September 11, 2009
UK PM issues official apology for persecution of Alan Turing
— the result of a petition from 31k British citizens, including Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry #
How one team tracked down missing Wired reporter Evan Ratliff
— part of the contest published in last month's Wired; another perspective from the ground (via) #
Designing a Popularity Algorithm
— with examples from Hacker News, Reddit, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon (via) #
Adam Mathes compares "new entry" UIs on blogging services
— only Wordpress and Twitter have inline posting tools on the homepage #
O'Reilly ends Etech conference
— very sad to see it go; I heard the last one was great though sparsely attended #
C64 emulator for the iPhone approved by Apple
— as far as I know, the first official emulator in the App Store #
Gawker crowdsources Russian translation of GQ's Putin article
— Conde Nast's gone to great lengths to keep the article hidden (via) #
MC Frontalot releases "Diseases of Yore" single featuring Jonathan Coulton
— how could I not link this? a song about medieval medicine (via) #
Japanese programmers' hidden gossip in 8-bit Famicom games
— one message wasn't discovered until 2007 (via) #
Ben Fry visualizes changes to Darwin's Origin of Species over time
— changes across six editions and 13 years; more on the project #
Ben Lee, Lou Barlow release new Noise Addict album for free
— using Bandcamp, their first new album in 13 years (via) #
Derek Yu's Spelunky hits 1.0
— free procedurally-generated platformer for Windows, highly recommended (via) #
AT&T dumps Kevin Mitnick as a customer
— rather than fix their security issues, they asked him to leave #
Robin Sloan's Google Adwords experiment for naming fictional characters
— testing to see which names are most compelling to random Google users #
Verizon the latest ISP to close free Usenet access
— joining AT&T, Time Warner, and Sprint; only a handful of paid feeds will be left, which will be easy for the RIAA/MPAA to attack #
Media outlets paying sources in Dugard
— one source claimed her Facebook page was hacked by reporters (via) #
Sunlight Labs
— opening government through code and design; check out the projects and vote for ideas (via) #
Moldover's circuit board CD packaging
— headphone jack and light sensor makes a portable musical instrument #
Worldwide Lexicon's Firefox Translator
— automatic language detection and translation, with community editing tools #
Yelp iPhone app adds augmented reality easter egg
— in other iPhone news, Apple approved Spotify and Facebook 3.0 is out #
LA Times profile of Jani, a 6-year-old girl with early onset schizophrenia
— her father's blog is simultaneously heartbreaking and terrifying (via) #
Visualization of time travel plots in popular TV and film
— the source data's in the Google Spreadsheet #
Wikipedia to trial moderated edits for articles about living people
— the debate is archived here; Jason's predictions are slowly coming true #
The Pirate Bay forced offline by Swedish authorities
— they've moved ISPs, but it's still down for me #
Typedia, encyclopedia of typefaces
— created by an all-star team; long look into the logo design and great use of Flickr machine tags #
Bill Wyman on why newspapers are failing
— his solution is deep local coverage, the only area newspapers weren't made redundant by the web (via) #
xkcd's Tech Support Flowchart
— so true; the only thing holding newbies back is the fear of making it worse #
Gabe Askew's fan-made video for Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks"
— lovely cut-out art direction, I want to play a game in this universe #