Waxy.org: Links Miniblog

Ultima creator Richard Garriott launched into space (Lord British spending 10 days on the International Space Station for a cool $30 million)

Moral psychology testing on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Brendan O'Connor's blog is one of my new favorites; he works at Dolores Labs)

Conplot, a commandline plotter with ASCII art (for use with piping from sort|uniq -c and the like)

Preview of Gomibako, like Tetris with garbage (every object has physical properties, so trash can be crushed, burned, or toppled)

Drew on the financial crisis (see also: Woot's Google ads) [via]

Gary Vaynerchuk on recession-proof marketing and dumb advertising (don't miss the part where he queries his UStream followers in real-time)

You Fell Asleep Watching A DVD [via]

Content-aware scaling in Photoshop CS4 (from SIGGRAPH demo to product in a year) [via]

Unicode Snowman for You (☃)

Tuttuki Bako, poke virtual characters in a little box (like Tamagotchi meets Levelhead)

Kevin Mitnick on the indictment of Sarah Palin's email hacker (he also touches on his own recent encounter with U.S. customs)

Portal: Prelude, extensive fan-made Portal mod, released a day early (Gamespy loved it, but warns that it's very hard)

Inspired by xkcd comic, YouTube adds audio previews for comments (this works nicely for quick speech synthesis with simple URL hacking)

NYT to close International Herald Tribune website (I remember when their 2000 redesign blew away everyone with impressive DHTML features)

Steven Levy visits Jay Walker's insane personal library (funny, I keep all my priceless artifacts in cardboard boxes in the basement)

Yahoo! Calendar finally, finally launches redesign (ten years in the making)

Chuck Klosterman's Brief History of the 21st Century (like Kottke said, there's too much in here to like; related: Phone Sex AI) [via]

YouTube in Super HD! (after it buffers, try clicking "Restart" to get it in sync) [via]

Little Big Computer, a virtual electronic 8-bit calculator built in Little Big Planet (see also: Mechanical 5-bit Calculator in the Half-Life engine)

Mail Goggles, Gmail tries to prevent late-night drunk emails (this could also be used to keep you from answering personal email during work hours)

DJ Z-Trip's Obama Mix (very listenable pastiche of rock and hip-hop from Pink Floyd to Saul Williams with a strong political undercurrent)

This American Life's Another Frightening Show About the Economy (followup to The Giant Pool of Money episode from May)

Take on Me: The Literal Version (if songs sang what was happening in the music video) [via]

TIGSource's Bootleg Demake competition winners (best game competition ever)

Sarah Palin's evening gown entry to the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant ("In Alaska, we have mosquitoes.")

Damn It Feels Good To Be a Banksta (Banksta 4 Life)

The Big Picture on Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth from Above photographs (with convenient Google Maps links for each)

Keith Loutit's tilt-shifted time-lapse videos (reminds me of an ant colony) [via]

The VP Debate on Auto-Tune (it's got a beat and you can dance to it) [via]

Flickr adds rainbow-vomiting panda feature to Explore (finally, some innovation in the photo sharing space) [via]

Fring, make Skype calls for the iPhone (Truphone was the first VoIP app, but didn't support Skype calling) [via]

Sippey's idea for restaurants to help diners split the bill (very useful, though it'd require servers to enter the number in each group)

One Metafilter user's personal anecdote about Paul Newman (there are several other good stories in that thread; related: a Hole in the Wall camp counselor's tribute)

Weird Al to release songs on iTunes as soon as he's recorded them (he talks about how digital distribution makes topical parodies much easier) [via]

Slate releases Poll Tracker app for the iPhone (looks like they bought Aaron's Election '08 app and rebranded it) [via]

NYT's interactive VP debate transcript (searchable and scrollable with checkpoints and speaker coloring; it's only missing permalinks and plaintext)

Dan Aykroyd pimps vodka in a crystal skull (looks like Ray has gone bye-bye; related: his UFO "documentary") [via]

Interactive Fiction Competition 2008 entries released! (like last year, the brilliant IF luminary Emily Short will be reviewing games as she plays them)

Cave Story coming to WiiWare with exclusive new content (if you've never played the freeware masterpiece, it's available for PC, Mac, and Linux)

Laser Portraits (or make your own) [via]

Obama campaign releases official iPhone app (flawlessly designed, focused heavily on participation; grouping your address book by state is surprisingly useful) [via]

Nintendo announces new DSi with camera, web browser, downloadable games (here's video of it in action)

Dabbleboard, social whiteboard drawing tool (you can draw and share anonymously, too)

Webmonkey on the clickjacking IFRAME exploit (potentially devastating hack and relatively easy to pull off, affecting every browser)

