Links 19

June 19, 2009
Anil Dash on the first rapper vs. the first blogger ("all of blogging is hip hop")
Pixar grants dying 10-year-old girl's last wish to see "UP" (prepare to weep) [via]
June 18, 2009
Guardian crowdsources investigation into MPs' expenses (brilliantly using readers to dig through 700,000 documents to aid their investigation)
Paul Lamere's Passion Index for measuring band's true fans (he looks at the number of plays per listener for a simple metric)
Sudden Impact (cliche supercut of TV/film characters suddenly hit by moving vehicles)
June 17, 2009
How to enable iPhone OS 3.0 tethering on AT&T's network (not as flawless as I thought; it disables Visual Voicemail, but you can check manually until the new hack's out tomorrow)
Ross Racine's incredible artwork of aerial views of fictional city maps (drawn freehand in Photoshop, they contain no photos or scanned material)
TED interviews Clay Shirky about Iran and Twitter (related: Clay's TED talk from last month at the State Department)
Shaun Inman releases Fever, an elegantly designed feedreader (PHP/MySQL app, it recommends stories in your feeds based on link popularity)
Ze Frank's Art Hour (he still makes me giggle)
Microsoft IE8 contest insults other browsers (tarnished Chrome, boring Safari, and old Firefox; "get rid of it, or get lost")
Alice and Kev, the story of being homeless in Sims 3 (start from the beginning and keep reading; his writing is outstanding) [via]
June 16, 2009
SomethingAwful user's "urban exploration" of his neighbor's house (also known as "trespassing")
Chris Messina's scathing critique of Opera Unite (sending all traffic through Opera's proxies creates more centralization instead of less)
Google asks 50 random New Yorkers, "What's a browser?" (only about 8% knew; Rocketboom got very different answers on the NYU campus in 2005)
Play Mario Off, Keyboard Cat (Internet meme plus chiptunes equals Waxy love)
Sweet Juniper on Andrew WK's "Destroy Build Destroy" kid's show ("It's official: Andrew W.K., world's best babysitter.")
Autotune the News takes on JFK's inaugural speech (everything sounds better autotuned; see also: Winston Churchill and MLK)
Opera Unite (web server hosted in the browser using Opera's proxy servers for a simple URL; file sharing seems the most useful)
Shnabubula's alternate-reality versions of classic videogame music (Super Mario Bros. in a blender)
Alex Payne's Open Ideas (he's publishing his notebook of "someday" ideas, and they're all winners)
June 15, 2009
PS22 Chorus covers Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" (don't stop believin', kids)
Weird Al's "Craigslist" (Doors style parody featuring Ray Manzarek on keyboards, directed by Liam Lynch) [via]
BREADBOX64 (a Twitter client for the Commodore 64/128) [via]
John Martz's IE6 denial message for Momentile.com (new candidate for best error ever)
Diorama, stereoscopic 3D game for the iPhone (I want to see this on the Wii with head tracking) [via]
Dina Goldstein's Fallen Princesses photo series (what happens after the fairy tale's over?)
