MeFi Projects

I wanted to try something different, so I've created a weird mixture of discussion list, newsletter, bulletin board & letters page. Anyone can submit text/Markdown and images with retro filters, then selected messages get sent out in a single-email 'inbox'. [more inside]
posted by malevolent on Feb 16, 2022 - 1 comment

I wrote a little utility to convert the massive text file one obtains from the Export Your Comments page into a variety of other formats suitable for various purposes. Currently converts to HTML, JSON, or Unix-style MBOX (mailbox) format. [more inside]
posted by Kadin2048 on Oct 29, 2021 - 5 comments

Eat Poop You Cat aka Telephone Pictionary (BoardGameGeek, MeFi, and this isn't the first MeFi Project) is a game of making art -- often badly -- and writing. Assuming 8 people play a season, each player's responsibility will be for 4 artworks and 4 sentences over the course of about 12 days. Each completed game is posted to Tumblr and sent to a group email for communal reaction.

Some past favorites:
• #013F: “Up from his mouth rose a volcano steaming with blistered robots fighting off evil bats."
• #010B: “The sun ws setting over the machines as they completed their work enslaving humanity and only one robot was remorseful as he tried and failed to paint a landscape of the scene in front of him."

posted by Jonathan Harford on Jul 28, 2019 - 1 comment

Here's how it works: each day you get an email, and you write one back. Everyone who writes back gets to keep playing, and the game gets more and more interesting as people drop off. We play until there's one person remaining and they're crowned the winner. Now gathering folks for round 3.
posted by jragon on May 21, 2019 - 3 comments

A few months ago I asked this question about replacements for reddit. Since then, I've been trying my hand at Python and ended up writing this program that pulls the top posts from your subreddits and emails them to you. This has worked well for me in that it allows me to bypass all of the muck and keep any reddit surfing to a minimum. [more inside]
posted by holmesian on Jul 20, 2017 - 5 comments

A curated weekly newsletter/blog of mostly-tech links that are interesting, strange, surprising or funny. From the BGP Bitcoin theft in 2014 that started it to Kugelblitzes, hashmaps in Rust and licking Nintendo cartridges, the Weekly Weird is me dumping my browser tabs into an email just in time for lunchtime on Friday (EST). No politics unless the underlying story is really compelling. Subscribe here.
posted by Skorgu on Apr 29, 2017 - 1 comment

Free, temporary (1 hour) email addresses. That's it. Ok, technically there are paid options to extend the life of a mailbox, download the emails, or password protect them. But it's really just temporary email addresses that anyone can use.
posted by blue_beetle on Nov 30, 2016 - 3 comments

A short story about your first day working at Hunter, Brown & Shen, told over the course of a single morning via several emails and a few text messages. Once you've registered, it begins for you at 9am the next day. (For extra verisimilitude, sign up on a Sunday so it plays out while you're at work of a Monday morning.) Call it an ARG without the G? [more inside]
posted by Andrhia on Feb 17, 2015 - 8 comments

I got sick of composing a new email every time I wanted to send myself a note. I looked around, but couldn't find anything that did everything I wanted (at most I found ones that pre-filled the "to"/"subject" field). So I learned Android development (helped that I was already a Java dev) and wrote this app. [more inside]
posted by pyro979 on Dec 19, 2014 - 11 comments

I've been writing short stories and sending them to this email list weekly-ish for the last couple of months. Some (but not all!) of them are archived here if you want to see what they're like. They have involved mimes in trouble, zoo animals menaced by a malevolent force, and tiny bananas, among other things. Read some free stories and subscribe, if that's the kind of thing you'd like.
posted by rusty on Aug 20, 2013 - 2 comments

Marginalia is where I've been living for the past six months. It's a simple app for keeping notes and journals with one interesting twist: creating and appending to notes via email. If I have a random thought or idea on the go, I can just send an email to Marginalia and it'll automatically create a note. [more inside]
posted by zrail on Sep 2, 2012 - 0 comments

LulzSec has released thousands upon thousands of hacked email logins. EmailAmbush places an "ambush" email message in your inbox which contains tempting-looking links and images which, if followed or opened, send a text message immediately to your cell phone. With your inbox acting as a skeleton key to all your other online accounts, knowing if you've been hacked is a critically important first step in preventing the compromise of ALL your online accounts.
posted by Imperfect on Jul 15, 2011 - 10 comments

Blog providing screenshot examples of socially engineered and/or specifically targeted spear-phishing emails, intended to entice the recipient to install trojans and/or malware. These are real emails that my colleagues or I have received, and therefore the examples are generally focused on the China/Taiwan analyst community in Washington, D.C. [more inside]
posted by gemmy on Mar 1, 2011 - 0 comments

Graph Your Inbox is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to graph Gmail activity over time. You can use it to visualize your communication with friends, your Facebook activity, when you purchased items on Amazon or how often you use certain words or phrases. We provide the same search functionality used by Gmail, but instead of a list of messages we show you graphs of email trends over time. [more inside]
posted by null terminated on Sep 13, 2010 - 0 comments

Many people don't know. The good thing is, there's parts of the process which are really easy to explain through visual metaphors. So we did, by constructing a giant mechanical spider marionette. Enjoy.
posted by gusandrews on May 25, 2010 - 2 comments