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January 31, 2008
Twitter Down Art Collection (linking to this only because I love their style; I completely forgive their growing pains) [via]
Improv Everywhere's Frozen Grand Central (207 people freeze at the same second and stay still for five full minutes) [via]
Video: Man on the street interviews in Beijing about the U.S. elections (they know more about us than average Americans know about Chinese politics, but not much more) [via]
Mr. Show's Bob Odenkirk created the "Bird Poops in Newscaster's Mouth" video (the YouTube video was viewed 1.2 million times, making this a very successful viral hoax)
Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007 (nice visualization of everywhere Dopplr users visited last year) [via]
January 30, 2008
Adrian Holovaty retires Chicago Crime (EveryBlock made it redundant, so he's shutting the influential site down)
Jason Kottke liveblogged the Mythbusters "plane on a conveyer belt" episode (big spoiler warning; literally, a very big spoiler)
Waxy.org: The Times (UK) spamming social media sites (including Metafilter, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, and many more; also: I'm blogging daily on the main site now!)
Tag cloud for the upcoming 2080 State of the Union (the 2008 tag cloud is slightly more predictable) [via]
Human Tetris (new video from the same group that made Human Space Invaders, Pole Position, and Pong)
Defective Yeti's dead simple Oscar Pool creator (no logins required, just simple Oscar goodness)
The story behind Woody Allen's signature typeface (with screengrabs from each film) [via]
2 Girls 1 Cup, The Sitcom (from Justin Roiland, the creator of House of Cosbys; warning: offensive language) [via]
January 29, 2008
Ellen Page and Michael Cera sing a song about Diablo Cody (if that whole acting thing doesn't work out, they should tour)
How a deadly BMW M5 crash affected an online community (18-year-old posts thread about high-speed driving, dies in massive wreck later that night)
Edward Tufte sounds like Gene Simmons (and weirdly, both the Simmons and Tufte links are worth experiencing)
The real history of woot and w00t (great roundup from a lexicographer on the multiple theories of the word's origins)
Hype Machine's 2007 Music Blog Zeitgeist (in aggregate, those MP3 bloggers have pretty good taste)
Tweetmeme, tracking link popularity in Twitter (surprisingly effective, updates every five minutes)
WSJ on Passage, the provocative 5-minute indie game (I linked to this back on December 7, happy to see it's getting some attention; play it before reading!)
January 28, 2008
SmugMug's private photos are public (Philipp interviewed Don MacAskill, who doesn't believe the autoincremented IDs are a problem)
January 27, 2008
Make3D, convert any photo to a dynamic 3D model (grab a photo from Flickr and fly around the 3D scene; like Photosynth with a single source) [via]
Geek Entertainment TV covers 20 Goto 10's ANSI art show (overview of the show including a good 30-second primer on ANSI art)
January 26, 2008
Arcade at the Movies (screen caps of real and fictional arcade game cameos from the last four decades of film) [via]
Game Mod workshop asked non-programmers to mod a Breakout clone in Processing (don't miss the video of the results; the well-documented source is available, too) [via]
Full drum kit as Rock Band controller for Otronicon 2008 (this is karaoke that goes to 11; also: build your own!) [via]
January 25, 2008
The Heavenly Jukebox, excellent Atlantic Monthly article on digital music from 2000 (they lowered their paywall on Tuesday, making thousands of articles free)
Dean Wareham's candid account of his affair with Luna bassist Britta Phillips (it must be hard for his ex-wife to hear about the new band) [via]
Books That Make You Dumb (Virgil correlates favorite books to SAT scores per college to find smart/dumb books; don't miss the FAQ) [via]
January 24, 2008
Nathan Rabin finishes his Year of Flops (he reviewed 104 films that were critical and/or commercial failures) [via]
Cat On A Dolphin (one-button game that keeps sucking me back in, along with Filler)
