Waxy.org: Links Archives: January 2004

Alan's Orgulator web toy for IE 5.5+ (the only compelling reason to start IE in months)

Pixar ends talks with Disney (how will Pixar fare without Disney's marketing machine?)

Video: David Bradley explains the origins of Ctrl-Alt-Del (and disses a pissed-off looking Bill Gates in the process)

Teen Gets Blood Clot Playing Xbox (deep vein thrombosis from kneeling, via)

Tolkein as Calculus

Video: sports bloopers from NES games (the Excitebike one still cracks me up)

RealNetworks teams with Heineken for free song giveaways (logical, since you'd have to be drunk to choose RealAudio)

Video: Pepsi's iTunes commercial (putting young faces to the statistics can't be good for the RIAA's PR campaign)

Microsoft recommends manually typing all URLs (a great solution to Internet Explorer's URL spoofing vulnerability)

Currency of the lost Victorian colony of Nadiria (beautiful designs, I like the $91 dollar bills best)

P2P companies say they can't filter

Wired profiles The Minibosses, the best NES cover band (sadly, their new homepage removed most of the MP3, but try here)

X68000 Floppy Disk image gallery (more about the Sharp X68000 from 1987)

Image: Yet Another 48 Hours (Nick Nolte and James Brown, via spingo)

MPAA's "Internet Enforcement" Manager job listing (Working knowledge of DMCA and copyright law preferred)

Confessions of a Car Salesman (fascinating series by an Edmunds.com writer going undercover)

Classic Sierra adventure games on the GBA (King's Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and more)

MSN Search beta is live

Slow motion movies (also, slow-motion gunplay)

Kaba Kick, Russian Roulette for kids (you know... for kids!)

Alexa Movers & Shakers (Orkut up 18,000%)

Gameboy Advance wireless link adapter (beat up your friends across the room)

New Face of the Digital Age (putting a human face to India's tech outsourcing)

Julian Dibbell sold his virtual house (a castle for only $600? that's it, I'm moving to Brittania)

Modding a G5 into an Athlon XP (or: how to reduce a Mac user to tears)

Google Grants (background on the AdSense PSAs)

PocketNES author developing an SNES emulator for the GBA (here's an 8MB video of Super Mario World gameplay)

Democratic Candidates and their Cartoon Equivalents

GoogObits (obituaries and essays augmented by Google searches)

Six Degrees of Livejournal (find the shortest path between two users)

Car Stuck Girls (safe for work, pedal pumping and stranded auto fetish)

MyDoom designed to take down SCO website (I hate SCO as much as anyone, but this is beyond lame)

Dio for America (you've been left on your own like a rainbow in the dark)

Being your friend is hard work (Kottke gets meta on social software)

Dreamweaver Studio MX 2004 causes epileptic seizures? (the effect is simulated here)

Lycos Discontinues Communities (including Chat, Message Boards, Clubs and Image Galleries)

Cellphones and Internet use in mental hospitals

Vocaloid singing synthesis software demo songs (strange, everyone sounds like Peter Frampton)

First episode of Dave Eggers' political serial novel

Plastination see-through human wallpaper (preserved human bodies in silly action poses)

Philips rollable electronic paper (with nice video demonstrations)

Interview with Streamcast CEO about Morpheus (the new version leeches off other P2P networks, but they blame Kazaa)

Lieberman denounces Grand Theft Auto (counterpoint: what Lieberman is missing)

Cockney Rhyming Slang dictionary (check out this wind and kite)

Seattle newspaper customizes their homepage by time of day (big news in the morning, lighter stories after lunch)

TiVo buys super-secret Strangeberry (much speculation about the nature of the company)

Torrents.us, an anonymous open BitTorrent tracker (if you want to create your own torrents, this is a good bet)

Justin Frankel resigns from AOL and Nullsoft (happened Friday morning, but I haven't seen this anywhere)

Orkut down for improvements (probably wise, considering the security issues and current criticisms)

Great UI design for a platform crane

Image: Prototype of the Nintendo DS (see also: the Nintendo BS)

Orkut quietly deleting posts (and users, too)

Hamsterball Beta for Windows (brilliant Marble Madness clone)

Ping-Pong Ball Avalanche Homepage (Japanese researchers drop 320,000 balls down a steep ramp, with videos)

Linux booted on Gamecube

Britney, Beyonce, Pink and Enrique Iglesias as Pepsi-wielding Gladiators (worst ad campaign ever? download the wallpaper)

OneLook reverse dictionary (1980s arcade games, or #16 under geek)

More idiotic blog spammer discussion (they think Memepool used blog spam to get popular; even more in the newsgroup)

Kazaa to sue movie, record companies (for copyright infringement, no less)

Nice profile of Norah Jones and her new album

TorrentReactor, another nice torrents site (these sites badly need RSS support)

Wacko "prayer visualizations" from former doomsday cult (don't miss Presidency and Drugs, from the Cult of Universal Triumphant folks)

Imaginary girlfriends for sale on eBay (it's a trend; there are some boyfriends too)

Top 100 Usenet groups, by bytes posted (10 newsgroups compose 1/3 of all data posted to Usenet!?)