The Money Meltdown, excellent primer to the current mess (some very good links I haven't seen before) [via]

Google Blog Search launches new Techmeme-like homepage (funny, I thought they'd abandoned the site entirely; here's the announcement)

Dexter ad campaign spoofs Wired, Esquire, New Yorker magazine covers (clever campaign, though the typefaces are slightly off throughout; the New Yorker cover was drawn by regular Edward Sorel)

Visual History of Recessions since 1949 (in other words: everything is going to be okay) [via]

Dan Rather interviews FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver (applying knowledge learned from baseball analytics to electoral projections)

Apple lifts iPhone NDA, developers rejoice (Furbo released some source to celebrate)

Netflix launches public Javascript, Atom, REST APIs (as Kellan points out, it comes with OAuth, a developer blog, and an API explorer) [via]

Routefinder, analog mapping wristwatch from the 1920s (scroll your way through the UK) [via]

Sarah Palin plays the flute in Miss Alaska pageant (see also: Nixon on piano, Clinton on sax)

Splicd, permalink to a YouTube timecode (conveniently hackable URLs, too)

Try Google Search as it looked in January 2001 (extremely surreal flashback only available for one month; predates 9/11, YouTube, Sarah Palin, or this blog) [via]

Rososo, the peaceful newsreader (clean and minimalist approach to feedreading for newbies) [via]

Twitter's Biz Stone charts popular terms tweeted during the presidential debate (you can reconstruct the entire debate this way)

I Wish I Were the Moon (experimental gameplay with four endings, part of Daniel Benmergui's Moon Stories mini-trilogy)

SF Gate's profile on Flickr community manager Heather Champ (virtually nobody can understand the job's difficulty or the impact her work has on Flickr's culture)

Very Small Array visualizes #1 hit singles by genre, geographic origin, and song length (great stuff; see also: the Whitburn Project, part one and two)

Metafilter user tracks down the lead singer of Sonseed, the Christian ska band (sometimes, journalism is just picking up the phone)

xkcd draws the universe from top to bottom, on a logarithmic scale (in-jokes galore, inspired by this logarithmic map of the universe)

Footage from Sarah Palin's 1984 Miss Alaska swimsuit competition (video was deleted, here's my local copy on Waxy)

Twitter Elections (based on candidate-related tweets, looks like only 2% of the Twitterverse is conservative)

Shrub, proxy for Amazon S3 with RSS, JSON, and Muxtape-style output (for sharing S3 buckets with the world; more from the creator)

Cisco accidentally removes all letter "T"s from official homepage (regex gone awry) [via]

Justin Ouellette on the meteoric rise and fall of Muxtape (I'm surprised there aren't invite-only Muxtape clones, flying under the RIAA's radar) [via]

Inside a North Korean video arcade (I love the modded Aero City cabinet)

Current TV partners with Twitter to broadcast tweets on live presidential debate broadcast (the first real-time backchannel on live TV?)

Vimeo Toys, real-time interactive visualizations of Vimeo social activity (I'd love to see new comments appear as word balloons in Vimeo Land) [via]

A Car's Life, interactive game built on YouTube annotations (they claim it's the first, but this Spanish adventure game came out in July) [via]

David Letterman on John McCain's cancelled appearance tonight (leaked video, expect this one to disappear shortly; the live feed of him talking to Katie Couric is pretty damning)

Dominoes Made of Dominoes (note the one column of blue trying to hold out) [via]

Hardcore "Claymates" respond to Clay Aiken coming out of the closet (a strange mix of heartbreak, support, and disgust) [via]

Suzanne Vega talks about Tom's Diner, remix culture, and being the "mother of the MP3" (Karlheinz Brandenburg used the 1984 song to help debug the MP3 codec)

Wario Ware Inc: Doc Brown's Microgames (much better) [via]

Larry Lessig's analysis of Sarah Palin's experience (in this very important presentation, he examines every single VP in history to see how she stacks up)

Superconducting maglev toy train (needs more Doc Brown) [via]

Abe Vigoda still alive (thanks for the update, CNN; also, Twitter, Facebook, and single-serving)

Parsons students design Little Big Planet levels (the scale of the Shadow of the Colossus-inspired creature is insane)

Bernanke/Paulson FAIL (is it just me, or am I seeing more of current net culture leaking into mainstream media?) [via]

Nintendo's Wario Land meta-ad destroys YouTube UI (inspired by the HEMA ad? try dragging the UI elements around at the end)

Google Maps adds NYC public transit directions (finally! not perfect yet, but HopStop must be panicking a bit)

SweetAfton23's MyHope ("I hope your MySpace stays forever... and I hope that your kids find it")

Dragon's Lair walkthrough using YouTube annotations (impressive! now, will someone make it playable with clickable annotations?)

