Nelson's Linkblog 2014-08

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Hipparcos errors?

Dispute over distance to Pleiades calls into question our primary method of measuring stellar distance

2014-08-29 distance • esa • hipparcos • parallax • pleiades • satellite

Pornhub OS report

SFW. Includes interesting alternate pie-chart visualization technique

2014-08-29 operatingsystem • porn • pornhub • survey

New Stamen map work

New funding from Knight to update and improve Stamen's maps

2014-08-29 design • maps • osm • stamen

Internet device heatmap

Guy pings the whole Internet in 5 hours

2014-08-29 internet • maps • shodan • via:reddit

csvkit is to tabular data what the standard Unix text processing suite (grep, sed, cut, sort) is to text

2014-08-28 commandline • csv • text • unix • via:tinyapps

Details of new-gen web stylesheets

2014-08-28 css • programming • web

Hellraiser box supercut

Every scene featuring Lemarchand's Box

2014-08-28 hellraiser • horror • via:jwz

Racetrack playa solved

Mysterious moving rocks; turns out to be ice + wind

2014-08-28 deathvalley • geology • rocks • science

Posner on gay marriage

Delightful to see a formidable intellectual drop the knowledge

2014-08-28 gay • law • lgbt • marriage • posner

Comcast / Netflix shakedown

details of how Netflix got forced to pay Comcast

2014-08-28 comcast • monopoly • netflix • netneutrality

Ice bucket challenge critique

Careful articulation of what's kind of weird about the ALS charity stunt

2014-08-28 als • charity

Kowloon cross-section

Detailed side view of the old walled city

2014-08-28 architecture • hongkong • kowloon • map • vertical • walledcity

Death threats against game critique

Anita Sarkeesian having to deal with monstrous response to her very thoughtful critique of video game tropes

2014-08-27 feminism • games • sexism

feministfrequency

Great critique of women in video games, other pop culture

2014-08-27 feminism • games

Uber's dirty tactics

Aggressive attempts to undermine Lyft

2014-08-27 business • competition • evil • lyft • uber

Kreyos: Indiegogo scam?