Laugh-Out-Loud Cats book released tomorrow ($15 from Lulu or $30 hand-signed by Ape Lad)
Entries from the New Yorker's Eustace Tilley redesign contest (the deadline ended today and the entries are great; my faves are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5)
Jill Sobule's fundraiser to make her next album (she hit $28k in a couple weeks; also: she just commented in the Metafilter thread about her)
TED Jesus Christ God 2008 (no, not that TED; Internet lunacy, NSFW if you scroll down far enough)
Maciej Ceglowski on bedbugs and modafinil (itchy story behind the creation of his Bedbug Registry)
Baby Instructions (I'm afraid I'm guilty of this one; here's the original book) [via]
Vampire Weekend on Blogotheque's Take Away Shows (unfiltered concerts with great bands on the Paris streets; my favorite music series)
Brazilian novelist pirates own books, sees huge increase in sales (distributes links to pirated copies through an unofficial blog)
PocketGuitar, virtual guitar for the iPhone (more info on the project homepage) [via]
January 23, 2008
MP3: David Lee Roth's isolated vocal track from "Runnin' with the Devil" (I found myself playing reverse karaoke, humming the guitar parts) [via]
576,000 private Myspace photos leaked to BitTorrent (an insane 17GB of photos grabbed before they plugged the security hole)
EveryBlock launches! (wonderful local data/news in a gorgeous design; if you live in SF, Chicago, or NYC, pop in your address and dig around) [via]
Ghostface Killah angry at fans for pirating album (115,000 fans on Myspace, but only 35,000 first-week sales)
January 22, 2008
White Whine (first-world problems; e.g. "$20 to upgrade my iPod touch? screw you, Apple!") [via]
Hardly Working: Office Fantasy (Jake and Amir make me laugh, and if that's wrong, I don't wanna be right)
Early Yahoo and Google (and Brian Lent) (the guy's like the Zelig of the web)
Jason Scott on the outset of editing GET LAMP (100 hours of tape in 80 interviews; I've watched some early footage and it's thrilling
)
Metafilter releases infodump of activity data (fun for stats crunching)
January 21, 2008
Coachella 2008 lineup announced (Portishead, Jack Johnson, and Roger Waters get top billing? strange mix)
Skitch goes into public beta (OSX screenshot app makes blogging images much, much faster; watch the demo) [via]
DJ Shadow says Happy MLK Day (remix of B-Down Brothers' tribute to MLK from 1986, with a Czech Hall & Oates cover tossed in)
JJ Abrams invited Professor Randy "Last Lecture" Pausch to appear in upcoming Star Trek film (if you haven't seen either of those talks, watch them immediately)
Joel Johnson talks about AT&T's filtering on AT&T show (the interview ends abruptly towards the end of the clip)
NYT on campaign reporting with Twitter (only 97 results for "microjournalism," but the domain's been taken since 1996) [via]
GameSetWatch on Audiosurf, innovative cross-genre PC game (puzzle/racing/rhythm game generates 3D playfields from your own music; compare Space Oddity, Mr. Blue Sky, Feist's Inside and Out)
Shot-for-shot remake of Journey's "Separate Ways" (I recommend watching the two side-by-side) [via]
January 18, 2008
Flickr's new places.find API method (pretty rad, allows for free-text searching of their entire place name database)
January 17, 2008
8080 terminals playing Portal's "Still Alive" (coded in Assembler with audio from a C-64 SID chip; here's the source) [via]
Macbook Air's thin obsession (making other laptops feel bad about their physique) [via]
Crank Dat Soulja Boy, MIT-Style (featuring Richard Stallman, holding the laptop in the back) [via]
Design Police (downloadable sticker kits for self-righteous designers)
January 16, 2008
Casual vs. hardcore games on Facebook (interesting thoughts from a Vampires player in the comments) [via]
Gawker responds to Scientology C&D (Nick Denton has balls, and so does his attorney) [via]
Randy Newman's performance at the Apple keynote (here's the lyrics to A Few Words in Defense of Our Country) [via]
Philipp Lenssen interviews Ruth Kedar, designer of the Google logo (some older versions in the comments)
Potrzebie System on Google Calculator (Jeff Atwood has scans of the original article from MAD #33 in 1957)
