December 3, 2008
Prop 8: The Musical
— starring John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Richter, Maya Rudolph, and Jack Black as Jesus #
Browse uploaded photos from Amazon's iPhone app on Mechanical Turk
— 150 current submissions, including pens, old sneakers, plants, and the inevitable naked guy reflected in a Macbook #
Amazon's Turk-powered app for the iPhone to identify product photos
— a truly harebrained idea, since SnapTell does the same thing instantly using image similarity for all CDs, DVDs, books, and games #
Sony deleting user-created LittleBigPlanet levels without warning
— the gaming world is about to revisit all the lessons Web 2.0 already learned, from Friendster to Facebook #
YouTube's new video thumbnails to be determined algorithmically
— they'll be representative of video content instead of cleavage shots designed to drive click traffic #
David Recordon on building OpenID in the browser
— the best way to drive mass adoption, since it's such a difficult concept to understand otherwise #
Image and video manipulation in Mathematica 7
— also, it supports built-in parallel processing on EC2 #
Pirates of the Amazon, Firefox extension adds Pirate Bay links to Amazon listings
— similar Greasemonkey scripts exist for Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB (via) #
Whole Foods subpoenas New Seasons' financial and marketing records
— the local Portland chain isn't even involved in the dispute #
Wired on how Dan Kaminsky and a set of DNS all-stars fixed a serious exploit
— a dramatic retelling of "the largest multivendor patch in the history of the Internet" #
The Guardian publishes six unreleased 999 emergency calls
— insanely dramatic life-and-death scenarios, including a solo childbirth and near-death choking (via) #
Jason Nelson's "I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies."
— an exploratory Flash game/poem with levels based on sites like Metafilter and Fark #
Magic/Replace
— spreadsheet manipulation built on the underrated DabbleDB; don't miss the demo (via) #
How Jeremy Keith's Flickr photo ended up in Iron Man
— it was CC-licensed, but attribution in the credits costs money, so he signed a release instead #
Six Apart acquires Pownce, which will shut down in two weeks
— unlike most acquirees, they thoughtfully built an exporter tool #
Kottke on the "broken windows theory" applied to online communities
— if graffiti can cause more crime, can the ugliness of a message board create more trolling? #
Give Me Something to Read
— meatier articles bookmarked by Instapaper users; related: the toread tag on delicious #
Change.gov switches from copyright to Creative Commons
— small decisions like these, made quickly in a time of transition, are inspiring #
Bio-Bak, the portfolio site of Dutch Flash artist Coen Grift
— I've never seen anything remotely like it #
Emily the Strange character inspired by Nate the Great's Rosamond?
— noticed before, but the phrasing on the sticker and book are virtually identical #
NYT on Mark Allen and Machine Project at LACMA
— one of the most interesting people I know gets a writeup of his most recent project #
MIDI Hero, Guitar Hero hack with a drum kit
— the author later wired up his Roland V-Drums kit (via) #
Danah Boyd on Lori Drew's conviction in the Megan Meier suicide case
— the lawsuit centered on technology, when the fact it happened online was incidental (via) #
New York Times' visualization of one year of NYC parking tickets
— they had to file a FOIA request to get the data for the 9.9 million tickets #
Helvetireader, minimal Google Reader redesign with Greasemonkey
— very sexy, though maybe a bit too minimal #
The L.A. Times data desk
— all their research projects collected in one place, though some raw data dumps would be nice too (via) #
Rick Astley rickrolls the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
— quite possibly the widest instant exposure of an Internet meme ever #
Barack Obama's weekly address on YouTube
— stylistic notes: his team's using the new widescreen format and comments are enabled #
Ed Piskor's Wizzywig #2 released
— the perfect blend of autobiographical comics and geek subject matter; I bought both books, highly recommended #
The Time Machine, an interactive YouTube adventure
— see also: Tube Adventures and its sequel, Samsung's Follow Your Instinct, and A Car's Life (via) #
Zoetrope, search and visualize the historical web
— in-development tool creates a window into past versions of a page (via) #
StateStats, find correlations between search queries and U.S. state characteristics
— Myspace users are violent illiterates in warm climates, Gmail users are skinny and rich #
Fleet Foxes on La Blogotheque's Take-Away Shows
— directed by Vincent Moon in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais #
Bad Hacks, a repository of vulgar ROM hacks
— including Super Nazi Bros., Naked Metroid, and Zelda as erotic fanfic (via) #
John Gruber on the iPhone's deprecation of "http://"
— I'm a little surprised they didn't merge the search and location bar into a single field #
Twitter acquires Rael Dornfest
— along with Values of n, which will be shutting down Sandy and Stikkit next month #
Autographed Zork first edition manual sells for $2,300 on eBay
— from Brian Moriarty's personal collection, less than 100 copies were sold for the PDP-11 (via) #
Disney World's Haunted Mansion map in Counter-Strike Source
— from the creator of the Van Gogh Starry Night map #
Doom ported to Flash 10
— built with Alchemy, which could bring a flood of PC emulators and ports (via) #