$1.5M in crowd funding, problematic delivery

2014-08-26 crowdfunding • indiegogo • kickstarter • kreyos • scam • watch

Pink Martini drummer died

Great neo-lounge band, sadness

2014-08-26 music • pdx • pinkmartini • portland

On the Roofs: Hong Kong

Insane urban explorers, great high-up photographs

2014-08-26 climbing • hongkong • parkour • photography • photos

Do better than PGP

Thoughtful critique of the venerable crypography system

2014-08-25 crypto • gpg • pgp • security • via:metafilter

Rivers in Tableau

Mapping major rivers of the world using off the shelf tech

2014-08-25 maps • rivers • tableau

Android fragmentation

Various statistics about Android OS versions, devices

2014-08-25 android • ios • market • mobile

Nevada County gold mining

Or rather the lack of it; no one wants mines to reopen

2014-08-25 california • environmentalism • grassvalley • mining • nevadacounty

Guilty until proven innocent

One man's reflections on Ferguson

2014-08-25 america • ferguson • race • racism

Face projection

Slick real time face tracking / projection mapping demo reel

2014-08-25 graphics • mocap • via:waxy

French street artist Invader has made an iOS/Android game

2014-08-24 android • games • invader • ios • spaceinvader • streetart

Quick traffic graph from the SF Bay Area of tweets after the earthquake

2014-08-24 bayarea • earthquake • napa • twitter

Funiture music, 1959 recordings of innocuous background music

2014-08-24 furniture • music

US passport card RFID

Security is not well designed

2014-08-24 badtech • passport • privacy • rfid • security

Languages of Islamic World

Nice thematic map, by Dr. Michael Izady

2014-08-23 islam • language • maps • muslims • via:reddit

New library for making map vector tiles with MapNik

2014-08-22 mapnik • maps • tiles • vector

Great American Eclipse

Total eclipse for August 21, 2017

2014-08-22 astronomy • eclipse • via:kottke

Secret exploits

Anonymous messaging app is having a hard time maintaining anonymity

2014-08-22 anonymity • badtech • secret

DRIVE: The Aphromoo Story

Short profile of one of the top League of Legends pro players

2014-08-22 aphromoo • clg • esports • games • via:reddit

2014 XOXO Arcade

Crazy list of indie games to play in person

2014-08-21 xoxo • games • indie • xoxofest

OSM Chicago import

Ian Dees' talk on importing Chicago city data into OpenStreetMap

2014-08-21 chicago • data • import • maps • osm

OSM New York import

Detailed notes from importing addresses and building footprints in New York

2014-08-21 data • import • maps • newyork • opendata • osm

soc.motss recollection

Nice early history of gay stuff on the net

2014-08-21 gay • lgbt • motss • soc.motss • usenet

Software defined radios

Roundup of current hacker hardware

2014-08-20 hacking • ham • radio • sdr

Nokia Maps schism

Head map guy leaves Here, the map arm of the remnants of Nokia

2014-08-20 here • maps • nokia

Ferguson: locals vs. visitors

Tweet map from @enf

2014-08-20 ericfischer • ferguson • mapbox • maps • twitter

Defeating backscatter scans

One of TSA's full-body scanners is easily defeated

2014-08-20 backscatter • security • securitytheater • tsa

Portland food carts

2014-08-20 food • foodcart • pdx • portland

Wright Brothers photos

Great set of pictures from early flight

2014-08-20 aviation • flying • photos • wrightbrothers

Ebola in Liberia

Powerful photos

2014-08-20 disease • ebola • hospitals • journalism • liberia • photos

Clay Shirky's brutally honest description of the state of print journalism

2014-08-19 ads • advertising • journalism • news

US Segregation Scores

Measures of how segregated states and metros are. St. Louis has a high black/white segregation.

2014-08-19 census • ferguson • politics • race • racism • stlouis

St. Louis: A city divided

Excellent background on how we got to Ferguson

2014-08-19 ferguson • justice • politics • race • racism • stlouis

Ferguson police misconduct

The details of what the Ferguson cops are doing are just awful

2014-08-18 ferguson • justice • police • racism

Set your clock by inspecting SSL handshake data

2014-08-18 date • ntp • ssl

Normalized Ferguson tweetmap

Better visualization of interest in the Ferguson story

2014-08-18 ferguson • maps • twitter • via:flowingdata

Tom Jennings (1996)

Early Wired profile of a pioneering network guy

2014-08-18 fidonet • homocore • internet • tlg • tomjennings

Early BBS network, alternate to Usenet and Internet

2014-08-18 bbs • fidonet • modem • networks • tomjennings

512k BGP route impact

Some of the fallout from the routing debacle on the Internet

2014-08-18 bgp • cisco • internet • routing

A 512,000 BGP route limit is breaking the Internet

2014-08-18 bgp • bugs • internet • routing

Windows Store scams

A brief stroll through Microsoft's negligence

2014-08-18 badtech • malware • scam • via:reddit • windows

A Unicode encoding that's like UTF-8 for plane 0, then some surrogate mess for stuff that are uncommon characters

2014-08-17 badtech • unicode • utf8

1915 chart style guide

From the US Census department, guidelines for making data visualizations

2014-08-17 census • charts • graphics • infovis

Berkhamsted shaped like a penis

The map is funny because it looks like a penis

2014-08-16 funny • maps • penis

512K routes limit

Internet is breaking in various ways because of a static limit in BGP and Cisco routers

2014-08-15 badtech • bgp • cisco • internet

Open source Elite clone

2014-08-15 elite • games • opensource • space

Ferguson killing tweets

Someone livetweeted the police killing Michael Brown

2014-08-15 ferguson • michaelbrown • twitter

11th century Arab ruler, a woman in Yemen

2014-08-15 arwa • history • islam • women • yemen

Part 2 of Maciej Cegłowski's amazing travelogue in Yemen

2014-08-15 tourism • yemen

Self-assembling bots

"Kilobots", 1000 small mobile robots that swarm and self-assemble

2014-08-15 emergence • harvard • robots • swarming

Chrome extension to improve disclosure of "native advertising"

2014-08-14 ads • advertising • chrome • disclosure • extension

Standoff in Ferguson

Short NYT Video piece

2014-08-14 civilrights • ferguson • news • nytimes

Ferguson cops attacking a news crew

Video of tear gas being fired at Al Jazeera video crew, then the cops dismantling their camera setup

2014-08-14 ferguson • freedom • journalism • press

US paramilitary police

The dangers of giving police military weaponry

2014-08-14 civilrights • ferguson • guns • military • police

Python type annotations

Surprising proposal from Guido to add optional static types

2014-08-14 code • lint • programming • python • typing

NSA knocked Syria offline

2012 outage wasn't done by Syrian government; NSA hack team screwed up

2014-08-13 civilrights • internet • nsa • snowden • syria

Linux can't print on Tuesdays

Bizarre bug where OpenOffice files generated on Tuesdays won't print

2014-08-13 badtech • bugs • funny • linux • ubuntu

Skeletal animations

2014-08-12 anatomy • gif • joint • skeleton • xray

Fun experiment writing a simple TCP stack

2014-08-12 hacking • networking • python • tcp

FAA shuts down air space right over the neighborhood of St. Louis where the unarmed black kid got killed by cops

2014-08-12 faa • ferguson • notam • police

#IfTheyGunnedMeDown

Clever protest against media stereotyping of African-American men.

