A clever Wii gamer used the console's Mii creator, Wii Bowling and what had to be an awful lot of editing, to recreate the "pee'd on my rug" bowling scene from movie The Big Lebowski. While it's kinda funny to watch, I think this mostly proves you can't really make evocative machinima with Miis.
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Cory Doctorow:
The Geek Wreath is a simple and powerful idea: take a strand of lights and weave it around a wreath of all the goddamned power cables, spare USB cables, obsolete SCSI cables and whatever else you've got cluttering up your home.
Link
(via Make)
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Drachten, a small Dutch city with around 50,000 residents has removed almost all of its traffic lights. Major intersections have been converted to roundabouts, smaller intersections just let drivers work make decisions on their own. Basically, it's anarchy. Anarchy that has completely eliminated dangerous crashes and road fatalities and created a surge in bicycle and pedestrian traffic.
Crashes still happen, but they have all been fender benders. The architect of the project, Dr Hans Monderman explained, "We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt." Instead of relying on a set of hard rules, drivers are asked to take their safety, and the safety of others, into their own hands. The result is that people are more aware, more careful and drive slower, but are far less frustrated while driving. Bikes and walkers now rule the roads and can pretty much travel non-stop around town
Mark Frauenfelder:
Cory Doctorow:
The IT Crowd DVDs have just shipped -- with subtitles in leet! The IT Crowd is a convulsively funny British TV show about sysadmins, created by Graham Linehan, who is best known for writing the classic show Father Ted.
The IT Crowd's first six episodes ran last year on Channel 4, and was widely shared online, resulting in major commercial success, critical acclaim, and a renewed contract for another season of the show.
I was privileged to consult a little on the show, and I was able to connect Graham with uber-geek Yoz Grahame, who suggested that the disc carry subtitles in leet (or 1337), the letter/number substitution code used by gamers, hackers and other net-dwellers.
The disc is region-locked to Europe, but I hear that a US version is coming shortly. Link(Thanks, Damien!)
See also The IT Crowd -- the geek comedy I've been waiting for all my life
Let’s kick things off with something a bit unusual: a virtual scavenger hunt.
At some point, nearly every web geek gets a chance to hack on some open data, usually from a government source. The buzzword here is “mashup,” but knowing how to find and consume openly available data will remain a valuable skill long after its faddishness ends.
Unfortunately, governments, and especially the US government, are often incredibly awful at providing this data. Sure, it’s available—but you’ve got to find it first.
So this question is all about finding that data. Since I’m most familiar with the USA, this question is USA-specific (but I’d love to see answers to any questions that apply to other nations).
In each case, the answer should be a URL where you can either download the data in question, or at least find a direct link to the data. There may be multiple sources for each, including ones that could be screen-scraped for the data. I’m not looking for those sources, however—just the ones with easily downloadable data in a format that can be easily parsed by a computer (i.e. CSV, XML, plain text). “Friendly” formats, in other words.
So, where can I download data to:
Post your answers into the comments. For extra brownie points, tell us how you located each piece of data—did The Google serve you well, or were you forced to turn elsewhere?
If you really want to stretch your brain, try to write a tool to import each chunk of data into your favorite relational database. There will be a related question in a couple of weeks involving modeling one of these pieces of data, so you overachievers can start thinking about it now…
Good luck, and check back this weekend for the answers.
This article provided by sitepoint.com.
technorati tags:Site+PointScavenger+Hunt
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Mark Frauenfelder:
Chirag has analyzed "the words that presidents used frequently in their speeches shows which issues they deemed important. The prominence of 'Terrorist' in G. W. Bush's tag cloud is unsurprising while Richard Nixon was all about 'commitment' somehow. Move the slider around to see the changes in tag cloud. Link
technorati tags:President, Speech, Tag+Cloud
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