List of most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com (more accurate stats since they removed the irritating double-click behavior in October)
June 14, 2009
Backbars, Greasemonkey script adds ambient bar charts to social news sites (unobtrusively visualizes popularity on Metafilter, Delicious, Reddit, Hacker News, etc) [via]
Hunch.com, decision-making engine, opens to the public (Caterina's new project is weird and good; worth checking out: the stats methods in the API and their cred system)
Nelson Minar on building social capital in multiplayer games (using an avatar creates a barrier to real-life interaction)
June 13, 2009
E_B_A tells the story behind the "Suing for Hotlinked Images" screenshot (the 2005 conversation is making the rounds again on Digg, Reddit, and Fark, without the followups)
140+ versions of Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson in The Sims 3 (also: Boxxy, Tay Zonday, and Rick Astley all living in one house) [via]
Simon Willison's thoughtful essay on Facebook usernames and OpenID (he also notes that they're not doing an HTTP redirect, instead relying on JS) [via]
ARhrrrr, augmented reality first-person shooter on a handheld (runs on a prototype Nvidia Tegra dev kit; "orange Skittles act like proximity bombs") [via]
June 12, 2009
Ian Bogost on cascading failure from Google's malware detection (Twitter uses it for spam detection, which caused Ian's account to be suspended) [via]
Image: Facesquatting (fixed) (Mat Honan's collecting more examples)
Fleet Foxes singer on the beneficial effects of filesharing on music (he argues that free access to music history creates better musicians)
Mythbuster Adam Savage's Colossal Failures (great talk from Maker Faire on how his failures have changed him) [via]
The Simpsons Minus The Simpsons (hand-editing out the main characters, frame by frame)
Rob Matthews' printed hardbound edition of Wikipedia's featured articles (and it only represents less than 1/1000th of the total articles) [via]
Jim Rossignol on the Fermi paradox and why the aliens stayed home (our grandkids might find space exploration boring compared to next-gen virtual worlds and networks) [via]
Microsia, gorgeous sound game/tool for Windows (feels like an in-depth, HD version of Electroplankton) [via]
Windosill demo, now playable online (the first half of the game from the creator of Vector Park) [via]
June 11, 2009
Trending Topics, tracking Wikipedia zeitgeist (a completely open-source clone of Wikirank built on Hadoop and EC2) [via]
Daily Show visits the New York Times (I don't think they deserved this treatment; the NYT preemptively responded) [via]
Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store (must-read short fiction on data visualization, Google book scanning, and immortality)
Microsoft's Project Natal demo on Jimmy Fallon (Gavin Purcell says the bright red suits weren't for edge detection, but just being silly)
Slate on orphaned tweets (people who post once to Twitter and never return) [via]
Chinese government to require all new computers to ship with "Green Dam" filtering software (ostensibly to remove porn, but it also monitors activity and allows full government control over Internet usage)
June 10, 2009
Evaluating Google vs. Bing with Mechanical Turk (same as my experience, Google has a slim lead for most queries)
Bygone Bureau's feature on the indie gaming scene (interviews with the creators of Gravity Bone, You Have to Burn the Rope, and The Graveyard)
Last.fm's three founders announce their departure (they're leaving at the end of the month, close to the two-year anniversary of their acquisition)
Anil Dash on the future of Facebook usernames (entirely plausible; until Simon writes his up, I'm linking to Chris Messina's thoughtful essay)
June 7, 2009
Blind Search, compare results from Google, Bing, and Yahoo (in my queries, Google has an edge over Bing with Yahoo far behind)
Flixel, a free Actionscript library for building complex games without Flash (used to create Gravity Hook and Fathom, and includes the full source for Mode)
June 5, 2009
Joystiq on Scribblenauts for the DS (its absurdly large vocabulary lets players summon anything from a Kraken to a jackelope)
Alabaster, an interactive fiction fairy tale edited by Emily Short (multiple authors, procedural illustrations, and a tremendous amount of dialogue)
NYT publishes a new photo of the Tiananmen Square "Tank Man" (fascinating to see an iconic moment from a completely new angle) [via]
June 4, 2009
