A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff.
If you missed the OC on Thursday night because you were in a MoCap lab or out eating pre-birthday sushi, then you probably missed the new Star Wars Episode III trailer. Luckily for you, Jason Kottke has the link.
I have to admit it does ‘look’ pretty cool.
When you are done there, you can also check out this neat Legend of Zelda trailer.
Kuro5shin writes about some software he came up with that exploits Google’s book browsing service.
Many people are curious about the inner workings of Google, but they are mostly interested in keeping it a secret. So, any information we can glean comes from “black box” analysis. Recently, I wrote a short article that explains how I wrote some simple code that can instantly create PDFs of entire books from Google Print.
Read Hacking Google Print.
I found a new blog about drawing, illustration, and art called Drawn! that looks pretty sweet. It’s still new, but so far the posts include (among others) links to Vintage magazine art, a collection of Batman logos from the past, and even some 3D animation from Blur. I love it; I’m adding the link to my sidebar.
Drawn! is a collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw. Visit us daily for a dose of links and creative inspiration.
From All Your Base to Zombo.com, the Wikipedia has a pretty good collection of Internet Memes.
I just installed another great extention for Firefox. It’s called Sage.
Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.
Previously I Heart Firefox.
On June 5, 1996 HoTMaiL was publicly announced. 3 years and 8 million users later it sold to Microsoft for $400 million.
Read about it in this interesting Wired Article.
GXM Studio is the new media company in Malaysia that I am hoping to work for while I am over there in two months. They have some pretty nifty little animations, web design, and video work. I’m very excited.
By now, you’ve likely seen the Numa Numa Dance. The New York Times reports that the dancer, Gary Brolsma, isn’t enjoying his newfound fame. “These days, Mr. Brolsma shuttles between the house and his job […] He is distraught, embarrassed.” (silly registration req’d)
(Via)
Here is a hairy headed update of my model.
I was reading a Wired News article about The Wall Street Journal becoming irrelevant because of it’s online presence or rather lack thereof. The thesis of the article was that in order for the WSJ to keep in touch with bloggers and the online community in general they need to open the doors to bloggers by allowing them to link to specific stories and remove their invasive mandatory registration requirements.
What I found particularly interesting was that Forbes.com “got rid of registration requirements when it discovered they drove away traffic.” I can’t say exactly how many times I have decided not to use a particular news source because of it’s stupid required registration but I can say that it has been less of a problem for me ever since I downloaded the Bugmenot extension for Firefox. Now I just right click on the registration pages and Firefox and BugMeNot take care of the dirty work.
So, what’s my point? Well it made me wonder if BugMeNot is actually doing a disservice to the fight against mandatory registration because it’s quite possible that sites that have them (like the New York Times and the Washington Post) have NO IDEA how many people aren’t logging with their own information like the good electronic sheep they imagine us to be. These news outlets make linking to them inconvenient, invade our privacy, and all the while they aren’t even collecting good data – they need to rethink their strategy. I’m happily surprised that Forbes has figured it out; I hope that the others clue in, making life better for everyone concerned.