Links: Oct 3, 2005

In preparation for Web 2.0, I’ve caught up on my boingboing, waxy, and other links. I’d hate to be in conversation with a rampant hipster over lunch and find myself missing pop nerd culture references.

  • Open Content Alliance: apparently O’Reilly is part of this project to scan out of copyright books, in conjunction with Yahoo!, Internet Archive, HP Labs, and others. Reminds me of my time on the scanner for Project Gutenberg.
  • Zipcode Mapping: an interesting first step to thematic mapping via Google Maps. Next up I want all the demographic information available for my zipcode. See freedemographics.com for an example of how much it’s possible to divine from a zipcode. (via)
  • Videogame Quilts: crafting is another aspect of the return to the physical that MAKE is riding. (Via)
  • Miggy After-School Movie: Nat Friedman reports that Mexican television aired a made-for-TV movie about Miguel, Nat, and Ximian. “Apparently we all wear suits and I [Nat] speak Spanish with a British accent.” (Via)
  • Mac Battery Life: I carry two spare batteries and have sore shoulders as a result. Some tips for long battery life not mentioned here: go to “long battery life” mode in the Energy Saver preferences and crank the LCD brightness way down. I tried an ElectroVaya battery but it died after eight months (warranty period: six months). I want my portable fusion reactor …
  • Wikipedia correcting errors in Encyclopedia Britannica: E.B. is another print publisher struggling to find meaning in a world where online is faster, cheaper, deeper, and broader. (Via)
  • Maps of Graz generated by cellphone traffic: ” Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity.” (Via)
  • Yahoo! Plug Fake Blog for McDonalds in Return for Superbowl Air Time: ugh. Jeremy Zawodny: “hey, let’s piss away our credibility for a big evil company!”
  • CalendarHub: another attempt to reinvent the calendar. Has Ajax, groups, RSS and APIs. (via)
  • Corporate Gibberish Generator: “We apply the proverb “He who laughs last, laughs best” not only to our applications but our capacity to innovate.” (via)
  • Yahoo! Leasing SF Office Space: Brilliant! I know a lot of people who’d be happier about working for The Man if they didn’t have to live in the nerd ghetto.
  • San Francisco Neighbourhood Map: I still snicker every time I read “Nob Hill”. Important because while GIS has been concerned with lat-long, everyday users are concerned with neighbourhoods and addresses. Relating the two so neighbourhoods are searchable and addresses resolvable is a big step for the web mapping sites and APIs. (via)
  • Interactive Fiction Competition Games For Downloading: “For the last eleven years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for newcomers to the genre, the competition is a chance to enjoy some of the best short adventure games available anywhere.” I wrote the first FAQ for that Usenet group, back in The Day. (via)
  • Alternative trailer for “The Shining”: brilliant stuff. Read the post to see what happened after it made it onto the internets. I can vouch for the power of waxy‘s link mojo. (via)
  • Trulia Real Estate Search: Integration of real estate listings with Google Maps. Real estate is a huge consumer of mapping and GIS tools, so it’s great to see them start to take advantage of Google Maps. Check out the price of housing in Sebastopol to see why I’m a remote worker. (via)
  • Sex Offenders on a Google Map: Only California, Florida, Texas, and New York states. (via)
  • Low-Tech Sensors and Actuators (PDF): interesting document showing how to treat toys and cheap gizmos as components in hardware hacks.