Do you remember the video I posted last summer of YouTuber Benn Jordan where he “uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird”? So cool. Jordan is back with more data encoding tricks in his latest video, There Are Files Stored in This Video (or: How To Hide Shit In Media).

Here’s his intro, which sounds completely bonkers but he demonstrates everything he says he’s going to:

This video is a very deep dive on all of the different ways that you can covertly send and receive data. I’m going to show you how to secretly store encrypted files in music that sounds completely normal to the human ear. I even made a little web app where somebody could paste a link to a Spotify song and it unlocks a completely secret separate audio stream. I’m going to show you how you can send and receive encrypted messages via ultrasound with no cell service or Wi-Fi required by turning your phone into a modem. We’re going to be exploiting Meta’s copyright protection to store ebooks inside Instagram videos. And I’m going to show you how I stored, hosted, and shared malware inside of a harmless Facebook photo of my [dog].

This is a pretty dense video and, I’m going to be honest, some of it went right over my head. But it is also genuinely mind-blowing and makes me want to watch a Sneakers-esque hackers movie where the characters do things like:

So if you ever want to send someone a selfie over PA system in a place with no Wi-Fi or cell service, I guess we’ve made that possible today.

If you want to play around with any of the stuff in the video, Jordan coded a bunch of demos and tools and put them up on his website.

I also ran across this recently: a system that can transfer data at 190 KB/s between two phones by pointing the camera of one phone at a QR video.

Tags: audio · Benn Jordan · remix · video

Lidar and other discoveries continue to show that the Amazon rainforest was home to a “sprawling ancient civilization much bigger than researchers expected” (possibly up to 3 million people around 100-300 CE).

Hey folks. I just wanted to hop in here quickly to let a cat out of a bag: I am in the midst of moving. Not going to get into the wheres, whys, and hows right now; there’s a bigger post coming at some point about all of that. I’m excited and anxious about the transition (it’s a pretty big one), but it’s been taking up a lot of time, energy, and bandwidth that I would usually be putting into KDO.

The move is happening in early Sept, and I’m probably going to be taking some time off between now and then (timing tbd) to get everything packed & organized, spend time with family & friends before I go, and generally not run myself completely into the ground. Thanks for your patience & understanding; I’m excited to get back to focusing on the site in mid-Sept. ✌️

Tags: Jason Kottke · kottke.org

This is an old list but still interesting: the 12 most linguistically influential American movies since 1980. If you were compiling a list of linguistically influential movies since 2000, what would be on it?

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s reading list for fighting back against Big Tech. “Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people.”

Emily Wilson takes another crack at a critique of Nolan’s “visually stunning, emotionally empty” Odyssey. “Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.”

Surfing Alaska’s Turnagain Arm (home to a twice-daily tidal bore wave) can be fun (10-foot waves you can ride for miles) but also dangerous: “You need a Plan B, a Plan C and a Plan D because no one is coming to rescue you.”

In recent years, science has been learning more and more about how central the role of inflammation is to our health. “The paradox that often makes treating chronic inflammation so difficult: It can be vital and harmful at the same time.”

Huh, here’s the trailer for a new director’s cut (of sorts) of the second X-Files movie (called I Want to Believe, orig. released in 2008) that, per Wikipedia, “will restore horror elements that were previously removed”.

I don’t know what sort of neurodiverse bucket this puts me in, but I think a lot about mowing the lawn¹ relative to how much time I actually spend mowing lawns (~6-7 hours per year). And so I was completely fascinated by The Pudding’s latest post on optimal lawn mowing paths and “why some people mow a lawn better than others”.

They built several digital lawns for people to mow and recorded all of their moves, how often they paused at certain times, and who mowed an optimal path.

Solving the lawn mowing problem is formally called Coverage Path Planning, and is related to one of the most famous path planning problems in computer science: The Traveling Salesman Problem.

Humans turn out to be pretty good mowers, especially those who take their time and have played some video games (including, one would assume, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Mr. Do!, and any other game where you need to worry about dead-ends).

Sarah, one of the best mowers, spent her attention unevenly on purpose. She had a theory about why.

“The bigger spaces have more cognitive load for you to figure out what the best path is. Whereas the smaller spaces…there are fewer decisions to make.”

She planned the tight, trap-prone sections carefully and winged it on the open ones.

