Adam Lindsay

McSweeney's: Lovecraft as a chocolate company copywriter

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/8/15burns.html

"In 1856, a fisherman from a tiny hamlet on the New England coast made a terrible pact with serpentine beasts from beneath the sea, that he might create the most delicious sweet seen upon the Earth since the days of the great Elder Race. Thus was forged the satanic pact between peanut butter and chocolate that resulted in the mutant offspring you see before you!"

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David Foster Wallace Motivational Posters

How could I not like image macros matched with my favorite post-modern American author? They've announced the winners of the DFW poster competition over at the Howling Fantods, but really, the finalist page is much more rewarding than the winner and first runner-up, no matter how right-on they are.

Duck.

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Olympics on Usenet and BitTorrent

Andy Baio does a lot of original writing on the net.

http://waxy.org/2008/08/pirating_the_olympics_then_and_now/

"A quick search on Mininova or BTJunkie returns a huge list of every video found on Usenet, plus dozens more and growing hourly. Beyond public trackers, I've seen extensive activity on several private communities. On one of them, its members compiled a list of every event and were slowly adding their own recordings to create a massive archive of Olympics video.

"And this is only Day 4! It'll be interesting to see how much of the Olympics was captured, digitized, and uploaded by the end of the games.

"Also interesting: If this chart from Mark Ghunheim is accurate, the thirst for pirated Olympics coverage is greatest in China."

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Large Hadron Collider rap

It's been passed around on the net a lot this weekend, but despite all the hype and novelty, it's actually very informative and well done.

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a blast from the past

I remember this medium large from way back:
http://mediumlarge.wordpress.com/2008/07/22/28/
...reminds me of an old friend.

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Physical Computing, the cover album

Some live blog quotes from a writeup of Tom Igoe's talk at Sketching in Hardware '08:

Physical Computing's Greatest Hits: the wheels that people reinvent again and again (in rough order)

• theremin-like instruments
• drum gloves (tangible vs intangible)
• dance floors
• Scooby-Doo paintings: paintings that react to presence (easy to sense presence, hard to sense attention)
• body-as-cursor
• video mirrors (aka, hand wavers, because people always wave their hands)
• mechanical pixels
• hand-as-cursor (aka Minority Report)
• multi-touch surfaces (exercise: operate an iPhone while it's in your pocket)
• tilty stands and tables
• tilty controllers
• things you yell at
• meditation helpers
• fields of grass (running your hand across it affects it)
• dolls and pets
• remote hugs
• LED fetishism

"these are really design patterns"
"what they have in common: 10 second space of expertise achievement, so they all feel the same"

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Via a tweet from Tim Bray

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaaze

Tamil hip-hop:

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For a pick-me-up

If you need some amusement, try this Brazilian short film, "Tarantino's Mind":
http://www.hungrymantv.com/shorts.php?vid=tarantinos_mind

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Audio recording software for the PC

I'm a Mac guy, but someone in the department had a question about how to get audio books from cassette to her iPod via her PC...

I think the most difficult part will be getting a card for your computer
that takes a "line in" audio signal from your cassette player.

A reputable freeware/opensource programme for Audio recording and
editing is Audacity:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
It's very capable, but not always easy to use.

Something that's freeware/nagware, and a bit more geared for what you
want to do came up on a Google search, but Mich here vouched for it
being safe to use:
http://www.roemersoftware.com/free-sound-recorder.html

Anyone else have other recommendations?

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webmail leads to kiddie porn (not really, but...)

I came across a link about distribution of illicit content that seemed to hit both anomaly detection and darknet keywords:
http://chuqui.typepad.com/chuqui_30/2008/07/new-and-interes.html

'For the last couple of weeks people at work have heard me muttering in the halls about "those damn geeks". I've been chasing down and cleaning up after a group that's been using the webmail system as a distribution system for -- stuff. Mostly warez cracks and video, from what I can tell.

'I want to emphasize this part:

'Let me say right up front: no system cracking involved here, no security issues, no hacks, no cracks, no leaks, no bugs. They are simply using these systems as designed, not doing anything to penetrate or compromise the system.

'Nothing was hacked in any way, this is purely (in its way) a social engineering hack taking advantage of free webmail sites all around the internet -- I saw at least 15 involved from my investigation.'

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