Ads via The Deck
September 30, 2004
Mount St. Helens' insect overloads (

mmm, underground sugar caves

)
Why I'm not posting many links (

their crappy rooms have no Internet access; light posting until Friday

)
Top 10 Secrets about the Presidential Debates (

both parties are to blame for this comspiracy to suppress real debate

) [via]
Tribe.net goes local (

for example, here's Los Angeles

)
September 29, 2004
Cachelogic's survey of P2P network traffic (

BitTorrent by far the biggest; P2P traffic far outpaces web traffic

)
September 28, 2004
Girlhacker has a baby! (

welcome, little Babyhacker

) [via]
Cockeyed's TGI Fridays menu prank (

one Bacon Churner and an Atkinz Soda, please

)
The Internet's Most Accurate English-to-English Dictionary (

now with support for three new languages!

) [via]
Ask Mefi on skitter scatters, ghosts, and auras (

very odd thread about a 6-year-old girl who sees strange things

) [via]
University professors gathering students in Second Life (

I highly recommend the free trial

)
Boogah interviews Eric Kleptone (

the Waxy shout-out left me blushing

)
HR 4077 bill passed the House (

bill proposes up to 5 years of jail for sharing 1,000 songs or one unreleased album

)
Invisible Train, multiplayer augmented reality game for the PocketPC (

watch the video to see the virtual trains running on real tracks

)
Bloglines announces web services, sync support for other feedreaders (

huge news; FeedDemon now supports it and NetNewsWire support is coming soon

) [via]
Sony PSP to retail for $349? (

update: it was a hoax

)
Flickr slideshow of U2's "Vertigo" (

wait for the images and hold the spacebar to flipall the frames

)
Escher for Real (

3D printed models of Escher artwork

) [via]
Tomas on the crazy juice in his hometown (

take me to the river, drop me in the water

)
Evil JPEG virus in the wild (

tons of info, including the FTP site it connects to and the image itself

)
September 27, 2004
Jeremy on new My Yahoo beta (

very well designed, with RSS everywhere

) [via]
Flash charts with PHP (

easier than working with GD::Graph, and sexier too

) [via]
Audio: Engadget has the breast-enhancing ringtone MP3 (

it sounds very butt rock

) [via]
Bontago, multiplayer Jenga-ish strategy game (

it was a winner in last year's IGF

) [via]
Conan to replace Leno on The Tonight Show (

...in the year 2009

) [via]
Lindows office building letters on eBay (

looks like a job for the Anagram Server

) [via]
Cornelius is Joi Ito's second cousin (

lovely photo of them on Flickr

)
Rex's thoughts on game culture intersecting with other media
MTV2's "Video Mods," music videos portrayed by video games (

machinima goes mainstream, watch the clips

) [via]
Black Magic, virtual reality pop-up books (

the handheld viewers look like a modern take on stereoscopes

) [via]
September 26, 2004
Dance Dance Revolution fan fiction (

the rest of the Games category at FanFiction.net is fascinating, too

) [via]
Image: Star Wars Battlefront game lets you kill Jar-Jar Binks (

and the Ewoks, too

)
September 25, 2004
Annotated recipes on Flickr (

like Cooking for Engineers, a new approach to an old genre

) [via]
Del.icio.us extension for Firefox (

two great tastes that go great together

) [via]
Annenberg survey finds Daily Show viewers far more politically aware (

also: of the 83 jokes surveyed, he targeted Bush and Kerry equally

) [via]
George draws parallels between the Kryptonite lock scandal and the DMCA (

this is an excellent read

)
Esther Dyson invests in Flickr (

great to see them get the support

) [via]
Technorati passes 4 million blogs (

I wonder how many of those are from Livejournal's 1.8M active sites

)
September 24, 2004
First screenshots of Wario Ware 2 [via]
Theo Jansen's Strandbeest, huge walking kinetic sculptures (

the videos are unbelievable, like a real-life Sodaplay

) [via]
CBS adventure race contestant killed by 300-pound boulder (

the first reality show fatality?

