Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival
— the creator of A Short Hike relaunched his charming interactive ghost town where players design and share jack-o-lanterns #
31 Days of Halloween
— for the tenth year, Laura E. Hall brings back her popup newsletter sending a gently spooky email for each day of October #
Bop Spotter
— an Android phone hidden in the Mission is set to Shazam all audio 24/7 and post the roughly 120 songs/day it can identify #
Rest of World’s Digital Divinity
— feature package on new ways religious believers are using new technology, from Muslim VR simulators to Buddhist monks on TikTok #
Guided by Vices
— Nick Heer on the ever-increasing user-hostile demand for your attention from the biggest social platforms #
Making 8-bit music from scratch at the Commodore 64 BASIC prompt
— Linus Åkesson just casually being amazing again #
DOOM in the iOS Photos app
— a technically-playable (but just barely) hack using iOS Shortcuts to download remote screenshots compiled into videos #
The data on extreme human ageing is flawed
— most "blue zones," concentrated areas of supercentenarians, can be attributed to pension fraud or bad record-keeping #
all text in nyc
— a search engine using OCRed text from map imagery across Brooklyn, expanding to all of NYC soon (via) #
How to Monetize a Blog
— you'll just have to trust me on this one; recommended for desktop browsers (via) #
Cohost to shut down at the end of the year
— very sad to hear this but I'm grateful for their effort, and loved having them at XOXO to talk about their weird and special community #
Celebrity Number Six was found
— the low-stakes internet mystery to identify the only unknown celebrity on a shower curtain pattern is solved after four years #
The Bumpin’ Sticker
— Guy Dupont made a "Keep Honking! I'm Listening to…" bumper sticker-sized LCD display that updates in real-time #
404 Media on the anarchist collective teaching people to DIY expensive medicine
— the course of medication that cures Hepatitis C costs $84,000 at $1,000/pill, but can be produced for only $700 or $0.83/pill #
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick on the Internet Archive decision
— the ruling is "a knife in the back of libraries," claiming that authors won't write new books if libraries lend digital books for free #
Internet Archive loses its appeal against book publishers
— the appeals court ruled that, despite being a nonprofit and no evidence of market harm, its implementation of Controlled Digital Lending isn't fair use #
Song Pong
— open-source music visualizer that synchronizes MIDI to bouncing balls in a modified game of Pong (via) #
The rise and fall of OpenSea
— the SEC notified them last week that NFTs on the struggling platform are unregistered securities #
The Pentium as a Navajo weaving
— 1994 replica of a printed circuit board handmade on an upright wooden loom (via) #
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
— Nolen Royalty tells the story of how a group of teens were writing secret binary messages on the Tiny Award-winning multiplayer experiment #
Shutterbug
— free desktop-only browser game where you photograph bugs by resizing and moving the browser window (via) #
Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From
— Facebook is paying bonuses for viral content, no matter how terrible, while laying off the content moderators who can prevent it #
One Million Screenshots
— a zoomable explorable rendering of 1M+ homepage screenshots, updated monthly (via) #
La Sentinelle
— French embroidery artist Marine Beaufils finished her needlepoint project recreating screenshots from The Sentinel #
Tulip Creative Computer
— The Echo Nest's Brian Whitman new project is a $59 portable computer for creative coding, first batch is sold out with more shipping in late August (via) #
The Mystery of Detective Barbie’s Audio
— can any audio codec nerds out there help extract the staggering 9,342 sound clips of girls' names from a 1999 Barbie game #
Beyond the C
— Louie Zong used Melodyne to change every note of Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea" to C (via) #
Destroying LEGO Towers
— the amount of effort that goes into every Brick Technology video is staggering #
Adding humans to Minecraft
— Dream spent a year making an elaborate rig for inserting real-time full-motion video of people into multiplayer games #
How Portland’s Sports Bra kicked off a women’s sports bar movement
— opened in 2022, Jenny Nguyen proved that a sports bar could succeed showing only women's sports, inspiring others across the country (via) #
The AI Keeps the Score
— long Verge feature on the development of AI-assisted aids for judging gymnastics #
Public Work
— a nicely-designed visual search engine for public domain images, but they could do a better job linking to sources #
The Many Lives of Null Island
— I never knew the shape of the in-joke for geospatial data geeks was based on the island from Myst #
Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650,000,000 checks
— wild story of scaling a ridiculous side project #
Generating sudokus for fun and no profit
— interactive explainer for the various ways to code a Sudoku solver (via) #
The best video game documentary ever just got better
— the excellent Double Fine PsychOdyssey just got a surprise 90-minute epilogue and a limited Blu-ray release #
Imitating the surreal transitions of AI-generated videos in real-life
— I love watching a new subgenre of shitposting appear in real-time (via) #
Crawlspace
— an experimental web journal akin to the html review, view source on each piece to read an interview with the artist (via) #
The bizarre secrets found investigating corrupt Winamp skins
— photos, memories, sound clips, and 56 previously unknown Winamp skins hidden inside other Winamp skins #
Aggressive AI crawlers leads to surprise bandwidth bills
— related: Anthropic's crawler hit iFixit's site a million times in 24 hours #
NYPD Coppelgänger
— Sam Lavigne's used facial recognition on an archive of 10,000 publicly-available photos of NYC police #
Prompt Airlines
— practice AI prompt injection with a series of challenges breaking a fictional airline's customer support chatbot #
Elizabeth Lopatto on the moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
— they're happy to trade human rights and personal liberty for favorable crypto/AI/tax policies that benefit their bottom line #
Reddit blocks all crawlers in robots.txt, gives exclusive access to Google with AI deal
— this means they're blocking the Internet Archive and every other search engine, a huge over-reaction ostensibly to stop AI training (via) #
Tiny Awards finalists announced
— like last year, a charming selection of oddball web pages; you have until August 11 to vote for your favorites #