Boxer, Mac-friendly DOS emulation (built on DOSBox, perfect for playing classic DOS games) [via]

Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008 (detailed demographic study and analysis from Technorati's index, five parts posted over the next five days)

Zen Bound, serene rope-twisting game, coming to the iPhone (based on Moppi's Zen Bondage for the PC, released in 2005)

Versionista, track changes to any website (the author's writing a political column for Slate; sadly, his background is in nasty SEO software)

MixTube, Muxtape-like playlists built on public YouTube videos (who needs video?)

The NO!SPEC campaign vs. crowdSPRING (the same group of design pros that attacked the very promising Pixish)

Robot Chicken on Excitebike (anus shattering) [via]

Z-Rox, like Flatland as a Flash game (trains your mind to think in 2D)

Google Goatse t-shirt (classic, I bought one)

The Pirate Bay hits 15 million unique simultaneous peers (has any other illegal behavior been this mainstream in history? update: from my readers, alcohol (during Prohibition), speeding, marijuana, and sodomy)

Hoshi Saga 3 (don't miss the first two in the series)

Clay Shirky on ~~information overload~~ filter failure (speculative Web 2.0 keynote says fixing overload requires a shift in social norms)

Bill O'Reilly on Sarah Palin's hacked email and the First Amendment (related: someone hacked into the O'Reilly Factor's admin interface two days ago)

Daft Punk's "Something About Us" on Nintendo DS, vocoder, and theremin (the LED display was added in post-production)

Wine Library's Gary Vaynerchuk at Web 2.0 (I could care less about wine, but I absolutely adore this guy)

Stack Overflow on favorite programming-related cartoons (they're doing some interesting things with reputation, like gaining points to acquire new powers)

Star Simpson speaks out for the first time about her Boston Airport "hoax device" ordeal (her year-long battle's over, and chose Boing Boing to tell her story because they had the most responsible news coverage)

Dan Hanna's Daily Photo Aging Project (the mother of all photo-a-day projects, he shot himself front-to-back for 17 years)

Google adds pirate translation for Talk Like A Pirate Day (be ye feelin' lucky?)

TechCrunch posts the three new Microsoft "I'm A PC" ads (much better than the Seinfeld ads)

Sergey Brin starts blogging (his first entry's interesting, about his predisposition to Parkinson's he discovered using 23andme) [via]

Twitter launches redesign (small, subtle improvements all over; FriendFeed and Yahoo redesigned, too)

4chan member explains the Sarah Palin hacking (I hate to link to Malkin, but this is the definitive story, quoting deleted posts from the original 4chan member who did the hack)

Inside Obama's Gmail Account (nicely timed parody from The Onion) [via]

Ben Walker's "You're No One If You're Not On Twitter" (you might as well not have existed) [via]

Sarah Palin's Yahoo! Mail account hacked, password posted to 4chan (excellent summary of the events; screencaps on Wikileaks, discussion on Reddit)

Crazy rumor of the day: Google to buy Valve Software? (update: Valve's Doug Lombardi said it's false) [via]

Artemis Fowl author asked by Douglas Adams's widow to write new Hitchhiker's novel (a Slashdot user imagines the results)

Atari Modern Classics (related: TIGSource's bootleg demakes contest)

Summary of Pew Internet survey of teen gaming habits (a staggering 99% of boys and 94% of girls, and half of teens surveyed played a game yesterday; read the full report)

Fifty People, One Question (what do you wish would happen by the end of today?)

Soulja Boy reviews Braid (that's a sentence I never thought I'd write) [via]

Cabel Sasser tracks down Sonseed's full album (the 1980s Christian ska band is very real)

Portal: Prelude trailer, fan-made Portal prequel (coming soon; eight months in development with a new storyline, NPCs, and longer than the original) [via]

Google Audio Indexing (a dedicated site for their YouTube transcription experiments, hopefully soon expanding beyond political videos) [via]

Wild Beasts' music video using the Droste effect (extensive recursion; see more on Flickr)

Gruber debunks excuses for Apple's removal of the Podcaster app from App Store (idiotic policy that should make every iPhone developer question their participation)

Pakimono, bizarre Mac game about streaking (run the naked Japanese guy through Copenhagen and jump in front of tourist's photos) [via]

Ninja Cat (and the inevitable remix)

Meme Breaks 1.0, famous Internet memes in turntable-friendly format (Peanut Butter Jelly Time is the new Amen break)

Everymoment Now, charting election news coverage (from the developer of Buzztracker) [via]

Hip-hop songs that sampled video games (they mention ytcracker's N.E.S. from 2005, available as a free download)

David Foster Wallace, dead at 46 (sigh)

Every Filter (Dorothy applies every Photoshop filter, in order, to a photograph)

Joshua Schachter's Mechanical Turk experiment with behavioral economics (where else can you get 2,100 people to answer a question for a total $30 in three hours?)

