, now confirmed by internal report (a Bed-Stuy whistleblower persecuted for reporting systematic manipulation of crime statistics)

Sounds of the Internet (playlist of websites that auto-play music)

How OpenStreetMap handled Apple's unattributed switch (brilliant work, and I'm so happy to see the project blowing up)

Ben Brown on 12 years of SXSW Interactive (you've changed, man)

David Friedman interviews videogame pioneer Ralph Baer (from his ongoing Inventor Portrait series)

Stephen Wolfram's personal analytics of his life (king of the quantified self)

Narrow the Gapp (Gina Trapani's open data mashup demonstrates the deeply unfair gender pay gap)

PBS short film on animated GIF art (from Under Construction to cinemagraphs)

Biologic by Bloom (free iPad app visualizes your social network as cells)

Emojicons (from the creator of Nonstop Nyan Cat, a community for sharing Japanese-style text emoticons)

Classic Movie Scenes Subtitled for Bros (a taste of On the Bro'd)

Toy Shining (inspired Toy Story/Shining mashup created on the iPad)

2SLEEP1 (hour-long playlist of textmode performances "designed to make you fall asleep")

Idle Screenings (entire feature films split into animated GIFs; also: as Powerpoint decks and starfield screensavers)

Tourney (story of an imaginary graphical text adventure )

Square Register (deeply disruptive to the POS industry; also, anyone in the U.S. can sign up for a free Square reader)

Mari0 released (open-source Super Mario meets Portal mashup, out now for PC/Mac/Linux)

Insider gossip on how Disneyland underestimated demand for their 24-hour leap day event (surreal photos of die-hards sleeping in Main Street Cinema)

Aerial quadrotor bot creators at TED (insane to see them map and navigate new spaces using the Kinect)

Jer Thorp on the Weight of Data (awesome talk from one of the giants of infoviz)

Gorgeous visualization of movie profits and reviews (a huge amount of information displayed in a concise, understandable way)

Pixels and Polaroids (when analog and digital nostalgia combine) [via]

2 Player Productions' behind-the-scenes of the Double Fine pitch video (interesting to see how much thought and effort went into the pitch)

Jake "virt" Kaufman's FX4 (pay-what-you-like chiptune soundtrack to a nonexistent film)

Verisign seizes non-US .com domain on behalf of US authorities (who needs SOPA?)

Cat Fountain (related: Minecraft 1.2 is out with iron golems, cat, ocelots, and smarter zombies)