MP3: Howard Dean Megamix (by far the best Dean remix I've heard)

Video: Hey Ya, Charlie Brown (Outkast meets Peanuts)

My Best Friend Plank, RealVideo (gorgeous design and pun overload)

Amazon taking campaign donations for presidential candidates (Lieberman opted out, but you can donate ribs to Bush)

Pepsi's Superbowl ad features RIAA-targeted teens

Great background on Johnny Ray Gasca, a big-time movie screener crook (with diary pages and details about his escape, (login: waxyorg/waxyorg))

Tests suggest scientists have found Big Bang goo (mmm, quark-gluon plasma)

Huge collection of Howard Dean scream remixes

Joule, Livejournal network visualization

Illinois man arrested for selling Oscar screener copies (and Carmine Caridi is in big trouble)

Wonkette, Gawker Media's new Washington DC gossip blog (edited by Suck alum Ana Marie Cox, no less)

Google employee releases social networking service (currently invite-only, so e-mail me if you're a friend of mine who wants in)

Arcade game alphabet quiz (I have the answers, if you want it)

The President needs ribs (someone get that man some ribs!)

Congrats, Papa Gruber (with possibly the best birth photo I've ever seen)

Binary link collector from IRC channel topics (collecting file links from 26 IRC networks)

Subpop Records parodies Pitchfork (indie rock will eat itself)

Librarian stereotypes in eBay clothing auctions (more about the research project)

Yahoo closes Scandinavia operations (shutting down their local Norway, Denmark, and Sweden portals?)

A Garden of Cellular Automata (the header graphic evolves over time using data from Weather.com)

Suprnova.org traffic statistics (at 3am on a Sunday morning: 25k active torrents, over a million peers)

NASA loses contact with Mars Spirit rover

Adam's angry at the New York Times (aka the blogger who didn't get hired at Google)

Wesley Clark on the cover of The Advocate (brave, but potentially more damaging than Dean's scream)

Male nipple removal, odd body modification (warning: this is pretty gross)

Top 20 Male Reactions to Olive Oyl (from this obsessive Olive Oyl fanpage)

Magical Gadget (forgotten electronics of the '70s and '80s)

Interview with CTO of Kazaa/Sharman Networks (he seems much less shady than his evasive employer)

Torrentz, cleanly-designed BitTorrent site (nicely organized and popular enough to seed most torrents)

Disneyland's Tower of Terror opening event (hey Cory and Mena, tickets are only $1,595 each!)

Magnetlinks, link directly to P2P files (open standard developed by Kazaa folks)

Billy Joel is Shiite (separated at birth?)

Periodic table museum display, with element samples (gorgeous, and so very cool)

Rolling Stone's interview with Justin Frankel

Radiohead, Pixies, Cure Flaming Lips slated for Coachella festival

Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," dystopian sci-fi about mandated equality (via Matt Jones)

Anna Maltz's One Size Fits All (hand-knit mohair naked bodysuits for the whole family)

The first Howard Dean remix comes in (using the sample suspiciously offered by Drudge)

Patch available to circumvent Photoshop's currency detection (Bugtraq found currency detection in more software)

The Fractal Blogosphere (I try to write like a 10,000, but I'm more like a 100)

RSS: Scraped feed for Suprnova Bittorrents (thanks, rayg)

Blank face dolls (creepy, but inspires more creativity than Barbie)

Sad story of Meat Puppets' Cris Kirkwood (methadone addicted musician shot outside Phoenix post office)

A look at secret new Apple computer (flashback to January 1984)

Photorealistic Chinese Photoshop work in 38 steps (may be faked, via Ask Mefi)

Gangrule, vintage gang photos (historical look at organized crime since 1890)

Nice photos of fake ATM scam (from Snopes, which has an RSS feed now)

New Technorati beta (much faster, nicer results pages)