Ron Gilbert plays Secret of Monkey Island, 20 years later (his random thoughts and memories about making the game as he played through)
Ask Metafilter on musical cliches from TV and film (also, Kick Ass Classical ranks the top 100 classical songs by pop culture exposure)
Pocket Retro Game Emulator ($100 handheld plays NES, SNES, GBA, Genesis, and Neo Geo ROMs natively (and most likely illegally)) [via]
June 3, 2009
Google Squared goes live, structured data search (the quality is spotty, but it's still fun to play with; badly missing sorting and data export)
Dave Eggers on the death of print (he's conflating literacy with print, but I'm very excited to see his newspaper prototype) [via]
God Texts the Ten Commandments ("no omg's")
Han Solo, P.I. (don't miss the side-by-side; see also: Star Wars in the style of Macgyver, Dallas, and Airwolf)
The Beatles Rock Band animated intro, by Gorillaz animator Peter Candeland (incredible detail and hidden goodies in the newly-released HD version) [via]
Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions ("the more you ignore it, the cooler you look"; it's almost a supercut)
Ask Metafilter on books that people proselytize (Aaron Cohen compiled a list of books and authors, ordered by most mentions)
June 2, 2009
JD Salinger sues over unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel (a fictional version of Salinger appears as a character in the book) [via]
John Martz's hand-drawn versions of famous album covers (more here and here)
Valve releases plugin to import Sketchup 3D models into Source maps (bring any object from Google's 3D Warehouse into a first-person game)
China blocking Twitter, Flickr, others in preparation for Tiananmen 20th anniversary (I find it fascinating how Chinese citizens view the GFW as an inconvenience or necessary evil)
Johnny Chung Lee reveals he worked on Project Natal (all my doubts about the technology just flew out the window; it is very real)
Steve Wiebe's live E3 attempt to break Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong record (he just started) [via]
June 1, 2009
Dan & naD, a palindromic sketch (related: the What Song Is This? series) [via]
Chris Messina on Michael Moore's advice to Obama on GM (the actionable excerpt from Moore's original essay)
Kevin Kelly's Internet Mapping Project (hand-drawn maps of each person's view of the Internet) [via]
IGN/Gamespy shutting down ClassicGaming.com on August 31 (Jason Scott broke the news last week, this includes all hosted sites)
MTV's new original animated series, DJ & The Fro (like a modernized Beavis & Butthead, mocking YouTube instead of music videos)
Microsoft announces Project Natal, full-body motion capture for the Xbox 360 (control games without a controller, plus gestural media browsing, face recognition and object scanning) [via]
Boone Oakley (ad agency uses interactive YouTube videos as their homepage) [via]
Twitcaps, stream of images posted to Twitter (the most popular list is a glimpse into Twitter's evolving demographics) [via]
Lou Romano's incredible concept art for Pixar's UP (don't miss the color scripts and animated tests; also: NYT interviews Pete Docter) [via]
Telltale Games to release Tales of Monkey Island, five short episodic games (and Lucasarts is remaking the original game with new graphics and sound!)
Crush the Castle (addictive little Flash game, knocking down ragdolls on balancing structures)
xkcd inspires 4chan to turn /b/ into Twilight fan forum (in response to this excellent comic) [via]
David Lynch's Interview Project goes live (interviews with ordinary folks conducted on a 70-day road trip across America; directed by Lynch's son)
May 31, 2009
Know Your Meme tracks the origins of the "God Kills a Kitten" meme (appears to have originated from Portland's BarFly magazine in 1999)
Windows Update quietly installs Firefox extension (which can't be easily uninstalled; karma, indeed)
May 29, 2009
Zoho CEO on Google Wave, Microsoft Silverlight, and technology karma (even though Google's their biggest competitor, they've aligned with them because of their history) [via]
PatchMatch, incredible video demo of interactive content-aware image editing (taking seam carving to the next level, I really could've used this last week)
Yahoo! 360 closing down in July (they're providing a migration option and export tools, though only six weeks to use them)
The Onion's report on tracking down an NYU dorm fire (the future of news) [via]
Normalware's Bebot, surprisingly deep synth for the iPhone (don't miss the demo song by Jordan Rudess, showing how it's a full instrument) [via]
