April

If you’re going to videotape your Star Wars fighting skills on a school camera, remember to remove the cassette when you’re done. Watch this embarrassingly good video.

It didn’t take long for the online community to remix it with full Star Wars special effects and lightsaber noises. I have no idea where this video originated from; if you know this kid, let me know. The kid has been identified… The full story here!

Update: I’ve turned off new comments in this thread because of the mean-spirited tone, and deleted the most vicious comments. Yes, he’s fat and awkward. We get it. Since 90% of the traffic to these videos is coming from gaming, technology, and Star Wars news websites, I’m guessing that most of you weren’t any cooler in junior high school than this poor kid. All you geeks, nerds, and dorks out there need to think twice before trashing one of your own.

Fox Television has collaborated with alumni directory Classmates.com to form a new reality series, where long-lost friends reunite through the website.

If you haven’t tried it, Classmates.com is extremely sneaky about how they acquired their massive alumni database. Originally a free service, Classmates.com now requires you to “complete your free registration to view your classmates.” After entering in your name, e-mail address and graduating class information, they let you browse lists of your old friends and classmates without any identifying information. To contact your friends, you’re forced to pay a $36 subscription fee.

Of course, they don’t disclose any of these caveats before you choose to add yourself to their database. Of Classmates.com’s reported 35 million members, only a mere fraction are paying subscribers. Everyone else was exploited for their personal information. Can anyone recommend a popular and free alternative to Classmates.com?

Donna D’Errico, former Baywatch alum and wife to Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx, opened a day spa in Los Angeles that offers Classical Rock Massage, massage services set to the sounds of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and the Moody Blues’ “Days of Future Passed.” Sounds great, but do they offer munchies and a laser light show?

So, Monday was my weblog’s first birthday. My guidelines were pretty simple, and I think I’ve kept to them. I’m going to make one exception today, and talk entirely about myself.

Randall Hyde is pioneering a new musical genre called Parodeities, biblical parodies of popular secular songs. The MP3 recordings are rough — Randall has no formal vocal training and he’s accompanied only by downloaded MIDI files — but the results are charming, like outsider art.

Highlights: “God’s Filled Ya” (Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla”), “Welcomed by the Devil” (Guns ‘n Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle”), and “Takin’ Care of Jesus” (BTO’s “Takin’ Care of Business”). The cover art is cute, too. (via the Yeti)

People who try to download tracks off of the new Madonna album from peer-to-peer networks will likely get an MP3 full of silence, prefixed by this short personal message from Madonna (150Kb MP3). More information from Dotmusic. Thanks to Tpoh.org for the file.

Update: Using the MP3 I posted, several people have created remixes that use the Madonna sample heavily.

You’ve probably seen these adorably amateurish animations featuring kittens lip-syncing White Stripes, Destiny’s Child and the Vines. Created by Rathergood.com’s Joel Veitch, the Flash animations started appearing on weblogs and discussion lists last August.

Well, someone at VH-1 just discovered it. In a short bumper promoting VH-1, the station co-opted the Flash meme for their own purposes. I created an animated GIF composed of six screen grabs from the commercial, which features two kitties and a chameleon performing Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that TV stations borrowed web-based memes for commercial purposes (see: Dancing Baby), but this might be the most blatant rip-off. The commercial is in the same limited-motion Flash style as the original Flash animations and uses the same kitten images. I hope you got a royalty, Joel.

Update: Um, nevermind. Joel confirmed via e-mail that he created the animations for VH-1.

Rumor of the Day: a little bird told me that Google is planning on integrating Blogger with the Google Appliance, and is courting media companies and portals to implement Blogger for their user communities.

I downloaded the VisualBoyAdvance Gameboy Advance emulator last night and was pleasantly surprised to see near-perfect emulation, even with brand new GBA games like Sonic Advance 2 and Tony Hawk 4. (You can find ROMs in alt.binaries.emulators.gameboy.advance or on the web, if you look hard enough.)

Likewise, I tested out the Nemu Nintendo 64 emulator with Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Zelda was playable despite display bugs, and Mario looked nearly perfect. (Try alt.binaries.emulators.nintendo-64 for ROMs.) Update: Apparently, Project64 is the most popular and compatible N64 emulator to date, but I haven’t tested it yet. These compatibility lists are very useful.

