June 27, 2005

Men that voiced Tigger and Piglet die one day apart — they both played the characters since Disney's first Pooh short in 1968 #

Corporate album cover remixes — brilliant Photoshop thread inspired by Nike's borrowing of Minor Threat album art #

Supreme Court rules against Grokster — unanimous decision finds technology services liable for its users' infringement #

Flash: Tetka.swf — human body falling through a bubble landscape #

Robot Co-op announces 43 Places — I've tried the beta; great design and fun to use #

Google launching online video playback today — based on VLC, no less #

AudioFlickrscrobbler — retrieve photos tagged with the last five artist names listened to (via) #

June 26, 2005

USA Today on Andy Milonakis Show — web meme gets own MTV show, and it's surprisingly funny #

Insanely great history of Suck.com — interviews with nearly everyone involved; so very good, read this now #

NYT profile of Party Poker — online gambling is technically illegal in the U.S., but nobody seems to mind their $600m earnings in 2004 #

June 25, 2005

Top 10 beams, lasers, and death rays in film — they left out the death ray from Real Genius (via) #

NY Times promotes Bugmenot — very strange; refers to "newspaper marketers" and "those annoying site registrations" #

Jason Scott's update on his podcast collection project — he's collected about 700GB of podcasts so far #

Katamari Damacy cosplay — some of the best I've seen (via) #

Another World homebrew port for the GBA — free conversion by the original author; found on 1UP's great feature on console emulation (via) #

June 24, 2005

Del.icio.us Director — gorgeously designed Ajax-style browser for Del.icio.us (via) #

Hacking the flag-burning amendment — using legal loopholes to make a statement; you can't keep a good dissident down (via) #

Joe Gregorio's Sparklines web service — the code is available, too (via) #

Report finds most people don't consider downloading digital media as theft — technically, it's not theft; it's illegal duplication (via) #

Data Munging with Sprog — Perl scripting from a GUI, without even knowing Perl (via) #

eBay launches open-source Community Codebase effort — more importantly, they're allowing 10,000 API calls monthly for individuals (via) #

Crying While Eating creator discusses the rise of the meme — they say that I linked to it first; go me! #

Behavior Javascript module — keep your code clean by using CSS selectors to apply JS functions #

Tom Cruise Kills Oprah

Posted June 24, 2005December 20, 2016 by Andy Baio

On Tuesday, I posted a link to my local copy of the Tom Cruise Kills Oprah Quicktime video that I found on an unnamed file-sharing site. Since then, the clip’s exploded in popularity. It’s been linked from MSNBC, USA Today, b3ta, and every Livejournal and message board on the planet. Right now, I’m serving about 200 gigabytes of the 4.1MB video every day. Yesterday, it was downloaded over 52,000 times and 60,000 times the day before. (Watch my bandwidth implode in real-time.)

Does anyone know the origins of the video? (Update: Found! Read the update below for details.) I know that it was later used to create the YTMND page, but nobody seems to know the source of the original video.

Between his crazy Scientology ranting, his war on psychiatry and anti-depressants, creeping out Hollywood starlets, frenetic couch jumping, and the conspiracy theories surrounding the brainwashing of Katie Holmes, it seems like Tom Cruise is the new Michael Jackson. Sounds good to me.

Update: Leonard’s hosting the video for a while until traffic dies down a bit. Thanks, Leonard!

June 27, 2005: An anonymous commenter admitted to creating the movie using audio from a downloaded version of Star Wars Episode III. He adds, “The video was created using Adobe Premiere for the shot and sound editing and Adobe After Effects 6.5 for the lightning using the ‘advanced lightning’ feature.”

I can confirm that my source originally found it on Shacknews, so this makes sense.

Scientology's Nut Job Founder — The Smoking Gun digs through L. Ron Hubbard's FBI file #

June 23, 2005

Empire State Building vs. 100 billion hot dogs — it's like the MegaPenny Project, only delicious! #

Gizmodo's history of the Scientology E-Meter — never trust a religion that hooks you up to lie detectors #

Annalee Newitz on stringent new porn recordkeeping laws — won't somebody think of the children? (via) #

Live webcam from within Second Life — yeah, it's about that strange (via) #

Mad Hot Ballroom documentary markers encounter with the music copyright cartel — egregious examples of copyright hell; one publisher asked for $10k to clear a ringtone #

Google Sightseeing points out new highlights to Google Maps — finding the neat stuff in their newly expanded global satellite photos #

First look at Apple's Intel Macs — Windows XP installs fine on them, but OS X for Intel won't install on generic PCs (via) #

Neopets sold to Viacom for $160 million — the kids' gaming site is one of social software's biggest successes, but nobody's paying attention (via) #

Katie Holmes' Missing Days — Fox News conspiracy theory implies brainwashing #

June 22, 2005

Nerds Make Better Lovers — Slashdot commenter on the reality of this story (via) #

Jason Kottke on G4's "Attack of the Show" in about 30 minutes — update: Haughey has the video #

PSP no-swap homebrew loader released — no more swapping memory sticks! huge news for the PSP homebrew scene; more mirrors; how it works (via) #

Google not competing with Paypal — Eric Schmidt said it won't involve direct user-to-user payments (via) #

Flickr Montager — automated photo mosaics using Flickr; it must be hammering their servers, though (via) #

First look at the Nyko Movie Player — plug your iPod into this weird portable video add-on (via) #

YubNub's most popular commands — quite a community has popped up around the Rails Day contest entry #

Flickr banned by United Arab Emirates ISP — the nudity debate on Flickr rages on (via) #

Foxit, freeware Windows alternative to Acrobat Reader — Acrobat sucks so bad, nearly anything else is better (via) #

Reblg, universal "Blog This" button generator — not to be confused with the outstandingly awesome reBlog project (via) #

Playlist Magazine interviews Evan Williams about Odeo — recording in the browser is the best feature, I think #

June 21, 2005

The Onion 2056 — a special issue transported from the future (via) #

Odeo launches quietly — if you signed up for the announcement, you should get an invite soon #

Lonely Google searchers form ad hoc community — where people that type "i am lonely" into Google find solace (via) #

Typepad integrates Kanoodle text ads for its users — turn on ads, and let the pennies roll in #

Tristan compares how Yahoo and Google index the blogosphere — surprising results: Yahoo is indexing blogs better than Google #