Twitter, as viewed by everybody who's never used Twitter (finally, the cliche's going away) [via]
Invaders! Possibly From Space! (Futurama fan makes a game based on a sketch based on a game)
Google Wave's full hour-long demo at Google I/O (don't miss the stunning demo of Rosy, real-time character-by-character language translation)
May 28, 2009
EFF chairman Brad Templeton makes a Hitler Downfall parody (don't miss his explanation of how he finally made the clip without breaking any laws) [via]
Hulu launches Desktop client for Windows/Mac (also, they just released browsing by air date and recommendations)
How Google Wave's spellcheck uses natural language processing (context-sensitive, it can correct there/their/they're and its/it's errors; also: Arrington interviews the founders)
Tim O'Reilly on the newly-announced Google Wave (real-time collaboration tool with an open protocol, blurring the line between email, IM, and personal publishing)
Don Bluth's Space Ace ported to iPhone (cheaper than the laserdisc version, but apparently, just as frustrating) [via]
Jeff Veen announces Typekit, licensing and hosting for web font embedding (short on details, but glad someone clever's trying to bridge the gap between developers and foundries)
Kevin Fox on Nilla wafers (I found this strangely touching)
May 27, 2009
Cabel Sasser on Panic's 50% off sale (every software company needs a green screen)
The Legion of Rock Stars (band wears 30dB noise-canceling headphones and plays along to rock songs)
Phreakmonkey surfs the web with a 300 baud acoustic modem from 1964 (at 6:30, he loads Wikipedia in Lynx; amazing it works so well with modern hardware) [via]
Zero Punctuation reviews Duke Nuke Forever ("taht's targic") [via]
Dennis Knopf's Bootyclipse series (booty-shaking videos on YouTube with the booty removed; the angry comments are funny)
May 26, 2009
Play Him Off, Green Day (Colbert gets in on the keyboard cat action)
Highlights from the truly horrible Star Wars first draft script (constraints led Lucas to make one great film; without them, he turned out films like this draft) [via]
Pick One (don't miss the top 10 (Sex, The Internet, Cats) and bottom 10 (AIDS, 9/11, Lil' Wayne)) [via]
May 25, 2009
nasty nets' YouTube Monster (culled from unrelated videos, like the visual version of In Bb 2.0)
Néojaponisme on the culture of anonymity for Japanese Internet users (opinionated but interesting article, particularly Japan's public vs. private personas)
Text Adventure, typography in video games (remember to adjust your fart volume) [via]
J. Chris Anderson on Toast, his standalone CouchDB chat demo (in the process, he explains some of the overlooked benefits of CouchDB)
May 24, 2009
Apple changes its mind, allows Eucalyptus into App Store (until Apple sorts out their approval process, it helps to have noisy friends)
The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist ("Having your desk near the entrance to your office without visitors assuming you're the receptionist.") [via]
May 23, 2009
Techcrunch reports CBS secretly gave Last.fm data to RIAA (Arrington says CBS lied to Last.fm and gave it to the RIAA without their knowledge; Last.fm is vehemently denying it, implying a personal vendetta)
May 22, 2009
An Optical Illusion by Ze Frank (put on a finger cot first)
The Deck Readership Survey (best survey ever; an excellent example of why I love The Deck so much) [via]
Intel's nerd rockstar ad (the way it should be! sadly, Intel hired an actor to play Ajay Bhatt)
Davario's Draw Yourself As A Teen meme on Livejournal (over 500 submissions in a year, some highlights)
May 21, 2009
Scott Schiller's forensics on a nasty piece of JS malware (the most bizarre Javascript obfuscation I've ever seen)
Buzzfeed's top video reactions to American Idol's finale (some very upset Adam Lambert fans, #9 is my personal favorite)
John Gruber on the next-gen iPhone's specs (he has the best sources of anyone in the industry, I'll bet this is dead-on accurate)
Sorry I'm Late, a stop-motion short film (I loved seeing how it was made, from the first test animations to the final shoot) [via]
U.S. government launches Data.gov, national data repository (not much there yet, but centralized data is good)
Project Gutenberg iPhone app blocked by Apple because of the Kama Sutra (note that Stanza, eReader, and Amazon's Kindle app all allow the same book) [via]
Infinite Summer, read Infinite Jest this summer (only 75 pages a week, easy!)
