Waxy.org: Links Archives: May 2008

Rory Root, owner of Berkeley's Comic Relief, dead at 50 (nice tributes from comic greats; the best comic book store I've ever seen, his passion was clear on the shelves)

How to Use Nico Video (Japanese video site from 2chan's creator requires registration to view videos, so I'm slogging through it)

YouTomb's tracking who ordered YouTube takedowns (recent takedowns are on the homepage of the MIT project) [via]

Threadless Prints (limited-edition 18"x24" posters based on shirt designs) [via]

Web Trigrams, visualizing three-word phrases from Google's corpus (gorgeous infoviz; more of his work from the massive dataset) [via]

Homer Simpson says, "Beat it, Waxy!" (from the archives)

SNL's Japanese version of "The Office" ("It's funny because it's racist.")

Music Bounce (quirky game built on music patterns) [via]

Vice-Presidential Prognosticatin' (Obama/Prime 2008)

Drew Burrows' virtual girlfriend in bed, a lonely art installation (reminds me of Daki Makura hug pillows and bedsheets) [via]

Webmonkey relaunches, again (this must be the third or fourth time the site's come back from the dead)

The London Tower Bridge on Twitter (I hope someone wires up a Coke machine to Twitter next)

Why We Twitter, academic paper from 2007 about microblogging (nice network analysis and node graphs towards the end; Scoble's tying disparate groups together)

Wired News on the new Soulseek client for jailbroken iPhones (decent speeds downloading music and it imports into your iPhone music library when done)

Bill O'Reilly's Producer (look at the other side of the camera)

"Things Younger Than McCain" creator on the subject of ageism (unlike sex and race, your age affects your ability to lead)

V8 Engine built out of Lego Mindstorms (it can hit 1440 RPM without any lubrication)

Let's Write a Song with Rivers Cuomo (the Weezer frontman's been vlogging on YouTube; the moustache is unnerving)

Joel Johnson's exhaustive roundup of 25 years of "exergaming" (from the Atari Joyboard to the Wii Fit)

George Lucas wanted Indy IV to be "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars" (the aborted draft by The Fugitive screenwriter made its way online in 2005)

California Supreme Court overturns gay marriage ban (systemic discrimination of same-sex couples is unconstitutional, period)

NodeBox, OS X app to create 2D visualizations in Python (for a more practical example, see Tufte-style charts in 11 lines of Nodebox code)

Cubescape, fun tool for building isometric pixel landscapes (some nice 8-bit art in the popular section)

b3ta's Extending Album Art challenge (all the Pink Floyd ones made me laugh) [via]

Games With A Purpose (humans playing games to teach computers, from the creator of reCAPTCHA and the ESP Game) [via]

MacJesusX (the very blasphemous Mac app from 1992 was ported to OS X with new features)

goodbye, foom (John Campbell's been trying to live off patronage from custom comics and shirts)

TwitBuzz (I've tried several Twitter meme-trackers, and this is the best)

Simon Stabs (Bishop's knife trick turned into a harmless game)

McSweeney's on good dating advice from a Grand Theft Auto FAQ (the original is on GameFAQs) [via]

Android Scan, mobile barcode scanner and search utility (a winner in Google's Android developer challenge, this looks very useful) [via]

Trailer for Mr. Bounce, an innovative riff on Breakout (from the creators of the wonderful Understanding Games series) [via]

Last.fm Playground (read more about the announcement, with some fun examples) [via]

New Einstein letter elaborates on his views of religion (he rejects it as "childish superstition," but also disliked the hubris of atheism) [via]

Sightseeing in Liberty City (Flickr photoset compared NYC locations to their GTA counterparts) [via]

WalletCards, clever idea to store membership cards on your iPhone (I'd love a slim wallet too, but your mileage may vary) [via]

Christian Mac/PC parody on GodTube (394 comments debating the differences between "Christians" and "Christ-followers"; more here)

Sad Trombone (goes nicely with Instant Rimshot) [via]

New Google Reader for the iPhone (huge improvement)

MUTO, an animation on public walls (I love watching it replace graffiti as it walks through) [via]

Current.tv on Tron Guy at ROFLCon (some of the user-contributed video on Current is great, as is the original programming)

BloggerBoard tracks top authors on Techmeme (amazing, Arrington wrote 67 posts in the last 30 days that ended up on Techmeme)

Obsessing, a web-based editor for playing with Processing.js (could Processing.js be the beginning of the end for the closed-source culture of rich media tech?)

