MetaFilter Projects

Get the Web: A Book of the Best Foundational Essays About the Web

dbarefoot

My friend and I are constantly recommending the same foundational essays--"1000 True Fans", "The Next Economy of Ideas" and so forth--to clients, colleagues, students and so forth. We thought it would be wise to compile these into a book--a toolkit for getting the web. Assuming we can secure author permissions, we'll publish an ebook and maybe a hardcopy version, donating any profits to the EFF. For now, we're looking for recommendations for your favorite essays about the web.

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I created a Q&A site for Cooking

kbrower3

What do you think? I am using a meta stackoveflow.

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OMG I'M THE ADULT

The Whelk

Inspired by a passing tweet ,OMGIMTHEADULT is a simple blog about the moment you realize, OMG I'M THE ADULT HERE. Submissions very welcome.

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The Gecko Wears A Tiara

msalt

My selection of the most amusing ancient Sumerian proverbs, taken from The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, (which I learned of from this Metafilter post.) Warning: PDF.

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Great Catch

DaddyNewt

Here's a Superbowl Doritos commercial submission that I did the post-production on. (I apologize in advance for the aggressive embedded audio. Push the "skip intro" button fast for god's sake. It's way down in the bottom right corner.) I made it with some folks in St. Louis who believe that catching some fish starts with throwing out a line.

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Efficient Mondrian

fearofcorners

Efficient Mondrian is a tongue-in-cheek art installation which generates HTML table compositions in the style of Piet Mondrian's Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red from the text of The Principles of Scientific Management by FW Taylor. It does this every two minutes, posting the results to twitter.

I was given the opportunity to present a work at the University of Toronto Art Centre as a part of a student curated show called Facing the Screen. The purpose of which is to examine the relationship between painting and technology. Efficient Mondrian is sort of a comment on the limitless reproducibility of the kind of abstract work Mondrian was known for. The compositions are derived from individual clauses in Taylor's text with a somewhat oblique algorithm. I had originally planned to use the IKEA (purveyor of fine, cheap, abstract pseudo-art) catalouge, but I settled on The Principles of Scientific Managment because it seemed more fitting. I've reduced Mondrian's work to a completely prescribed, mechanical process. Taylor did that to everyone else. The twitter feed was a last-minute addition but I think it's the best part. There's a sort of stubborn determination to its 24 hour, every-two-minutes posting. It will reach about 30,000 tweets by the time the installation is over, unless of course I get banned for posting too much. If you live in Toronto and would like to come see the show, it's on until Dec 19th at UTAC. This is also my first post (ever) to MetaFilter after years of lurking.

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How desperate are you for a Mac netbook?

ardgedee

The Askme question about a hackintosh netbook a week and a half ago got me interested in making one myself. So I bought a Dell Mini 10v and made my own. This is a 3,400 word blog post about the advantages (some), disadvantages (many), and why the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for some people and not others. In addition, it's compared to a real Macintosh and is used as evidence for why I've come to believe that Apple's unlikely to ship a Mac netbook any time soon.

I tried to keep the post understandable by anybody who's comfortable using computers but don't consider themselves computer geeks. Hopefully it's useful for people who are curious about hackintoshes or are planning to use one themselves.

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Resurrected Recipes

litlnemo

Resurrected Recipes is devoted to researching and recreating recipes that are no longer in vogue, but were familiar to our grandparents, or even our great-great-grandparents and beyond. Many old recipes are very tasty, and it’s a mystery why they’ve been forgotten. Others have been forgotten for good reason. We’ll try them and find out which category they belong to.

Our emphasis is food from the turn of the 20th century to the 1970s, but we will also occasionally dabble in recipes from earlier times, right back to medieval cookery. Additionally, there are other posts related to vintage/historic kitchens and cooking, such as vintage cookbooks, kitchen equipment, interesting old articles and ads, etc. The blog belongs to two of us, one who has a degree in Family and Consumer Science, and the other (me) who is a history geek, loves to bake, and cooks in a 1920s-style kitchen, complete with a late '20s refrigerator and a cast iron stove.

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Habiter

tmcw

A tiny tool for keeping good habits. Log whether you did complete whatever (keeping your room clean, jogging) and get a nice little graph of it in your console. Put the file on a USB drive and you can edit it because it's a simple text format (YAML). Install it with 'gem install habiter' if you've got a mac or linux machine with ruby + rubygems. That's it.

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Metafilter: Tagline Joke Remover

logicpunk

A greasemonkey script which removes (or attempts to remove) comments containing Metafilter tagline jokes.

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Homeless Child: Helping Street Children in Brazil

DarlingBri

Homeless Child is a charity supporting street children in Rio. Most tourists traveling to Brazil never see the dire proverty, crack addiction and sexual exploitation millions of children suffer through each day. It takes less than one minute to make a free 1% Travel Pledge online and promise to donate 1% of your travel budget towards inproving the lives of local children if you ever go to Brazil.

Genghis, Memo and I volunteered our time to build the newly launched website for Homeless Child, who had never had a site before (yay MeFites!) I'd appreciate feedback and particularly ideas on how to promote the pledge drive, since we're relying on it to raise awareness. Thanks!

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Renaming "favorites" with Greasemonkey

Pronoiac

I wrote a Greasemonkey script that lets you, on-the-fly, modify the "favorites" label on comments. Originally written because the November experiment's "faved" was unpopular, but since updated for the classic count of favorites.

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Jobsee.kr is a new Korea jobs and community site

stavrosthewonderchicken

Jobsee.kr is my entry into the slightly-crowded jobs site space for expats in Korea and people who are interested in coming here. My hope is to provide an evolving set of resources and a grow a community that breaks from the negativity that reigns in much of the K-expat web scene.