Brian & Eileen's Wedding Music Video (someone found a business model for lip dubs)
Tiny Art Director, little kids are difficult clients (I'm finding this very, very late, but every entry made me laugh) [via]
May 20, 2009
Mozilla Jetpack, extend Firefox with HTML, CSS, and jQuery (don't bother trying to grok it from the text, just watch the screencast)
Yahoo! Placemaker, extract world locations from unstructed content (also, Yahoo released the huge GeoPlanet/WOE placename database under a CC license)
Axono.me, isometric pixel art grid library for jQuery (check out the demos, including these racing cubes)
LEGO announces Frank Lloyd Wright sets (the Guggenheim and Fallingwater are first, continuing the LEGO Architecture series of landmarks)
Evan Roth's Intellectual Property Asshole Competition (he painted the HOPE poster and the AP photo it was based on; whoever C&Ds him first wins) [via]
Braid for Mac released (now there's no excuse not to buy it)
Fast Company on Taipei's innovative "zero landfill, total recycling" program (here's a first-person account of the system and video of the garbage trucks playing Fur Elise) [via]
May 19, 2009
Leaked video from Trico, new game by ICO/Shadow of the Colossus creators (their games seem to be weaving a larger narrative arc in the same fictional world)
Katy Hargrove's real-life molded Gummi Venus de Milos (life imitating art)
Fathom (tweaking the genre's cliches, it quickly shifts from 8-bit platformer to art game) [via]
Gmail Labs adds automatic language translation (getting closer to the Babel fish)
Tweeting Too Hard (dedicated to finding the most self-important, egotistical tweets)
ghstbstrsbstrs (clever, a digital collage without Photoshop) [via]
Joel Johnson on the divide between Wired Magazine vs. Wired.com (great comments from Wired employees past and present, including Chris Anderson, Leander Kahney, Steve Silberman, and Brian Lam)
May 18, 2009
Auto Tune The News #3 (last month, the New York Observer interviewed Michael Gregory about the series) [via]
Last Day Dream (a 42-second short film) [via]
Which of our beliefs will our grandchildren be appalled by? (Phil Dhingra highlights the best from a massive Reddit thread)
NYT's Maureen Dowd steals paragraph from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall (it would've been more fitting if she'd plagiarized from Twitter instead)
May 17, 2009
All Your Base dialogue, properly translated from Japanese to English (amazingly, I've never read the correct translation before)
Japanese trailer for "Muscle March" for WiiWare (defies description, the most intensely weird game I've ever seen)
Google's index of Wolfram|Alpha search results (they have no robots.txt at all; Google isn't parsing their Javascript, so Google can only see what's served statically from their results)
May 16, 2009
danah boyd's answers questions on Twitter about teen practices (I find this kind of thing absolutely fascinating)
WolframAlpha rendering text as images to prevent indexing (though they claim it's for "consistency," which is absurd; on second thought, I think Paul Ford's right, it's just Wolfram culture)
Hard Times with Ze Frank (Ze's second video for Buzzfeed, I'm hoping he'll keep making more)
Danger Mouse to release blank CD-ROM after legal fight with EMI (selling the packaging without the music; also, NPR's streaming the album) [via]
May 15, 2009
Updating the Web 2.0 logo collage for 2009 (tracking how many of the original sites are dead or acquired; or, in the case of WebJay, both) [via]
Wired's walkthrough of the May issue's hidden puzzles (reminds me of the golden era of Games Magazine) [via]
Stephen Wolfram demonstrates Wolfram|Alpha in detail (after watching the screencast, I'm much more excited about tonight's launch)
Us Now (one-hour free documentary about online collaboration and participatory government) [via]
May 14, 2009
Ian Bogost's Guru Meditation (Zen game released in two versions: the Atari 2600/Amiga Joyboard and the iPhone)
Vulture crunches the numbers on this season's SNL (charting cast member frequency, average appearances, and celebrity cameos) [via]
The Sound of Young America's Pledge Drive (a short film by Lonely Sandwich; donate to the best interview show around and get a Mustache TV)
Ubik's Voxel (absolutely stunning animated 3D pixel-ish art) [via]
F.A.T.'s KANYEFY bookmarklet, turn any site into Kanye West's blog (also on Kanye week: see the web through Kanye's eyes, Quotable Kanye (with API), and the Kanye rant detector)
Giant net-enabled Etch-A-Sketch hacked out of a 52" HD TV (related: giant collaborative Etch-A-Sketch from Siggraph 2006, projected on a giant screen) [via]
Greg Borenstein explains Why the Lucky Stiff's Bloopsaphone, with examples (write chiptunes in C or Ruby with a surprisingly readable syntax)
Buster Benson leaving Robot Co-op to do Enjoymentland full-time (one of my favorite people, always doing interesting things)
Gamasutra's Community Manager interview series (social network and gaming community managers could learn from one another)
Cracked's Most Baffling Pairings from Erotic Slash-Fiction (some gems in the comments, including this site dedicated to Radiohead slashfic)
Pixel City, Shamus Young's procedurally-generated city (his ten-part series of blog posts breaks down how it's made)