) [via]
Bootable Goatse rescue floppy (

make copies and put them in Best Buy PCs

) [via]
Fable's first-week game sales beat Sky Captain's box office (

it sold 375,000 games for an $18.7 million gross

) [via]
Fascinating article on Second Life's economy and entrepreneurs by a Linden Labs VP (

a must-read for both the uninitiated and experienced users

) [via]
TiddlyWiki (

neat UI, but a novelty until saving changes is fixed

) [via]
MIT creating a spinach-powered computer [via]
OJR on political coverage on Google News and Yahoo News (

they claim Google's system favors conservative sources

) [via]
September 23, 2004
Image: Sim playing "The Sims" in "The Sims 2" (

very meta

) [via]
MetaVNC, a window-aware VNC client (

as in the screenshot, makes your remote Linux desktop transparent within Windows XP/2000

) [via]
Image: Nice hat! (

Google Images is great for serendipity

)
Emusic relaunches (

$9.99/month for 40 DRM-free MP3s

) [via]
Video: C-Mon and Kypski, "Shitty Bum" (

excellent music video, with great Space Invaders sequence

)
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game, redesigned with graphics (

here's some technical information about the redesign

) [via]
New California law requires disclosing valid e-mail address for filesharing (

I'm absolutely furious about this MPAA-sponsored law, here's some of the reasons why

) [via]
September 22, 2004
The Last Starfighter, the Musical (

more information about this terrible idea

)
Nick's update on Blog Torrent, and call for help (

they need people with NSIS, ActiveX, and Moz plugin experience

)
Commercial ultrasound services growing popular (

we tried FetalFotos, and got our money's worth

)
Sony to support MP3 on their portables (

apparently, ATRAC never really took off

) [via]
Record companies double royalties while online music sites lose money (

Apple makes only $.04 per song, while the labels take $.62 or more

) [via]
Brian's roundup of new social-network local listing services
Video: Watermelon Love (

seducing the online consumer

)
SpamAssassin 3.0 released! (

also: a new logo, better performance, and a better plugin model

)
Star Wars DVD released on Usenet two weeks ago (

here's the Star Wars NFO file from Sept. 11

)
Archive.org's Sabucat vintage movie trailers collection (

not public yet, but here's the growing index

) [via]
Navy sailor crushes son to death while playing Gameboy (

reminiscent of the Everquest neglect death

) [via]
Change Mac desktop images based on CPU load (

reminds me of the Ambient Devices line of aware devices

) [via]
Botball organizer buys 350 Gameboy Advances (

$40 for a pre-owned (non-SP) GBA is dirt cheap

) [via]
Guitar 101's cover songs forum (

like karaoke for guitars, but with an extremely supportive audience

) [via]
Us Weekly says Britney faked her wedding
Dowser, interesting client-side search tool (

privately tracks your local search history across multiple search engines

) [via]
Flickr gets positive review in Sun-Times (

they deserve all praise

) [via]
September 21, 2004
Cat Stevens diverts DC-bound plane to Maine (

he was on the federal watch list

)
Nellie McKay is lying about her age (

and the White Stripes weren't really siblings; does anyone care?

) [via]
Life Lessons from Super Mario Bros. games (

also: life lessons from the SMB1 instruction bookley

)
Pongmechanik, outstanding mechanical tabletop version of Pong (

check out the photos, or watch the video for gameplay

)
Dave Chappelle reunites the Fugees in a massive Brooklyn block party (

it was directed by Michel Gondry for a likely DVD release; Gothamist has first-person accounts