1993 Lincoln Mark VII for sale (may require light interior cleaning)

Bizarre attacks on Stephen Hawking (sounds like some sort of blackmail is involved)

SimCity Classic, free online play (registration required)

Michael Jackson Innocence Song ("where's the objectivity, not greedy insanity")

Vogue's take on Alice in Wonderland (photos by Annie Leibovitz, with the designers as characters)

Anil on Windows Services for Unix (sounds like a decent Cygwin replacement, download here)

Detailed description of FBI house raid (looks like the guy is suspected of stealing the Half-Life 2 source code)

Guterman revives the dead Industry Standard (with a weblog, naturally)

Google developing ad service for e-mail (may offer free e-mail)

Design new levels for the Atari 2600 Combat remake (some sample playfields to inspire you)

Scans of Half-Life 2 bootleg CDs from Russia ($5.35, cheap!)

Prototype Marvin costume for Hitchhiker's Guide film (to be worn by my favorite little person, Warwick Davis)

Website Mixmaster, remix one site's layout with another's content (there's Kottke in my Haughey!)

Matt Haughey goes Under the Iron (great interview)

Indie rock stars design t-shirts for fake bands (it's for charity, so buy some (via Phil))

President Bush's speech announcing manned missions to Mars and Moon, in 1989 (everything old is new again)

Disney sells off Celebration, FL (are there any bloggers living there?)

Independent UK on The Sims Online's banned newspaper (also: NYT article; does the First Amendment apply in virtual worlds?)

MoveOn, PETA Superbowl ads rejected by CBS

A Modest Browser Proposal (Microsoft should switch to Mozilla)

Deep-fried cow brain burger (if you think that's appetizing, you're probably already infected)

Hollywood Reporter article on Academy screener leaks (heh, my first media mention of 2004)

Japanese trailer for Donkey Konga for the Gamecube (rhythm game with bongo controllers)

Goatse.cx suspended by registrar (link goes to whois information)

The Color of the Web is #9C9C9C (overlaying 3000 URLs, view all 35 steps)

Amazing article about Wal-Mart's monopoly power

Screen Spam, fighting intrusive full-screen ads

Movable Type v2.66 released to defeat comment flooding

Weblog for tenants of an L.A. apartment building (interesting alternative to message boards for micro communities)

Champagne Chair contest finalists (via Kottke)

U.S. military using XBox Live to connect soldiers with their families (speak with your wife and kids, and then blow them up)

Easy Favicon.ico generator (upload an image, they turn it into an icon)

eBay drop-off stores getting popular (drop off your junk, they list it, sell it, and take a commission)

Nintendo plans NES revivals for GBA (great idea, but $18 per game is way too high)

I'll Have You Know I Have Several Black Friendsters

Bob, the Door-to-Door Spammer

63% of all e-mail is now spam (I propose a bounty for the systematic murder of spammers)

Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad

Bugmenot, open accounts for popular websites (nytimes.com is the most popular)

The Numbered Shirts Project

Vivendi spinoff takes MP3.com archive private

Media Player Classic (open-source app that replaces Windows Media Player, Quicktime and RealPlayer)

Bob Mould (of Husker Du and Sugar) has a weblog (via Phil)

Topix.net, news aggregation by topic and location (from the DMOZ guys, via Jim via Mefi)

Image: Can't Download RealPlayer (via The Maxx)

High-res unedited photos of Saddam capture (new to me)

MP3: Super Mario Bros on a ukelele (the rest of the albums are good, too)

Radio stations switching to "classic alternative" format (it's official, it's a trend)

Spalding Gray reported missing

1/6 scale model of Christopher Walken's head

Matt explores equestrian dating sites (or, if you're just looking for friends...)

Colored smoke photos (so perfect, I thought they were rendered)

Make Acrobat 6 load faster (I can't believe Adobe shipped a product that slow)

Google adds more obscure features (Battelle wants to know why)

Fergie from Black Eyed Peas is the hip-hop Poochie (also: the music industry hates you)

Buy the Grand Royal record label (or their liquidated assets, anyway)

Proper use of the Photoshop trademark (they're scared of becoming another kleenex or styrofoam)

Elliot Smith's girlfriend speaks out (my friends suspect her of murder)

Skinhead Family Tree (via boogah)

NYT chart of movie credit lengths (the graphic sums up the article)

Amazon: search for "old fart" (in case they remove it tomorrow, it redirects to this page)

The "net send Hey!" kid tells his story (the school staff may be idiots, but his parents are super cool)

Strongbad on classic video games (you can play the Atari 2600, Vectrex, C64, and Coleco clones at the end)

isoHunt, IRC and BitTorrent search engine

RipDigital converts your entire CD collection to MP3s for you (costs about $1 per CD)

Great interview with Ricky from Better Off Dead

RIAA puts troops in the streets (the home searches are next, I tell you)

Mad cow disease in humans (scary stuff, but I don't know if I could give up eating brains)

13-year-old sends Windows Messenger greeting to entire school network, suspended for three days (net send * "Hey!")