(Apologies upfront for the already-retro web2-esque URL, but I couldn't resist once I saw it was available) The site's as ready for launch as it's ever going to be, I think, and I'm fervently hoping that people will join the community and once I start sending out emails to employers and recruiters, that job listings will ramp up. Existing community sites for K-expats tend to be either a) relentlessly negative b) ugly c) ghost towns or d) moving to social networking platforms like Facebook, and in all but the last case they tend to be cookie-cutter PHPBB clones. I was hoping that offering something new, even if it might be a bit bewildering at first to people used to the same old same old, something focused more on people and the ways they might gather around topics and in the real world, might be received well and useful to the real-world community. My dream is a web community that, as it develops, will hew to some extent to kind of ethos we're familiar with here at Metafilter, as much as I can guide it in that direction. Existing Korea job sites tend to be functional (sometimes barely) and ugly as sin, and I was hoping that a site that's a little warmer and friendlier might also be welcome. I'm no designer, but I hope the look and feel of the site accomplishes that. If you think my effort's as ugly as sin, too, I will understand but please don't tell me. Anyway, the major development work is pretty much done for the moment, I think, and I'm moving in to the stage of trying to get the word out -- emails to employers and recruiters and such are my next step -- so I thought I'd start here. I've tried to help scores of people over the years that have asked here in Ask Metafilter about working in Korea, and I'm hoping for folks like that, for the same folks if they end up coming to Korea, and for people who already live here, that the site grows to be a resource that will be as important and useful to them as Metafilter has been for me. Big dreams, I know, and nothing much will happen unless the community reaches a critical mass. We'll see. Sorry to ramble on -- I've never put together a site that was intended to be anything but a pet project to please myself or a friend, and I'm a little nervous about throwing open the virtual doors.

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Hometaping - record an album in a month

basil1

Hometaping is a big effort to get as many people as possible to record an album of music in a month. November is the Hometaping month (i.e. now!). At the end of the month, we'll link to your album or host it for you (you own everything, of course) and then we'll have a party to celebrate. Read the about page or see the FAQ on the site for more info. Or you can follow the project on Twitter: @hmtpng

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Put This On

YoungAmerican

Put This On is a new web series (and website) about men's style for men who want to dress like grownups. I'm the host/producer, Adam Lisagor (aka LonelySandwich) is the director/cinematographer/editor/producer as well as an on-camera contributor. We just finished our first episode, and are looking, eventually, to get some money together to make more.

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"Lock & Key"

pxe2000

I recently completed work on a three-minute documentary for WGBH Lab's Open Call program. "Lock & Key" profiles three women -- poet/bookmaker Sarah Westbrook Binns, playwright and therapist Kelly Dumar, and burlesque poetess Jojo Lazar -- about their diurnal diary habits. I blogged about postproduction here and here. Please help me potentially get aired on WGBH by viewing and rating my video!

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Gloomy Halloween: Post-apocalyptic Music For Sole Survivor

gmm

I have made a new album. Dark and depressive post-apocalyptic cthulhutronica, from a bleak and lonely character, roaming and searching a lost future. This is glitchy, bleak, hopeless desperation, the soundtrack of an individual doomed to eternal solitude in the ruins of a extinct civilization. It is available as a full download in a pay-what-you-want model, and it is sure to cast a depressing, departing and end-is-nigh mood on absolutely any party.

Thanks to those who helped with feedback, comments and support here on MF!

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Seroquel hits the black market.

The Straightener

I've consistently expressed concerns in mental health threads on Mefi about the frequency with which the anti-psychotic medication Seroquel is prescribed off label for minor disorders like insomnia. Now, the drug is turning up on the streets in Philly.

I've previously written about the Pill Hill section of North Philadelphia hightlighted in the Daily Beast story. Including my own experience copping OxyContin there and also some observations from working in the neighborhood as a social worker after getting clean. I put together a piece of supplemental coverage to enhance the Daily Beast story that looks at how gentrification may put Pill Hill permanently out of business.

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Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office

cog_nate

Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office is a speculative/experimental novel in epistolary form written by yours truly and physically realized by dozens of creative Mefi Mail Art group members, Metafilter members and other collaborators. (RSS feed).

Realizations (omitting author contributions and more or less in order of appearance with MeFites past and present in bold) by and heartfelt thanks to sleepy pete, Aubrey, Megan P., Ray B., rumposinc, Max Y., Otis, Howard L., annaramma, Marc E., Mikepop, Nanojath, Dale W., ageispolis, Filthy, Ellen J., liosliath, Matt L., Dan C., Emily L., Jason G. & Melissa S., Nate G., soma lkzx, Baud, Joe Y., Tabitha A., advicepig, Deathalicious, cobaltnine, and dersins. (Errors in the depiction of the social, psychological, cultural and quality of life implications of the instantaneous disappearance of the wonders of modern technology are my own.)

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Textual Noise

DecemberBoy

Textual Noise is a sort of Web 2.0 art project, consisting of a Python Twitterbot which tweets a random YouTube comment every hour, on the hour. It is essentially a text white noise generator, hence the name, and is the source of some highly amusing idiocy if nothing else.

I've just gotten this going (I only had the idea earlier tonight), I plan to add many features (apply Burroughs/Gysin cutup technique to a comment/several comments, Markov chains, etc., it's all on the page). There may still be bugs as well, but so far it appears to work fine. It's pretty simple, really. There should hopefully be a text-to-speech PHP thingy that will speak the latest tweet later tonight or tomorrow. The code itself is pretty simple, using BeautifulSoup for the YouTube bits. I'll probably post it later, to give me a chance to discover any hidden bugs.

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