) [via]
Changing page layout for different resolutions (

check out the demo

)
Gameboy DS set for $149 on Nov. 21 (

also: the tiny PStwo set for $149 on Nov. 1

) [via]
September 20, 2004
First Nintendo DS commercial in Japan (

also: nice wallpaper and a nice shot of the Developers Hardware

) [via]
"I Found Some of Your Life" is gone (

I suspect it's partly because of this excellent net research

)
Emulation and the Video Game Industry, A White Paper [via]
Wired on Kahle vs Ashcroft (

saving orphaned works still under copyright

) [via]
Projecting Middle-Earth onto a map of Europe [via]
Slate dissects how Ali G keeps conning his famous guests (

vague memos, fake websites, and fake companies

) [via]
CoolGov (

new blog of interesting info culled from official US government sites

) [via]
September 19, 2004
Wikipedia hits 1 million articles (

very impressive

) [via]
Katamari Damacy for sale starting Tuesday (

and at only $20, it's a steal

)
Doom III demo released (

461 megs seems excessive for a trial version of anything

)
September 18, 2004
The Kleptones, "A Night at the Hip-Hopera" (

one of the best mashups ever created, local mirror

) [via]
Visual history of one user's spam (

excellent charts from 1997 to present

) [via]
September 17, 2004
Jon Udell's badass bookmarklet to search library books via Amazon (

Santa Monica people can use Sirsi and this base URL

)
Paul Smith's Typewriter Art (

some of the earliest ASCII art, I bet

) [via]
Instant Replay Binocular (

brilliant idea, if a flawed implementation

) [via]
Video: Pepsi Can Fu (

from this very good TV commercial blog

) [via]
Google Answers on nerds in pop culture (

from Woody Allen to Ken Jennings

)
Torrone's howto on tagging photos with GPS coordinates (

another step in documenting your every move

)
Video: Willful Infringement, Mickey and Me (

documentary of a video store owner's copyright battle against Disney, and many other similar stories

) [via]
Screenshots of "Wanda and the Collossus," the Ico pseudo-sequel (

IGN has more details about the game

) [via]
Sony launching smaller PS2 next week [via]
Spread Firefox campaign passes 720,000 downloads, with 7 days left (

G4TechTV has the lead with over 17k referred downloads

) [via]
Galactic Conquest, amazing Star Wars mod for Battlefield 1942 (

look at those screenshots!

) [via]
Ask Mefi thread about the history of scientific discovery (

some very thought-provoking comments

) [via]
Rat Haus Reality, odd rat-sized houses (

rodents of unusual size

) [via]
I Found Some of Your Life (

blogger finds digicam memory card, posts photos online with fictional narration

) [via]
September 16, 2004
The Jig Is Up
Rock stacking street art
Baby names for bloggers (

these are almost as bad as the LOTR baby names

)
Homeless use Internet to stay connected (

I like that the ex-con geek has "LYNX" tattooed across his knuckles

) [via]
Rave parties in City of Heroes MMORPG (

I love the idea of superheroes dancing in abandoned warehouses

)
Update on the underground Parisian movie theatres (

an interview with the group behind the catacomb hacks

) [via]
Imvu, Will Harvey from There.com's new avatar-based instant messenger (

with hundreds of accessories for sale, naturally

) [via]
9/11 tributes in Second Life virtual world (

including this unusual recreation

)
Downhill Battle's "Three Notes and Runnin'" remix contest (

get creative to protest the insanely dumb recent court ruling on samples

) [via]
Nicholas Stedman’s robotic Blanket sculpture (

creepy hack

) [via]
Google Labs Aptitude Test (

Michael scanned in the whole thing

)
SIPshare, true P2P app over SIP (

building a Skype alternative with open standards

) [via]
Half-Life 2 release candidate sent to Vivendi (

it's going gold any day now

)
Popover ads in newspapers
Antigeist on the definition of chivalry (

reminds me of this classic first date net.lore

) [via]
Suprnova blocks external links to torrents (

plus, they're blindly blocking requests without a referer

) [via]
Atari ST emulated on the Dreamcast
Bic pens illegal under DMCA (

what if the DMCA applied to analog devices?

)
Video: ASCII Bush (

Bush Jr. and Sr.'s State of the Union speeches rendered in ASCII and robot voice

)
European cigarette commercials by American directors (

David Lynch, the Coen brothers, Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders, and Robert Altman

)
Video: Slowtron's "How to BBQ A Man" (

end of summer silliness courtesy of Coudal

)
New U.S. nickel design (

heads on money are getting bigger and bigger

) [via]
Google's 1999 hardware (

how quaint!

