The story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his “lost week” at the movies
— $20 in 1947 is $280 in 2024 dollars, buying one adventurous 10-year-old boy a wild week in San Francisco #
Twitter.com is officially X.com now
— one of the worst rebranding decisions of all time is mostly complete, though references to Twitter and tweets are still everywhere #
Archie, the internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running
— a copy of the source code for the FTP search engine was found at the University of Warsaw in Poland #
Retro tech in anime supercut
— a compilation of camcorders, VCRs, floppies, cassettes, arcade games, and more from '80s and '90s anime (via) #
Fabio and the Goose
— Bobby Fingers teams up with Adam Savage and The Slo Mo Guys to bust a long-standing myth about the incident #
Google Search will now show AI-generated answers to millions by default
— a destructive, predatory move that seems likely to hurt everyone who publishes for the web #
Pink Floyd’s “Any Colour You Like” on the Famicom Disk System’s Family Composer
— every video on this channel is great, covering Frank Zappa, Weather Report in Otocky, Steely Dan on the Roland PMA-5, and Jaco Pastorius on a music box #
Replace your Windows cursor with a cat paw
— inspired by a viral Foone post on Tumblr, you can buy it now at the very good domain catpawdesk.top #
OpenAI announces GPT-4o
— they're really tripling down on acting like a human, these live video demos are clearly inspired by Spike Jonze's "Her" #
A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?
— The New Yorker is geoblocking this fascinating article in the UK, presumably because its impact on the retrial could violate their contempt of court law #
Matt Sephton digs into the early history of Japanese emoji
— painstakingly redrawing emoji sets he found on electronic organizers and pocket computers that predate SoftBank's emoji set by at least a decade #
Development notes from xkcd’s “Machine”
— how the massive collaborative Rube Goldberg machine was designed and built in three weeks #
Pop Culture Detective’s Patriarchy According to The Barbie Movie
— "a primer to help explain what patriarchy actually is, what it isn't, and how it ends up harming everyone, including men" #
Exploring Hacker News by mapping 40 million posts and comments
— don't miss the Hackerverse demo, visualizing 2D embeddings as an island of posts #
Food for Fish
— a browser game with lots of underpants, made with WebGPU so try it in Chrome, Edge, or Safari Technology Preview (via) #
Apple’s “Crush” iPad ad sparks backlash
— amazed nobody there realized how a tech behemoth crushing creative tools with a giant hydraulic press would be received #
Indie rock legend Steve Albini dies at 61 of heart attack
— a shocking and tragic loss, Shellac's first album in a decade was due out next week #
Pokémon Go players are vandalizing OpenStreetMap to cheat the game
— an issue for seven years, seems like Niantic should be storing a snapshot of map data to discourage editors (via) #
Meet Me at the Workers’ Club
— Molleindustria's interactive reconstruction of Alexander Rodchenko's Workers' Club from the 1925 World Expo in Paris #
404 Media investigates the “zombie internet” of Facebook’s AI spam
— a growing plague of AI bots posting nonsense for an audience of humans, other bots, and hacked human-bot hybrid accounts (via) #
Washed Out’s “The Hardest Part”
— first music video made with OpenAI's Sora, embracing its surreal artifacts, broken physics, and dream-like creepiness #
We can have a different web, if we want it
— Molly White on the yearning for the "good old days" of the web #
Printing music with CSS Grid
— responsive music rendering for the web; see also: Soundslice's world-class responsive sheet music and guitar tab viewer (via) #
Doom Scroll
— a DOOM-inspired demo without JavaScript made with the CSS scroll-timeline property, supported only in Chrome for now (via) #
Daniel Shiffman’s The Nature of Code gets updated for 2024
— his 2012 book on simulating natural systems now uses p5.js, available free online or as a printed edition (via) #
Famous paintings recreated with emoji
— Nimona creator ND Stevenson uses Instagram Stories as a canvas #
Moviecart, full-length movie cartridges for the Atari 2600
— nice attention to detail with the box art, manuals, labels, and only using films from the 1970s (via) #
Mystery 1980s pop song “Everyone Knows That” finally found
— turns out it's from a 1986 adult film; now we just have to find Celebrity Number Six #
McSweeney’s Millennial CAPTCHA
— I'm late-stage Gen X and passed easily, so they may need to tune it a bit #
Super Moxio Bros.
— "a loving homage to level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros with art done entirely by typewriter characters" (via) #
As The Crow Flies
— a mini-game included in arcc, the delightfully weird 1970s-inspired multiuser computer network #
The Man Who Killed Google Search
— Ed Zitron is reading the internal emails released in the Google antitrust case #
musicForProgramming();
— beautifully chill mixes for focused work with an excellent interface (via) #
NYT’s incomplete guide to how TikTok has changed America
— the Senate advanced the measure today to force ByteDance to sell TikTok within the next nine months or face a national ban #
KRAZAM OS
— everyone's favorite satirical startup culture sketch comedy troupe launched a Windows 98-inspired homepage (via) #
The Flipbook Experiment
— the findings and animated results of The Pudding's experiment asking anonymous people to trace a line in order, flipbook-style #
Christmas shopping online in 1996
— videos like these are the only documentation of some early websites that predate the Internet Archive's large-scale web crawls with Alexa #
Bizarre traveling flame discovery
— Steve Mould digs into a strange phenomenon when igniting lighter fluid in a thin trough (via) #
NASA fixes Voyager 1 glitch, resuming communication after five months
— no big deal, they just patched code to work around a corrupted 46-year-old memory chip 15 billion miles away #
Ghost joining the fediverse, will adopt ActivityPub
— sounds like Buttondown may be federating too #
The Read, Write, Own Web of the 1990s
— Olia Lialina highlights examples from the Geocities archives of the web before platformization (via) #
I Hope This Email Finds You
— Waldo Jaquith made a clever, sometimes poetic, new Mastodon bot that finds sentences in Google Books #
2024 AI Elections Tracker
— Rest of World is tracking AI-generated election misinformation in this year's global elections (via) #
Post.News shutting down
— one of the many Twitter clones to pop up in the wake of the Elon acquisition calls it quits (via) #
Lola Dupre
— love the work of this collage artist who primarily works with paper and scissors (via) #
Hands-on with Delta, the first console emulator officially allowed on the Apple App Store
— free with support for the NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and Nintendo DS #