October 2008 - Page 2 of 4

October 27, 2008

Fred Armisen shows off Weekend Update's new megapixel giant touch map — art imitates life; the display was created by Perceptive Pixel (via) #

CNN's Anderson Cooper experiments with "virtual pie chart" — extremely silly use of augmented reality gone mainstream (via) #

AC/DC releases ASCII music video in Microsoft Excel — created by fans to "subvert the corporate firewalls"; Windows only, sadly #

Google Earth for the iPhone — free download, adorable; also, Street View's coming any day now (via) #

Typeface.js, rendering Truetype fonts with Javascript, Canvas, and VML — awesome hack lets you deliver custom fonts on the web without Flash; works on the iPhone, too (via) #

October 25, 2008

YouTube adds linking to video timecodes — in YouTube comments, just list any time and it's automatically linked #

Tasha's Impossible Ransom of Rage — silly little Flash game from Double Fine, creators of Psychonauts (via) #

NYT on the Hitler "Downfall" remixes — I love when the Gray Lady comments on Internet memes (via) #

Ill Doctrine's "A Poem for the Youth Voter" — turning "Yes, We Can" into "Yes, We Did" #

October 24, 2008

Wikipedia DVD available for free by BitTorrent — 2.4GB partial snapshot reviewed for offline use by schools (via) #

Nerdy Robot Playing A Vectrex — my $2 was well-spent; be warned he's a bit backed up #

Geography of newspaper endorsements for the 2008 election — beautiful work from the Infochimps guys (via) #

Visualizing bias on political blogs linking to the Ashley Todd hoax story — left-leaning blogs only found it newsworthy when discredited #

rlax, Flash game to remove the top piece — Friday procrastination fodder #

Remote Impact, multiplayer distance shadowboxing — the sensors recognize and give extra points for "intense brute force" (via) #

Wassup 2008 — reuniting the friends that created the short film that launched a nationwide catchphrase #

Little Boots' Tenori-On cover of Hot Chip's "Ready for the Floor" — the rest of her Tenori-On covers are great, too (via) #

Turn Your Name Into A Face — generates a unique avatar from your name; Philipp Lennsen's entry in the 24-Hour Application Challenge #

Jason Scott on Blu-Ray's mandatory DRM for indie filmmakers — exorbitant AACS fees make small runs impossible, doubling budgets for broken copy protection #

Garamond Powerline — gorgeous type experiment made from photos of electrical cable lines #

Trailer for "RiP: A Remix Manifesto," documentary on remix culture — the film's finally done, and much of the raw footage is available for remixing #

October 23, 2008

Matt Haughey explains how to get the nerd vote — some good suggestions in the comments, along with some idiotic strawmen #

October 22, 2008

ZIP File Quine — just keep unzipping (via) #

October 21, 2008

Derek Powazek shuts down Pixish — a promising startup killed, at least partly, by bowing to the no spec crowd #

DOTS Gloves — mittens with metal dots for use with iPhone touchscreens (via) #

Woman gets fastest time at Nike Women's Marathon, loses race — also, why are four of the top five finishers at a women's marathon male? #

WTF, Broccoli? — my sister found tiny people living in her broccoli #

Macs vs. PCs, the Musical — bonus points for gratuitous violence, points off for technical inaccuracy #

Penelope Trott's Best Baby Halloween Costume Ever — one-year-olds make surprisingly good balding comedians #

October 19, 2008

Domai.nr, find domains with wac.ky TLDs beyond .com and .net — you know, like del.icio.us and burri.to #

October 17, 2008

Interviewing the anonymous Twitterers behind FakeJohnMcCain, FakeSarahPalin and FakeJoeBiden — the parodists love Twitter because it's quick, concise, and you can grow a network quicky #

LittleBigPlanet delayed because of Qur'an verses in background music — I believe in religious tolerance, until it affects video game release schedules #

Mygazines shuts down after publisher lawsuits — as fun as these sites are, trying to build a business on copyright infringement is just dumb #

Qwitter, get alerts when people unfollow you on Twitter — software that enables hurt feelings and awkwardness (via) #

McCain and Obama do standup comedy at the Al Smith dinner — both are very, very funny; Obama starts at 11:00 #

October 16, 2008

Vimeo launches paid option — $60/year removes ads, increases limits, priority uploading, and limited HD embeds #

Slate Magazine on the rise of FAIL — the writer asked me on Tuesday about the meme's origins, so I'm a little bummed I didn't get credit (via) #

Andrew Sullivan's "Why I Blog" — "for all the intense gloom surrounding the newspaper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism" (via) #

The New Yorker challenges xkcd to a Cartoon-Off — Randall Munroe wins handily (via) #

Forumwarz Episode 2 is live! — the intro's interminable, but it picks up from there; and if you never played the first one, get to it! #

Barack Obama meets Joe the Plumber — I think it's worth watching the original encounter that inspired McCain's "spread the wealth" line of attack (via) #

October 15, 2008

First episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from January 1999 — amazing how fully-formed it launched, with the same voice that would make it so successful (via) #

Lexical analysis of the 2008 presidential and VP debates — word usage statistics and clouds, with parts of speech and word pairs; Atom feeds available for the whole dataset (via) #

Batman debates The Penguin — no mudslinging in this campaign #

Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels": Literal Video Version — from the same people the Take On Me video #

Newzbin preparing for litigation — if media companies attack Usenet indexing services that host no files, Usenet servers can't be far behind #

Bluegrass musician plays banjo during his brain surgery — his ability to play was used as a measure of the surgery's success (via) #

Kongregate Labs tutorial for creating a side-scrolling shooter in Flash — helping convert gamers to creators is good for everybody (via) #

Scraping Wikipedia data with Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo! Pipes — solid tutorial; for this kind of thing, I'd also consider Freebase #

RjDj, reactive generative music app for the iPhone — reacts to sensory input from the microphone and accelerometer #