The NSX2 Playstation 2 emulation project managed to get the loading screens from Mortal Kombat 5 and Blade 2 to display. As far as I know, it’s the first PS2 emulator to partially load a commercial game.

Finally, gCubix is an amazing Gamecube emulator that’s been ported to a number of platforms, including Windows, Mac, BeOS, AmigaOS, Apple II GS, Commodore 64, Atari ST, PDP-1, and Babbage’s analytical engine.

In addition to his other crimes against humanity, Saddam Hussein also pirates movies: “In one cabinet was an assortment of pirated movies, some with the titles in English.”

It’s one thing to piss off the President of the United States, but now Saddam will face the ultimate adversary: Jack Valenti!

Armed with a list of spelling errors and my old friend Google, I decided to see if I could find the most commonly misspelled word on the Web. If you can do better, leave a comment. (The number of results is in parentheses after each word or term.)

– transexual (2860k)

– didnt (1230k, via Matt)

– doesnt (1080k, via Evan)

– seperate (804k, via Bill)

– calender (727k, via Graham)

– definately (693k, via Shannon)

– recieve (667k, via Matt)

– offical (366k)

– managment (359k)

– goverment (317k)

– commerical (277k)

– Febuary (245k)

– enviroment (242k)

– occurence (186k)

– commision (167k)

– assocation (134k)

– Cincinatti (70k)

– milennium (32k)

Special mention: “could of” (166k results), “would of” (296k), “should of” (123k)

Can anybody find a misspelled word that’s more popular than its correct spelling? Update: We have a winner! Ewin found that “transexual” (2860k) is the more common (but incorrect) spelling of “transsexual” (1660k)!

A Usenet group devoted to swapping karaoke versions of popular songs is unusually popular, with 7500+ songs posted in the last month alone. I don’t know where the original files are coming from, but the diversity and timeliness of available files in alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke is staggering. The standards are all represented (“Celebration,” “I Will Survive,” and “Mandy”), along with brand new songs spanning the genres of alt-rock, country, and pop. The MP3s are bundled into ZIP files along with mysterious .CDG files, so I did a little research.

Apparently, karaoke CDs are distributed in a format called CD+G, which stores images and lyrics information along with the uncompressed audio. Clever karaoke fans developed software to rip and compress these discs into a format they call MP3+G. It looks like the .CDG file is all of the goofy images, lyrics, and metadata that is normally displayed by specialized karaoke players.

Some of the more oddball gems were karaoke versions of King Missile’s “Detachable Penis,” Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right,” Electric 6’s “High Voltage,” Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run,” PJ Harvey’s “One Line,” and the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk To Fuck.” Is there really much overlap between karaoke and Dead Kennedys fans?

Anyway, enjoy singing along to these karaoke renditions of The Strokes’ “Last Nite,” Andrew WK’s “Party Hard,” and the White Stripes’ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.”

If you can read this, you’re sitting too close to your monitor. (For those of you arriving late to the party, my homepage was displayed at 50% scale for the whole day.)

In other news on this lovely April 1:

– Google buys Metafilter

– Matt’s Script Archive merges with CPAN

– Joi Ito met the Pope

– Tori Amos to play Mary Poppins

– Aaron abandons Google for Overture

– From Slashdot: the Evil Bit RFC, Gentoo switches to RPM, whitespace-only programming language, Distrowatch loves Windows XP, anti-cracker application for PC/Mac, Enlightenment goes gold, new Lord of the Rings movie delayed

– From the Mefi thread: The End of Free gets ads, Chris Pirillo gets blurry, Thinkgeek’s new products, DC Comics buys Elfquest, SomethingAwful’s boring fetish

– From the K5 thread: WinXPHints

– Word 5.1 for OS X

– Honda’s Mecha car salesman

– Minidisc.com gives up on the format

– Dave Matthews fan site changes to John Mayer fan site (is there a meaningful difference?)

– Bradlands goes Brady Bunch

– Inmate wins freedom in new reality show

– Movable Bloggerland

– Phonescoop covers Nokia’s rotary cell phone and Samsung’s Gollum Phone

– New BBEdit pricing option

– Teevee’s brilliant Reality Network

– Digital Web displayed upside-down and backwards

More April 1 updates throughout the day.