) [via]
September 15, 2004
Virtual Window project (

fake LCD windows, a la Back to the Future 2

) [via]
Video: Greenskeepers' "Lotion" (

great pop song inspired by Silence of the Lambs

)
Gamespot's hugely improved reviews index (

for example, PC games sorted by rating in the last year

)
Oprah gives a new Pontiac to every audience member (

they go ballistic for free soap, so this must have led to several deaths

) [via]
Romanian photo gallery decays with every pageview (

artsy, but clever

) [via]
Adbusters files lawsuits against Canadian broadcasters (

they won't air their ads

)
Cameron's Foo Camp hack (

also: here's why I wasn't updating my links for the last few days

)
Trailers for Everyday Life [via]
Image: Spam origin map [via]
Firefox.com owner donates the domain to Mozilla foundation (

an unselfish act, props to Kevin

)
Gmail invite spooler (

automated Gmail invite giveaways

) [via]
"Godfather" horse head pillow (

catching up on links I missed over the weekend

) [via]
Megnut leaves tech to cook full time (

I think this is wonderful, and so do others

)
Video: Sin City preview trailer (

a stylish comic book conversion, but the acting looks bad

)
Quake IV preview scans (

Raven's title will use the Doom 3 engine

)
Waxy Links "via" Meta Aggregator (

apparently, I have my own cult

)
September 9, 2004
Cooking for Engineers (

great recipe info design

) [via]
Guardian UK on Dropcash (

plus, some developers are using Dropcash to sponsor software features

)
Diarists more likely to suffer from various ailments (

well, that explains Livejournal

) [via]
Snopes on the Big Burger (

for people who refuse to heed Kliban's advice

)
September 8, 2004
The Adventures of Superpup (

obscure Superman spinoff from 1958

) [via]
Artist turns Scrambler ride into giant Spirograph (

also: she uses pinball machines to make kinetic paintings

) [via]
Meetup launches new site (

better design, message boards, more flexibility for venues

) [via]
Cincinnati Court rules all musical samples must be paid for (

"Get a license or do not sample," they ruled

) [via]
Gameboy Advance console mod [via]
Save Betamax (

call-in day to oppose the Induce Act

)
Comment spam forged to appear from legit companies? (

one theory: companies are spamming to get their competitors blacklisted from Google

)
Kempa on Snerdles (

robots that make superhero mosaics out of Nerds for nerds

)
Audio: President Bush covers U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (

this is a masterpiece of digital editing and public domain audio

)
Unix on the Gameboy Advance (

this is a hugely geeky hack

) [via]
Huge Ken Jennings Jeopardy spoiler (

how many games he won, and his grand total

)
September 7, 2004
Flash: Not My Type IV (

animated typography, see the Flash storyboard way down the page

) [via]
Register to vote via P2P (

Bearshare adds voter registration to their P2P client

)
FlashBlock Mozilla extension uninstalled by Macromedia? (

update: this turned out to be false

) [via]
Image: Should I Rip This? flowchart [via]
Joel on the social aspect of UI design (

as always, a great read

) [via]
Obsessive collection of telephone book covers (

strangely, I remember this creepy 1984 phone book

) [via]
James Duncan is building a 3D chocolate printer (

here's a video of it printing, sans chocolate

)
Simon's new details of the Half-Life 2 code theft (

including the IRC log that led to an arrest

)
Slashdot launches Politics section (

following the lead of Sensible Election

) [via]
Wikialong, Wiki extension for Firefox (

collectively doodling in the margins of the web

) [via]
Gallina, Gmail-based blogging tool (

a bizarre proof of concept

) [via]
Turn your NES controller into a PC joystick (

yet another great Torrone hack

)
College textbooks available on BitTorrent [via]
September 6, 2004
Hot or Not's $200,000 voter drive contest (

a brilliant idea, and I get $100k if you sign up from that link and we win

) [via]
Why Adam doesn't recommend Firefox for normal users (

I commented about my uncle's weekend upgrade experience

) [via]
TargetAlert, Firefox extension to show icons next to non-HTML links (

PDF icons next to PDF links, and so on

) [via]
Japanese novelty and party goods store (

OD finds some of the best items in the store

) [via]
TiVo and Netflix team up to offer movie downloads (

more in the Newsweek article

) [via]
Merlin Mann's 43 Folders (

Merlin's new site full of nifty productivity and software hacks

)
10 real-life inventions that came from science fiction (

$20 gets you a lot on Google Answers

)
September 5, 2004
A Livejournal Grammar Lesson
Simon Carless on O'Reilly's Gaming Hacks (

