Looks like Digg found a copy of the Tetris valentine I’ve been hosting on my server since February 2006. The original was created by Mitch at the wonderful 4 Color Rebellion gaming blog, but when I tried to redirect the requests to their original entry, the traffic shut down their server in a few minutes.

So if you’re looking for the valentine, here it is. Click it to see a full-size, print-quality version on 4 Color Rebellion’s site, and see their other 2006 Geek Valentines.

And if you like those, don’t miss 4 Color Rebellion’s geek valentines for last year and this year! In 2007, they made adorable Phoenix Wright, Nintendo DS, Wii, and Metroid Prime valentines. This year, it’s a set of valentines for Dr. Mario, Mario Galaxy, and Wii.

In case you’re 14 years old, relatively new to the Internet, and/or coming from Digg, here are a bunch of other two-year-old links you might have missed: Halo Babies, Ze Frank’s On Valentine’s Day, A Very Star Wars Valentines, All Your Heart Candy Are Belong To Us, a set of vintage 1980s Valentines including Mario, Zelda, and TMNT, vector art of Ralph Wiggum’s valentines, more original Nintendo valentines, and nothing woos a lady like romantic Perl poetry. Want something more fresh? New this year are the Team Fortress 2 valentines, Ironic Sans’ Scientist Valentines, Jacks of Science’s Science Valentines, Diesel Sweeties’ E-Cards 2.0, a DIY pulsating LED heart card, interlocking Moebius strip hearts, and Woot’s superhero comic anti-valentines.

Reading Rex Sorgatz’s commemoration of Wired Magazine’s first issue for its 15th birthday, I was reminded of the very first mentions of Wired online. Not on the web, which was only just getting started with the release of Mosaic 0.5 the month before, but on the uber-hip Northern California BBS, The WELL.

I love deep-diving the WELL archives for research. It’s an amazing glimpse at the tech and media scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but especially for anyone interested in Wired. Many of Wired’s founding staff and contributors were active on the WELL, and executive editor Kevin Kelly was a WELL co-founder, so it was natural that the BBS hosted the official Wired forum.

Below, for the first time on the public web, I’ve reprinted some of Wired’s early history on the WELL, including the first call-for-feedback from May 1992 (9 months before the first issue), the first press release, and some of the more interesting responses.

Continue reading “WIRED and The WELL” →

As I mentioned yesterday, I got slightly obsessed with researching oscilloscope hacks yesterday, after seeing this jaw-dropping graphic demo released at Assembly 2007:

The author released the audio files (FLAC and WAV), allowing other people to try it on their own hardware or software scopes and post the results.

Continue reading “Oscilloscope Fun and Games” →

While researching oscilloscope art — more on that tomorrow — I stumbled on the MovieTone Digital Archive, an incredible and underrated online resource for vintage British newsreel footage from the 1930s to the late 1970s.

Amazingly, it seems virtually unknown on the web, linked seven times on Del.icio.us and only 33 links in Google’s index. It’s almost certainly because of the registration wall, with no clear insight into what’s hiding behind the curtain. But once you register (for free), you get access to full access to the entire video archive in high-quality Quicktime or Windows Media.

Funny enough, I noticed that their Quicktime previews are viewable outside of their site. So, as long as it lasts, here’s a small sampling of my favorites from the 48,500+ reels in the British MovieTone News archive.

Continue reading “Highlights from the British MovieTone Darkweb” →

Just received word moments ago that Consumating, the niche dating community acquired by CNET in December 2005, will be shutting down next month. In the wake of the sale of Webshots to American Greetings, it appears that CNET couldn’t find a buyer for the site and is no longer interested in maintaining it.

Founders Ben Brown and Adam Mathes are no longer affiliated with Consumating, but they were the first to break the news two hours ago. “Just got word of the plan to turn off Consumating,” Ben wrote on Twitter. Adam replied, “Beginning my long mourning period over the end of Consumating.”

After Ben Brown left CNET in Spring 2007, Jesse Keyes took over managing the site. This morning, he posted a revealing Question of the Week on Consumating: “What will you do when it all comes grinding to a halt?” Jesse’s own response was, “Pack it up and call it a day…”

Rumors of its demise have been swirling for the last two weeks, so most of the community didn’t seem surprised in the active discussions. A week ago, Consumating users set up an off-site message board to ease the transition and keep friendships alive, in the event of a closure.

Though there hasn’t been an official statement from CNET on the matter, sources close to the company confirmed that the shutdown date will be March 15. Users will be able to download a data dump of their questions, answers, and other social activity as a comma-separated file.

Even though Consumating never found a huge audience or revenue, it’s worth noting that it still has a dedicated following that loves the site, uses it every day, and formed offline relationships because of it. It’s unfortunate that CNET couldn’t find a way to keep the site online, even if that meant handing it back to the users that made it special. Since online communities are built on top of user’s contributions and social interactions, it raises the question: are companies responsible for keeping community website alive, even after they cease to be strategically desirable?

Well, maybe the Consumating founders did find a way to preserve it after shutdown. Shortly before Ben Brown left, he pushed CNET to open source the Consumating code base. That project, Clonesumating, is available on Google Code. After it’s burned to the ground, maybe an open version of Consumating will rise from the ashes.

February 14 Update: Yesterday, Jesse Keyes gave the official announcement. “We know you want and deserve a site that is vibrant and fresh, and we don’t think it’s fair to you to keep an unsupported site live. And so, we’ll be shutting Consumating.com down on March 15th,” he wrote. “In a couple weeks we’ll have a way available for you to download a file with most of your profile data, which could theoretically be imported into a similar site. Details will come when we’re ready to release the exporter.”

According to this thread, the private messaging feature recently stopped working and nobody’s around to fix it. How depressing.