Woody’s Roundup 001

Hallo again, I was super busy last week so I have two weeks of fun stuff to post about. Also, I hope you like the new name (any feedback on it in the comments would be nice) :)

First up we have the important decisions by the American Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress to grant 3 of the EFF’s applications to legalize the jailbreaking of mobile phones so that they can 3rd party software and use other networks as well as allowing video remixers to ‘rip’ DVD’s to create new original works. More can be found out in the EFF press release.

A couple of weeks ago it emerged that both Google and the CIA have both invested in an Echelon like technology, Wired has the story.

Next, an interesting about learning piano scales and learning in general.

This post is an amazing series of pictures from the present day painstakingly overlaid with that same shot but from world war two. Both touching and surreal.

I love this Expendables takeover of YouTube, a great little example of how video can be so much more on the web.

This next page is all about islands and lakes. For example, the biggest island in the world, the biggest lake in the world, the biggest lake on an island in the world etc etc… Some definite pub quiz fodder there.

Last Saturday it appeared that the torrent site TorrentReactor has bought an entire Russian town and renamed it after itself. Crazy? Perhaps but it seems that they are bringing some much needed income to the small town.

This week Twitter announced their Tweet this buttons in partnership with TweetMeme. However, TweetMeme may have trumped their announcement in my eye with their own announcement of Datasift, an enhanced and frankly amazing search interface for Twitter. I was lucky enough to see it in action at the Twitter DevNest last week and we cant wait to get our hand on it!

Of course, a post with a bunch of links would not be complete without something we had cooked up ourselves. Here is Steve‘s
“selection of nifty, real-time, social media widgets for your Geckoboard! :)”. Geckoboard is a realtime statusboard service and Steve has cooked up some great widgets so you can track your Twitter followers and Facebook fans.

Last up is this amazing tech demo of iD Softwares new title Rage running on the iOS, lovingly coded by the hands of John Carmack himself *swoon* (yes, he is one of my video gaming idols).

…till next time pardners! :D