I've read the draft, and it's excellent

)
Detailed account of rock climber's infamous self amputation (

cute book title

) [via]
Data Fountain (

international currency rates displayed with a Net-enabled water fountain

) [via]
Jish quits blogging (

now who will I get to mediate between me and Ghyslain?

) [via]
New version of MyTunes, the easy iTunes copying software (

the nag screen is only shown once now; thanks, Bill!

) [via]
September 4, 2004
Darkguest, free and clean alternative to Evite
NYT on the World Rock Scissors Paper Championships (

their FAQ is very entertaining

) [via]
PBS special on the Video Game Revolution (

plus a nice site supporting the show

) [via]
Grand Theft Auto for the GBA confirmed (

top-down perspective sounds more like the original

) [via]
Fraud Frond (

gallery of cellphone towers disguised as fake trees

) [via]
Star Wars, the Not-So-Special edition (

sarcastic and informative!

) [via]
Jesus was a Jedi (

a Christian journal's unusual cover story

)
Adam Kalsey's new license plate
Titanic, the Animated Movie (

a musical, with a kid-friendly ending

) [via]
gmail copy, Perl script to copy files to/from Gmail (

easy alternative to gmailFS

) [via]
September 3, 2004
Brilliant method of linking to excerpts of a large MP3 (

with the Python source

) [via]
Archie Does Revelations (

1970s comics adaptation of a religious tract

)
Image: Google Blog Google?
Waxy.org 'Via' Links Aggregator (

very meta! read his justification for the hack

) [via]
How to view and control your TiVo over the web (

with video and audio over Quicktime streaming server

) [via]
Ed Felten fact chects Wikipedia (

including the entry on himself

)
Ico sequel announcement next week? (

the Japanese Sony site is counting down

) [via]
Bigha's Jasper laser (

incidentally, it's one of the cleanest retail sites I've seen

) [via]
MP3.com on Microsoft's four new digital music initiatives [via]
What's wrong with digital music stores? [via]
Cher's Hexadecimal Clock [via]
Baby name ideas from the Lord of the Rings (

Treebeard, Wormtongue, and Farmer Maggot are all nice

) [via]
September 2, 2004
Software group falsely accuses Interactive Fiction archive of pirating Doom 3 (

doom3.zip is a 114kb freeware DOS game from 1988

) [via]
Image: The Words Republican and Democratic speakers used (

lovely chart design from the NYT

)
37signals web design tips for Christmas retailers (

good usability tips

) [via]
PVR Blog on XM Radio and Time Trax (

XM walks away from a huge opportunity

)
Apache rejects Sender ID spec
Creative Commons search beta [via]
Paul Ford's "Screenscraping the Senate" (

converting the government to RDF

) [via]
The Omegathon Collection gaming contest at PAX (

to win, you need to win rounds of DDR, Halo, Doom, Mario Kart, and more

)
Hostess Twinkies Sushi (

also: Twinkie-misu, Twinkie Tacos, and Twinkie Kebobs

) [via]
September 1, 2004
Second Life's in-world tribute to Burning Man (

including a massive player piano

)
"The Apprentice 2" profiles on Friendster (

more fake Friendster marketing, since their profiles don't have any real friends

)
MSN Music beta preview (

sneak a peek at Microsoft's answer to iTunes

) [via]
Smoking Gun takes on Photostamps (

Milosevic and Kaczynski now on official U.S. postage

) [via]
Banner Ads Invade Gamespace (

including automatic downloads of new ads

) [via]
Kick Ass Kung-Fu (

EyeToy-like game installation, with a great video demo

) [via]