Speed, addictive Flash card game (sloppy programming, but still fun)

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything (an engineer's adventure in postmodernism)

Business 2.0 article on Foo Camp (it was even better than the article makes it sound)

Usenet thread by spammers on blog comment spamming (evil, evil, evil)

TiVo announces TiVo to Go (download saved programs to your PC, officially)

Clay's trip to Atari HQ in 1983 (luckiest kid ever)

Quicktime clip of Howard Dean in Ninja III (Dean says it's not really him, IMDB still says otherwise)

Photoshop CS and Paint Shop Pro detects and blocks currency editing (that's absolute insanity; how it works)

Music Rebellion selling most songs for $.10 each (DRMed WMA, but cheaper than anywhere else)

Community sites that make money (interesting list)

Flash visualization of e-mail discussion lists

Musicmobs, aggregate iTunes playlists (another attempt at Audioscrobbler for iTunes, but uploaded manually)

Yahoo beta-testing an RSS aggregator for My Yahoo

Top Ten Reasons to Work at Google vs Microsoft Search

Refgrunt, reference librarian requests (Memepool says it's a trend)

Internet Archive open-sources the Wayback crawler code (more on the Heritrix homepage)

John Locke weighs in on the piracy debate

Good LATimes piece on the movie piracy scene (check out the 0-day moviez, d00d)

Weblog shrinky-dinks (my blog is longer than your blog)

Howard Dean in Ninja III: The Domination

Macworld Keynote blogged live (anyone taking bets on the mini-iPod?)

UK newspapers plagiarize Retrocrush article (then it was sourced incorrectly and published in US papers)

History of the planned encore (one of music's stupidest traditions)

Share and view RSS reading lists (beware: it's a Winer project; if you sign up anyway, view mine)

Photos from Iraqi LAN gaming cafes (lots of Counter-Strike)

TechTV interviews Timecube crackpot Gene Ray (highly entertaining nutcase, much more on his site)

Posters in "Rainbow Six 3" advertise porno website (Ubisoft should have registered the domain before putting it in the game)

DVD Jon cracks iTunes DRM again (can now be played in VideoLAN for GNU/Linux)

Sonic Death Monkey Bug (Jack Black makes a cameo on some defective Toy Story 2 DVDs)

Mister Pants is BACK! (as promised, the Pants have returned for 2004)

TV report on Internet from October 1993 (obscure hobbyist network called "Internet")

Fontifier, free tool to make a font from your handwriting (click the "1" to get started)

Burning Man project for Microsoft Flight Sim (some screenshots from Wired)

Epcot growing Mickey-shaped cucumbers (via Stereogum)

Britney Spears marries Jason Alexander (pop star weds Seinfeld co-star)

SNES controller adapted for GBA

Hollywood and computers (historical depictions of computers in film)

Cringely's tech predictions for 2004 (he has a good track record)

ReadyMade sells PDF back issues for $5 each (clever revenue model for magazines)

Please Don't Buy My Magnets (buy them, don't buy them... make up your mind, Mark!)

The economy according to eBay (eBay is a microcosm of the online world)

Plink, FOAF search engine

Functional pinhole camera made out of paper (do it yourself with the PDF instructions)

Nick Bradbury on software piracy (how many people would've bought it if they couldn't steal it? my guess: not many)

Drew Cope's Drum Machine, animated Flash music (runner-up in Rockstar's contest, more from Drew at Tokyoplastic)

Top 25 Album Covers of 2003 (also: Tiny Mix Tapes staff top album lists)

Second known photo of Emily Dickinson found on eBay (amazing tale of finding and dating a mysterious purchase)

Barbie, the Intolerance Collection (parodying the eternal Barbie controversy)

Yes.net, real-time radio playlists (someone should write an API for querying this)

WebTV co-founder dies at 39

Rex's Blogs of the Year roundup (shucks, I made the list)

Interactive Fiction all-stars release Narcolepsy (download the free multi-platform story/game or read the readme)