September 10, 2005

Neja — insane Javascript graphic demo from Assembly '05; runs in Firefox! #

NeighborNode uses wifi to build local community — redirects free wifi users to neighborhood homepage on first connection (via) #

Digital camera turns 30 — how Kodak buried their prototype camera in 1975 (via) #

Google Maps with 2000 Census data — very well done; the average income in Malibu is over $200k/year! #

Five days with Katrina — amazing slideshow and story from a survivor #

Ado's ultimate weblog API primer — long, but surprisingly readable #

September 9, 2005

Second Life membership now free — brilliant move on their part #

Microsoft tries to recruit Eric S. Raymond — hilarity ensues (via) #

Huffington Post has a 15,000 comment backlog — the downside of comment moderation (via) #

Super Mario Bros. clone in Javascript — insane Japanese hack, fully playable or with a speed run demo (via) #

Official U.S. site for We Love Katamari — including some nice new wallpaper; release on Sept. 20! (via) #

Wolfram Tones — fun with generative music, but actually listenable #

Gametap full launch game listing — subscription retro gaming service for $10/month (via) #

Common Bits video roundup of Daily Show's Katrina coverage — tons of essential commentary #

Upcoming.org adds badges — post your events on your own site; here's an example #

September 8, 2005

Rolling Stone publishes Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note — along with a strange eulogy #

Upcoming.org Badges

Posted September 8, 2005 by Andy Baio

We added badges over at Upcoming.org! This is something I’ve wanted to do since the site launched, but didn’t have the time or resources to pull off until now. Read more about the change, along with Gordon’s formal introduction to the community.

Upcoming.org Events

More of waxpancake’s events

Neat, huh?

NYT on News Corp's buyout of IGN and MySpace — $1.5 billion on three Internet companies in the last two months #

Katrina conspiracy theories — plenty of great stuff on Snopes news page recently, too #

Evil Interiors — Unreal 2003 recontructions of classic movie sets; don't miss the screenshots (via) #

Sploid redesigns — like The Onion's redesign, very busy but somehow fitting; more info (via) #

Vinton Cerf joins Google — though I'm sure people will balk at him remaining ICANN chairman (via) #

Kanye West remix, "George Bush Don't Like Black People" — very professionally done #

Wired on the Paypal vs. Something Awful fundraiser controversy — Paypal locked SA's account, but I can't really blame them for vetting suspicious fundraisers #

Astrodome radio station blocked by local officials — meanwhile, FEMA is blocking pancakes, milk, and jailbreaks #

ROKR iTunes phone limiting song uploads with bad DRM — limited to 100 songs, whether they fill up the storage or not (via) #

National Geographic article predicts Louisiana disaster in October 2004 — yet another example of extremely accurate predictions in the mainstream media #

September 7, 2005

Apple announces iPod nano, iPod Phone — pencil thin, color display and 80% smaller than the 5GB iPod #

Alex Chilton found and other music-related Katrina news #

Robert Cringely's NerdTV — weekly one-hour geek interviews licensed under CC #

Paypal offers micropayments pricing — five cents plus five percent for transactions under $2; not completely micro, but a nice effort (via) #

September 5, 2005

Conspiracy theory that Hurricane Katrina was a guided weapon — many more related crank links in this Metafilter thread #

Flickr photos from the Houston Astrodome — photos from a volunteer wiring the Dome with computers and wireless (via) #

Ajax IM — browser-based instant messenger app with PHP backend; doesn't work in IE yet (via) #

September 4, 2005

Greasemonkey M3U Generator — nice! #

September 2, 2005

Dan Kaminsky's Best of Siggraph 2005 roundup — tons of nifty tech #

Steve Ballmer threatened to "fucking kill Google" in 2004 — amazing piece of gossip leaked in a legal brief #

What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans? — unbelievably accurate predictions from October 1994 #

Tale of dead soldier and his little girl was elaborate hoax — the Iraq war's own Kaycee Nicole (via) #

Video: Mr. Bill and Hurricane Sluggo — disturbing wetlands preservation ad from last year; mirrored locally #

September 1, 2005

DIY GTD Planner Hipster PDA templates — very professional collection of PDF planner templates, ready for printing #

Fake screenshots of a Google OS — amusing predictions from Future Feeds, but the UI is ugly enough to be real #

The Interdictor — liveblogging, photos, and interviews from an ISP in New Orleans #

Big Star's Alex Chilton missing in New Orleans — Fats Domino was reported missing, but found today #

Trapped in the Superdome — extremely difficult to read #

Bandnews.org — a nicely-designed niche news aggregator for musician news; crawls tons of band sites #

Feist and the State of Music Videos Online

Posted September 1, 2005 by Andy Baio

My favorite new artist is Feist, the genre-defying Canadian singer-songwriter formerly with Broken Social Scene. Her album was released in France in mid-2004 but only found a U.S. release in April, and I’m in love with it. Like I usually do when I get obsessed with a musician, I went looking for any related media I could find about her.

It’s a bit disheartening that the only place I could find high-quality music videos of her were in Usenet, and even those were ripped from MTV2 UK’s “120 Minutes” show. After doing a little research, the state of music videos online is just generally poor. Music videos are promotional material to spur album sales, right? Then why do we need to suffer through postage-stamp video and buffering Realvideo streams to watch a well-produced advertisement? I’m not asking for DVD-quality here; just something on par with Apple’s movie trailers.

One reason could be the bandwidth concerns, but that’s getting cheaper every day (and there’s always BitTorrent). Or maybe the labels are worried they’d be giving something away they could potentially profit off of? I don’t know, but that seems desperate. There are exceptions, like the Decemberists distributing a music video over BitTorrent, but they’re very rare.

Anyway, I’m hosting high-res MPEG videos for “Mushaboom” and “One Evening” below. If there are record labels or legal websites distributing video downloads of this quality, let me know.

Download: Mushaboom (MPEG, 27MB)

Download: One Evening (MPEG, 25 MB)

Oh, and if you’re a fan, don’t miss the video of her live KCRW performance.

8 million UMD movies sold for the PSP — this is surprising to me; pretty great for a DRMed format that can only be watched on a PSP #

Cash donations relicense Eyes on the Prize — this actually just makes the copyright problem worse, as Stay Free points out #