Ze Frank on the closing of the ORG community site (the creator of Zefrank.org shut the invite-only community down on January 1, exactly one year after it opened)
Feltron Annual Report 2007 (like previous years, designer Nicholas Felton presents his life as a corporate report) [via]
Theinfo.org (community for people who love to process and visualize large data sets) [via]
Sad, Sweet One-Act Play, Told Entirely By a Burger King Receipt I Found
Lasagna Cat (extremely odd real-life reenactments of Garfield comics, from the creator of Ducktales and Infinite Solutions)
Ron the Music Maker, the all-star Scientology album (let's hope Tom lays down a track along with Chick Corea, John Travolta, Leif Garrett, and Sylvester Stallone's dad)
Nick Denton digs up Tom Cruise's Scientology video (wisely hosted on Gawker's servers instead of Youtube, so won't be easily taken offline)
January 15, 2008
xkcd's Robot9000 attacks noise in real-time chat (a parallel IRC channel only displays lines of conversation that've never been spoken before) [via]
January 9, 2008
Urban Mapping opens up neighborhood database (hallelujah, this kind of geo data is so valuable and hard to build on your own; update: Zillow followed suit)
January 8, 2008
Erica Sadun's song recognition software for the iPhone (let it listen to music and it'll try to identify the song)
Superelectronic (like a seizure-inducing Flash version of Superbad or Jodi.org) [via]
Stupidfilter's random stupid comments (from a project to programmatically identify stupid web comments using Bayesian filtering) [via]
January 6, 2008
Music Thing on the "Compendium of Physical Activities" (playing the accordion is better exercise than "vigorous sexual activity"?)
How Techmeme Changes Over Time (50 hours of Techmeme screengrabs in 50 seconds) [via]
Elyse Sewell blogs her violent fight with Shins' keyboardist Martin Crandall (former America's Top Model heads to jail after battle with ex-boyfriend; update: switched to Google cache after she locked the entry)
January 5, 2008
Army Major Andrew Olmsted's final post (blogging from the front lines of the war, he was the first casualty of 2008) [via]
Adam "Everyware" Greenfield self-publishing his new book (three cheers for cutting out middlemen; pre-orders are now available via Paypal)
How to Read Wired Magazine, Revisited (Derek Powazek returns to Suck.com's original guide)
January 4, 2008
Video: Excuse Me, Princess (see also: (almost) every Knight Rider turbo boost) [via]
Game Innovation Database (like Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, a tremendous resource in an awkward Flash interface) [via]
Video: Kirby Ferguson on shrinking attention spans (tl;dw)
January 3, 2008
Flash: Cursor*10 (ingenious game trains you to solve puzzles with multiple versions of yourself) [via]
Scanlation of Shintaro Kago's "Labyrinth" (NSFW comic about mazes, his work is often grotesque but some of the best comics I've seen) [via]
DJ Earworm's "United States of Pop" (mashing up the Billboard top 25 for 2007) [via]
January 2, 2008
Alison Jackson's Confidential photo art exhibit (using celebrity doubles to recreate paparazzi shots that never existed)
Yahoo! Picks of the Week closes after 12 years (they've maintained the same inoffensive tone since 1995, but it seemed to get better in the last year)
Valve now selling gorgeous Portal shirts (game-related t-shirts that don't make you look nerdy) [via]
Branscome International's cringe-inducing Pixar knockoffs (don't miss the trailers for Ratatoing and The Little Cars) [via]
Kottke posts his Best Links for 2007 (still the best link blogger around)
Best freeware games of 2007 (quirky independent games, though almost entirely PC only) [via]
January 1, 2008
Fret Killer, the mysterious YouTube acoustic guitarist (in every video, the commenters repeatedly try to identify this relentlessly anonymous performer) [via]
Christmas wishbook catalogs on Flickr (you'll shoot your eye out! happy new year, everyone)
David Cross on accepting the "Alvin and the Chipmunks" role (I love Patton Oswalt too, but aren't we past accusing people of selling out yet?) [via]