So it’s not about thinking more or faster, but when thinking happens. That’s what a good heuristic does: it spends your attention on the decisions that matter and nothing on the ones that don’t.

The piece is interactive so you get to try your hand at digital mowing as well.

My actual lawn is very irregularly shaped with a few dead-ends & choke points and an added wrinkle that I can’t blow grass clippings into the flower beds (so I can only go one-way the “wrong way” in those areas). So every time I mow, I’m trying to figure out the optimal path so I don’t end up backtracking too much. I probably end up saving about 45 seconds of actual time but boy is it fun from an intellectual standpoint.

1. See my post on Tidying Up from more than 20 years ago. ↩

Tags: infoviz · science · The Pudding

“poetry camera is a new way to see your world. take a photo with the camera… poetry camera thinks… and prints out a poem about the scene.”

The Phone in Your Hand. “A layer-by-layer teardown of the most intricate object you’ve ever held.”

Using high-definition open source videos and photos from NASA and his own music, John Boswell (aka Melodysheep) created this mesmerizing eight-minute video recap of the Artemis II mission that enchanted us all back in the spring. Like all of his videos I’ve featured on KDO, this one is really well done.

See also Animated Artemis II Photos Reveal Satellites Buzzing Around Earth and Stunning Artemis II Phone Wallpapers. (via colossal)

Tags: artemis · astronomy · Earth · John Boswell · mesmerizing · Moon · NASA · photography · space · video

The Past Catalog Archive is a throwback to fun & modest personal projects on the web. “There is no reason to keep these old catalogs to myself, or only allow them to be viewed. Share them and let everyone take a trip down memory lane.”

Reading Maps: Journeys from books & films (Moby-Dick, Murder on the Orient Express, The Hunt for Red October, The Muppet Movie, etc.) plotted on a map.

Work vs gym: a simple way to decide whether to use AI for a task. “At the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.”

“Long live Hyrule jazz!” The Z Suites is “a modern jazz reinterpretation of the music from The Legend of Zelda”.

How Podcasts Ruined America. This is an odd claim and article. No mention of the clear precursors to right-wing podcasts (talk radio, blogs, Twitter) and the general shift towards less accountability for public speech, esp. by conservatives. 🤔

So, I don’t know what kind of nerd you are, but my brand of nerdiness dovetails neatly with this video about the origins of some of the most common symbols on your keyboard: #, @, &, §, *, ¶, †, and ‡, as well as ☞.

The “and” symbol or ampersand does not look like a word, but it is one. In fact, it is a full one. It is the Latin word for “and”: “et”. The Romans themselves used this. How do we know? Because we have this: the earliest known example of it, graffitied onto a wall in the doomed Roman city of Pompeii.

See also Where the $&%@# Did Grawlixes Come From?

Tags: language · video

This video catalogs every borrowed sample from Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys, from the soundtrack to Car Wash to the Sugarhill Gang to the Eagles to the Ramones to the Beatles. They play the original first and then what they did with it on the album.

Somehow this video only has 31,000 views?! You can also listen to this remix of Paul’s Boutique on Soundcloud, which combines the source tracks with Beastie Boys vocals and some audio commentary.

Tim Carmody made a Spotify playlist of all the sampled songs or you can download zip files of the original songs sampled in Paul’s Boutique and five of their other albums.

They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore, mostly because clearing all of the samples would be prohibitively expensive if not impossible.

Hip-hop sampling began as a live technique, with DJs working turntables at parties and clubs. Whether it was strictly legal or not, nobody was going to try to sue anyone about it. As the genre’s popularity grew, people naturally started recording performances and releasing them as albums. Early sampling tended to come fast and furious. In the ’80s, short clips of existing recordings were the order of the day, often — as in the case of the Beastie Boys — lots of them, layered and shuffled in a clearly creative way. As hip-hop pushed further into the mainstream, however, the stakes got bigger and so did the samples.

1990 saw the release of both M.C. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice, Baby.” Not only did both songs sample, they each relied heavily on one particular sample — the baselines from Rick James’ “Superfreak” and Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” — for their main hook. Both hits resulted in legal controversy.

[This is a vintage post originally from Dec 2019.]

Tags: Beastie Boys · copyright · legal · music · remix · timeless posts · video