2014-08-12 ferguson • images • race • stereotypes • twitter

Let's build a browser engine!

Toy web browser being written in Rust

2014-08-12 browser • mozilla • programming • rust • via:metafilter

Hey Ash Whatcha Playin?

Funny video game commentary shorts

2014-08-11 funny • games • parody

US Digital Service

New government group will try to do better building web sites, etc

2014-08-11 government • heathcare • it • mikey • pahlka

QUIC test drive

Outdated, but results of playing with Google's UDP alternative for the web

2014-08-11 google • http • network • performance • quic • spdy

Ralph Wiggum appreciation

Moments defining one of the Simpsons' best characters

2014-08-11 simpsons • tv • via:metafilter

Cigarette fine securitization

Crazy financial engineering backfires for states that settled with tobacco companies

2014-08-11 cigarettes • finance • tobacco

Non-offending pedophiles

Young men who are pedophiles and want to not do horrible things.

2014-08-11 compulsion • pedophilia • sexuality • therapy

"utf8" isn't actually UTF8; you have to use "utf8mb4" to get beyond plane 0

2014-08-11 badtech • bug • emoji • mysql • stupid • unicode

Maps that don't explain the Middle East

Excellent antithesis of the crappy maps that get passed around

2014-08-09 history • maps • middleeast • via:metafilter

Slippy map video

New WebGL map stack lets you embed video

2014-08-08 aerial • drones • maps • video

Twitch CEO answers Reddit questions in the wake of very contentious content destruction

2014-08-07 copyright • games • twitch • video • youtube

Hilarious sound re-edit of fight scenes from Matrix Reloaded

2014-08-07 funny • games • matrix • movies • retro • via:metafilter

Stuck with passwords

Good high level overview of the problems with authentication

2014-08-07 authentication • login • openid • passwords • security

HTML5 8 bit color cycling

Old school game effect repurposed

2014-08-07 games • graphics • hacks • html5 • palette

Slack / Stewart Butterfield

Phenomenal long profile by @Mat Honan

2014-08-07 flickr • slack • startups • stewart • tech

Simple host file swapper for MacOS. Works in Mavericks

2014-08-06 development • hostfile • macos • macs

Twitch removing video archives

Along with the complete erasure of Justin, it's clear Twitch is preparing for something big

2014-08-06 archive • games • google • history • streaming • twitch

Mapbox GL for the Web

Mapbox publishes their new vector map client

2014-08-06 javascript • mapbox • maps • webgl

New creative programming environment inspired by Processing

2014-08-06 art • design • javascript • processing • software

At the Edge of the License

More on OpenStreetMap licensing. It's awfully complicated.

2014-08-06 license • odbl • openstreetmap • osm

New link aggregator / news site from linkblog master @waxpancake

2014-08-06 aggregator • blog • linkblog • news • twitter

Anatomy of a Pentakill

Second-by-second breakdown of a League of Legends play

2014-08-06 games • leagueoflegends • lol • pentakill

Saturn polar vortex

Lovely image of the hexagonal storm

2014-08-06 astronomy • astrophotography • saturn • space

Justin.tv shutdown

Very little notice

2014-08-06 justintv • streaming • twitch • video

"Uncontacted" tribes

Some hard reality about anthropology

2014-08-06 amazon • anthropology • culture • humanity

OSM community guidelines

Clarifications on the OpenStreetMap license, how the community views its application

2014-08-05 licenses • maps • odbl • osm

Visualization glitch art

Accidental images that are interesting

2014-08-04 art • glitch • infovis • visualization

Google reported someone for child porn?

Houston police say Google tipped them off about a Gmail user with child porn

2014-08-04 google • surveillance • via:metafilter

Questioning monotheism

Why do we continue to program in monospace fonts?

2014-08-03 design • fonts • monospace • programming

Honoring the computer font of the 70s

2014-08-03 computers • design • fonts • ocr

Zachary Watson in hospital

Well known SF data visualizer in a bad accident

2014-08-02 exploratorium • sanfrancisco • stamen

Chromium command line switches

The browser has a lot of options; --app is particularly useful

2014-08-02 chrome • commandline

Daigo parry visualized

Amazing Street Fighter play from 2004 in infographic form

2014-08-02 daigo • games • infographic • shuli • streetfighter

Stellar funding

New currency company is using their new currency to pay for things. Pretty sketchy.

2014-08-01 bitcoin • compensation • currency • stellar

Concerns about AdBlock

Two competing ad blockers for Chrome; one claims the other is up to something shady

2014-08-01 adblock • badtech • chrome • extension • opensource