Yahoo! opens its geo location database to the world (I'm stunned and thrilled they finally opened it up; this powers Flickr and Upcoming's geo features)

Things Younger Than John McCain (I didn't realize he'd be the oldest US President ever) [via]

PMOG comes out of beta (Justin Hall and Merci Hammon's game built on passive web surfing) [via]

Matt Haughey on how PR people should pitch bloggers (most won't do this because it takes too much time, even though it's far more effective)

Italians flee Google Street View cameras on streets of Rome (they assumed the far-right government was trying to film them)

First-person video of the China 7.7 earthquake (some original coverage on Flickr, too)

TinyDB, store tiny data in a tiny URL (store variables with a POST or GET, get it back in JSON or XML) [via]

Ian Rogers on Reaper, Justin Frankel's current project (the Winamp/Gnutella creator made a formidable ProTools competitor; amazing to see it go from this to this)

A Brief History Of Cars Crashing Through Walls On Sitcoms (I'm embarrassed to admit I found the Happy Days clip (in French) for Jeff)

Turning the New York Times into a beatbox (an application for Lily turns DOM elements into audio) [via]

Antville Quarterly, their favorite music videos so far this year (high quality videos in three torrents from the music video community)

Gore Verbinski to direct Bioshock film (I loved Bioshock's story but not the gameplay, so this should be a fun ride) [via]

Anil Dash's Paste to Win (random sampling of 150 people's clipboards, categorized)

John Resig ported Processing to Javascript, using the Canvas element (one of the most amazing hacks I've ever seen; don't miss the demos further down the page)

Chronotron (time-bending Flash game, reminiscent of P.B. Winterbottom)

Rock Band hates me (a multi-instrumentalist's reality meets fiction) [via]

Piet, a graphical programming language, with source code resembling abstract art (named after Piet Mondrian, here's how it works; also, a Javascript IDE) [via]

The Sewer Goblet, The Wu-Tang Clan and the Wu-Tang Baby (new RPG madness from the developers of Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden)

Interview with indie game creator Cactus (he just released a mega-sampler of 17 of his games; highly recommended)

Dino Run (surprisingly deep multiplayer 8-bit Flash game)

Kottke on the Yahoo! stock "plunge" (on the contrary, Yahoo! gained $7B in value while Microsoft lost $33B)

Interview with astronaut Peggy Whitson about her return to Earth (members of the Soyuz capsule were greeted by confused locals in a Kazakhstan field) [via]

SynPet's Newton, 1989 promo video for a personal robot (like R2D2 with a floppy drive and 20MB hard drive)

Why the Lucky Stiff's Unholy attempt to convert Ruby into Python (not there yet, but a fun first pass at getting Ruby code running Google App Engine)

Google's chart of character encoding adoption on the web (last December, Unicode beat out ASCII and Western European encodings for the first time)

Ben Goldacre debunks the recent "regrown finger" story (glad I wasn't the only one skeptical of "pixie dust" made of pig bladders) [via]

San Diego GOP chairman co-founded warez group Fairlight (funny, guys like that usually end up in tech, not politics) [via]

Soundamus (generate a feed of upcoming releases from your favorite artists on Last.fm)

XSketch, multiplayer Pictionary game (from the creators of Kdice, even more fast-paced than iSketch)

Ze Frank, Textism, Chip Kidd, and Aviary join The Deck (Jim Coudal knows how to pick 'em)

Schulze & Webb show off the Olinda prototype (their social radio for the BBC, modular hardware that adjust to your habits and social network)

Twitter typewriter in Second Life (hop around on the giant keyboard and it'll post here) [via]

College Humor's All-Nighter (live feed with thousands of chatters, and they're posting new videos all night)

Winners of Boing Boing Gadget's 1k contest (if you like that, try these popular 1k intros from the demoscene)

Homer Simpson in CSS, animated (taking typewriter art to the next level; from the same creator, a portrait of Bush)

Jonathan Coulton performs "First of May" (take that, Bee Gees; NSFW lyrics, for the sensitive folks) [via]

AT&T wi-fi hotspots now free for iPhone users (including Starbucks and Barnes & Noble; spoof the iPhone user-agent and it's free from your laptop too)

Mena Trott's Wasted on the Young (what if first-gen bloggers were vlogging in 1994? this is amazing, I want to see Kottke next)