Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany — Acrobat 7.0 maxes out at 381 km x 381 km, but what happens if you make it bigger? #

Never Post — new member-supported, employee-owned podcast "about and for the internet" co-created and hosted by Idea Channel's Mike Rugnetta #

Project Tapestry — Iconfactory is kickstarting an iOS app to unify public web sources like blogs, Mastodon, Tumblr, and Bluesky into a single timeline #

Infinite Craft — Neal.fun's latest is an endless crafting toy heavily inspired by Little Alchemy #

Nilay Patel’s Apple Vision Pro review for The Verge — best thing I've read and seen so far about it, a device that's technically impressive but years away from something I'd use regularly #

shelby.cool — minimalist web experiments and sketches from Shelby Wilson, co-creator/editor of The HTML Review #

The Museum of Screens — wonderfully quirky virtual museum devoted to web games of all kinds (via) #

ASCII Theater — MSCHF's latest project lets you stream pirated movies to your terminal in glorious ASCII, with color and captions, now playing Barbie #

Pong Wars — I stared at this for longer than I want to admit (via) #

Who’s living inside this volcanic crater in Madagascar? — Vox's Christophe Haubursin goes to absurd lengths to find the story of a remote village spotted on Google Earth #

Correcting flutter in Steamboat Willie’s audio — using a new 34GB lossless 4K scan of the original 16mm film reel on the Internet Archive #

Improbable Island — sprawling 16-year-old new-to-me browser text adventure RPG with sweary British vibes and a unique code of conduct (via) #

kala.watch — hypnotic visualization of different units of time passing in a number of styles, "cardioid" is beautiful (via) #

John Herrman on the future impact of Google adding an AI text generator to Chrome — "We have the technology, in other words, for a web that publishes itself. Will anyone want to read it?" (via) #

Where’s Madeleine? — find Holly Gramazio's cat in this charming little game made with Downpour, v buckenham's upcoming no-code game-making app (via) #

How beloved indie blog The Hairpin turned into an AI clickbait farm — the domain was snapped up by a scumbag SEO, plagiarizing many of the original articles under fake bylines alongside machine-generated sludge #

Deadpubs — one man's highly opinionated, and weirdly soothing, reviews of London pubs on TikTok (via) #

Lumiere — Google Research's new text-to-video diffusion model can also handle inpainting, cinemagraphs, and converting still images to video #

iFixIt’s CES Worst in Show 2024 — from Ecovacs' surveillance vacuum and Instacart's AI shopping carts to BMW's AR goggles and Sennheiser's $300 disposable earbuds #

The Living New Deal Map — mapping 18,359 public works and artworks funded by the New Deal, with tens of thousands still to be added (via) #

Trolls have flooded X with graphic Taylor Swift AI fakes — a failure of content moderation, federal legislation, and basic human decency, the images originated in a Telegram group for non-consensual AI-generated porn #

YouTube deletes 1,000+ deepfake celebrity scam ads after 404 Media investigation — this little indie publication has been killing it, happy to be a supporter since launch #

Buzzfeed’s “dire” debt problem — their stock is down 98% since going public, they need to repay $150 million in debt by late 2024, and are looking to sell off assets to stay alive #

The voice-cloned George Carlin special was not written by AI — a modern update of Keaton Patti's old "I forced a bot" schtick, but tacky and unfunny #

People Make Games explains Jubensha, the murder-mystery social deduction game that took over China — a multi-billion dollar immersive role-play sensation that doubles as a way to make friends and meet new people #

F.a.l.J’s mathgames — a growing collection of beautiful art/code math visualizations with P5.js, try Pong B&W in fullscreen (via) #

VICE talks to Lyle the Therapy Gecko, the internet’s unofficial therapist — Lyle Drescher found an online audience livestreaming conversations with anonymous strangers in a gecko costume #

Mixed reality vacuuming — "never miss a spot again" (via) #

OpenAI quietly scraps promise to disclose governing documents to the public — not only for its for-profit arm, but for the 501(c)3 nonprofit parent organization as well #

The NSA Furby Documents — 60 FOIAed pages from the NSA's ban on the toy in the late '90s #

Neon Knives — free two-player local multiplayer game in the browser, take out your enemy in a field of randomly-roving NPCs a la Hidden in Plain Sight #

90% of top news outlets now block AI bots, right-wing sites mostly allow them — an extension of the free vs. paywall news gap, quality journalism is expensive to produce compared to polarizing clickbait #

Feedle — new-to-me search engine for blog posts and podcasts, with an RSS feed for every search and a solid trending posts list #

Discmaster rises again — offline since June, the semantic search engine for thousands of vintage shareware/compilation CD-ROMs is back online #

Old’aVista, a guide to the old internet — launched in 2021, a search engine indexing early personal websites plus Yahoo directory listings from 1996 to 2003 (via) #

Ode to Internet — a modern orchestral arrangement of the 56k dialup modem handshake, paired with unrelated '90s film footage (via) #

How platforms killed Pitchfork — Casey Newton on the challenging environment it faced, from the ad market to personalized algorithmic recommendations #

Conde Nast is folding Pitchfork under GQ, with layoffs — its editor-in-chief, Puja Patel, was also laid off from the 28-year-old music magazine #

Researchers find Google search really has gotten worse — "Search engines seem to lose the cat-and-mouse game that is SEO spam" (via) #

Sixteen Stories for Flickr Commons’ Sixteenth Birthday — Jessamyn West wrote 16 quirky stories about some of the lesser-known images from their vast photo collection (via) #

Ken Fritz spent years building a $1 million stereo, but the real cost was unfathomable — Geoff Edgers writes about a workaholic audiophile whose obsession consumed his life and everyone around him #

From-To — find comparable neighborhoods in two cities #

Molly White’s guide to migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost — not for the faint-hearted or non-technical, but gives her far more control than any other platform #

Instagram co-founders shutting down Artifact after less than a year — a promising idea, but for me, the recommendations were generally worse than Google News's For You #

George Carlin’s daughter seeking legal action against voice cloned “comedy” special — disappointed to learn Will Sasso of MADtv and lemon Vine fame was responsible for this mess #

Who hosts the fediverse? — over half of all Mastodon users are on an instance hosted by Hetzner (via) #

Internet Archive now hosts DatPiff’s hip-hop mixtape collection — 366k mixtapes saved, over 50 terabytes of music, from 18 years of the site's history (via) #

Seen — Tae Young's bittersweet animated short about a girl trying to reconnect with an old friend #

Tom Coates on how Threads will integrate with the Fediverse — extensive notes and thoughts from a small meeting with the Threads team about their federation plans #

Why Platformer is leaving Substack — every newsletter I love, from Garbage Day and Today In Tabs to Citation Needed and Ironic Sans, are moving off the Nazi-friendly platform #