October 19, 2004

Video: Jon Stewart comments on the "Crossfire" appearance — the Washington Post has Crossfire's response (via) #

October 18, 2004

Gmail begins signing outgoing mail with DomainKeys — adopting the standard would eliminate spam for good #

Flash: Collaborative fridge magnets — the emerging behaviors here are fascinating (via) #

Half-Life 2 to ship on November 16 — more than a year late, but I'm still very excited #

Effect of presidential election on the markets — Table 5 talks about using the market to predict elections #

"Crossfire" downloads exceeds TV broadcast audience — it's been downloaded at least 500,000 times in three days #

P2P Politics — Lessig's new project freely hosts political videos on Archive.org (via) #

Compare and contrast the Carlsons — CNN's Tucker Carlson vs WKRP's Mr. Carlson (via) #

Nick Denton releasing rare Ed Wood porn film — under the new "Fleshbot Films" title (via) #

October 17, 2004

Urbz online promo uses indie comic stars — James Kochalka, Peter Bagge, Evan Dorkin, and more (via) #

Game Tunnel Client Links Xbox, PS2, and GC Games — free alternative to Xbox Live and PS2 online play #

October 15, 2004

GTA San Andreas is gold — rumors say Half-Life 2 is gold, as well! #

Irony level high on Disney's Peter Pan lawsuit — Disney wants to profit from the public domain, while keeping its own work from it #

Mobster, recommendation addon for iTunes — uses the Musicmobs community to recommend music #

Neal Stephenson classic on Unix and the Hole Hawg drill — remember that the next time you 'rm -rf /' #

Jon Stewart on Crossfire

Posted October 15, 2004 by Andy Baio

The blog world is freaking out about Jon Stewart’s incendiary appearance on CNN’s Crossfire today, in which Jon calls hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala “partisan hacks” that are reducing the level of political discourse in the country. (Here’s the complete transcript.)

My friend Phil was quick to post the complete appearance on his BitTorrent server, and my other friend Leonard is hosting the direct download. (It’s good to have friends with lots of bandwidth.)

Watch the video now, and watch Leonard’s bandwidth graph skyrocket! The 36MB WMV looks and sounds great, so don’t bother downloading the 97 MB version.

Jon Stewart bitchslaps CNN's "Crossfire" show — the CNN transcript is jaw-dropping, here's the video #

Benchmarking 101 video cards on 14 games — even my Radeom 9700 Pro is showing its age (via) #

Found Item Clothing — t-shirt reproductions from movies and TV, but mostly just Real Genius for now (via) #

October 14, 2004

Halo 2 leaked to Usenet — French audio with English subtitles, you can read the release NFO here (via) #

Tracing the Evolution of Social Software — from the Memex and EIES to wikis and Del.icio.us (via) #

Early T.Rex ancestor was furry — happy fluffy dinosaurs (via) #

Poynter Institute's Eyetrack Heatmaps — interactive maps of eye movements reading news webpages (via) #

Google announce Desktop Search! — a huge announcement, many details in Rael Dornfest's overview (via) #

October 13, 2004

Cherry OS may be a PearPC clone — Slashdot and Wired News are convinced it's real (via) #

Seven die in "Internet Suicide" pact — just because they met online, that makes it an "Internet Suicide"? #

Brain controlled computing a reality — he's able to operate a PC with his brain with 70% accuracy (via) #

Bloglines subscriber stats redux — Richard crunches some numbers for A-list bloggers #

BBS Documentary in pre-sale — the staggering history of the BBS is finally done #

Nick Nolte's Diary — the archives are priceless #

New SEO Technique in the Works?

Posted October 12, 2004 by Andy Baio

So I noticed these incoming links from Technorati, all of which appear to be from automatically-generated Blogspot weblogs. They all appear to steal entries from a legitimate Typepad weblog, The Last Minute. I’m guessing this is another attempt at gaming search engines, but I can’t figure out the details. Take a look at the sites and let me know if you have any theories.

http://digitalvideo.blogspot.com/

http://digitalvideoediting.blogspot.com/

http://appleg5.blogspot.com/

http://homestarunner.blogspot.com/

http://thelastminute.blogspot.com/

http://ipodjack.blogspot.com/

(I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to help promote their Pagerank.)

Update: The creator of the cloned sites contacted me… He was experimenting with techniques for improving the Pagerank of his own website. He now understands the problems with this sort of cheating and promptly took them all offline.

October 12, 2004

Flash: Honda's Grrr Game — surreal goodness, but does it sell cars? (via) #

City of Heroes players honor Christopher Reeve — some good screenshots of the tribute #

Six Apart profile in the WSJ — with hedcuts of Ben and Mena! (via) #

Cardhouse on odd Hawaiian food products — everything looks like the Tiki Tiki Room (via) #

Hands-on with Nintendo DS games — they look like low resolution N64 games (via) #

Blogging the debate within Second Life — they're created a virtual stage for both candidates #

Wired magazine internships — this would have been my dream job, in 1995 (via) #

New Yorker on the broadcast spectrum giveaway — more information about the situation and McCain's proposal (via) #

Network Solutions takes Gawker offline — the domain expired a week ago #

October 11, 2004

The Perry Bible Fellowship — a wonderfully surreal weekly comic, like so and so and so #

Migrating your link list from MT to Delicious — a good howto, but I'd still like "via" support #

Alexa web services — I'm sure someone can use this for something good (via) #

How to Torture Your Sims — painfully funny (via) #

Background on the ABC News redesign — tableless XHTML, expanded RSS, and Flash headlines (via) #

Shakeskin Gallery — all you need is a camera and some loose skin (via) #

Star Wars Kid in Tony Hawk Underground 2

Posted October 11, 2004 by Andy Baio

It may not be Episode 3, but the Star Wars Kid makes a cameo in Tony Hawk Underground 2. (Thanks to Dan Beckett for the tip and original video clip.) Update: Here’s a high-quality video of the appearance with audio, thanks to Erik:

tonyhawk_starwarskid_high.wmv (WMV, 5.5MB)

Here are instructions for finding him, courtesy of Travis Ogdon:

“On the Boston level if you ollie through the glass windows on one of the buildings (it’s one or two to the left of the one where Ben Franklin is hiding) you land in a living room with a flat panel tv on the wall. If you stand in front of the TV Ghyslain gets up and shouts something about watching Star Wars (which you’re now preventing). Hitting O (on the PS2) will result in him showing off his moves.”

October 13, 2004: Joe Ford confirms that you can unlock the “Geeky Kid” character by beating the all goals in all levels in Easy Mode. They don’t refer to him as “Star Wars Kid,” which indirectly answers the question about whether he was compensated for his likeness. (He wasn’t.)

October 14, 2004: The THUG2 SWK video was featured on G4TechTV’s Screen Savers show yesterday. Erik has the video of the Screen Savers appearance. No mention of my site, and they mistakenly assume that Ghyslain was paid for his appearance. Tacky!

October 10, 2004

Flash: Dad's Home! (via) #

October 9, 2004

Tour of Ghostbuster locations in Spiderman 2's modeled NYC — with photos of locations in real life and in-game #

Video: Instant Messenger Fight — a little fresh air (via) #