Redrawing the Obama/McCain tax plan chart to scale (the original chart doesn't visualize the extent of the disparity)

The Big Picture on the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games (NBC's waiting until October to air the coverage, but they're posting highlights daily online)

Adam Kimmel's Claremont HD, downhill skateboard speedrun (absolutely insane, just watched it for the second time; Sippey has the route)

PleaseDressMe, the t-shirt search engine (been playing around with Gary Vaynerchuk's new startup and it's great; also, Gary's broadcasting live on UStream)

The Mountain Goats and Kaki King's "Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is in Another Castle" (wistful song sung from the perspective of Toad)

Anil Dash on September 11, Seven Years Later

When Algorithms Attack (how Googlebot, the Chicago Tribune's CMS, and a careless Bloomberg analyst killed United Airlines' stock)

Dopplr open-sources their "find and invite" feature (Rails plugin for locating your friends on other social networks)

Bioshock creator Ken Levine talks about growing up nerdy in the '70s (finding his tribe, losing it in Hollywood, and finding again in game design) [via]

EepyBird's Sticky Note Experiment (from the Mentos/Diet Coke guys, soon to be seen everywhere) [via]

Seth MacFarlane's AdSense Cartoons Now Available (new videos weekly, subscribe on Burger King's YouTube channel)

Hands-on demo video of the Plastic Logic Reader (cool stuff, but someone needs to take lessons from Apple)

OiNK admin charged with "conspiracy to defraud" (his bail date was extended five times; related: Elite Torrents admin sentenced to 18 months in jail)

TIGSource's brilliant Bootleg Demakes game dev competition (the entries remade famous games for retro systems; my other favorites are parodies of GTA, Burn the Rope, American McGee's Alice, Silent Hill, Bioshock, Legend of Zelda, and Shadow of the Colossus)

Heroes in Guitarland, NES-style remake of Guitar Hero (download the game from TIGSource)

Super 3D Portals 6, remaking Portal for the Atari 2600 (and yes, it actually runs on 2600 emulators)

Why do people participate in Mechanical Turk? (he asked the Turker community, by creating a HIT paying ten cents per answer)

Road Trip: Southwest USA (Penn & Teller's Desert Bus remade as a 1980s text adventure)

Sasha Frere-Jones on the use of laptops in live music (Gregg Gillis covers his laptop with saran wrap and reconstructs his mix nightly) [via]

Being a List of Songs Related to the Switching-On of the LHC (and, just to be sure, no and nope) [via]

Freestyle Rap Battle, Translated (here's the original)

Simon Carless announces FingerGaming, new iPhone gaming blog (promising site from the same group that runs GameSetWatch, Indiegames, and Gamasutra)

Schulze & Webb commercially releasing the Availabot (and it's "almost ready"! ) [via]

World Names Profiler, find people with your last name globally (also shows the name's roots, top cities, and most common first names) [via]

Little Hands, documentary short vocalizes the daily conversation of deaf children (mesmerizing to watch; I liked the kids caught "whispering" on camera at 2:55)

Atmosphir, collaborative 3D platform designer (announced at TC50 today, still in private beta; watch the demo for more)

MoreCowbell.dj, add cowbell to any MP3 (built on the lovely Echonest API; this Paul Simon remix is perfect) [via]

FlowingData announces winners of the Personal Visualization Project (see also: Daytum and Mycrocosm)

Adam Savage inhales sulphur hexafluoride (I'd never heard of the gas; more demonstrations on YouTube)

Google Turns 20, speculative fiction by Philipp Lenssen (blog posts from a parallel future world)

Audio Puzzler, game that creates timestamped audio transcripts (like Luis von Ahn's Games with a Purpose) [via]

Rock Paper Shotgun on the Spore anti-DRM activism on Amazon (for better or worse, it's an effective protest; my aunt bought a copy as a gift, but is returning it today because of DRM fears)

John McCain gets BarackRoll'd (or: what happens when you speak in front of alternating blue and green screens) [via]

Craigslist Missed Connections, Visualized (also, maps by hair color, age, and by exact location; from the very talented Dorothy of Cat & Girl) [via]

Bloons Tower Defense 3 (Friday afternoon Flash fun) [via]

Viddler's 15 Seconds, short videos twittered (records from your webcam, then tweets the link and note)

Bre Pettis's pilot on history hacking coming to History Channel on September 26 (set your DVR, he hacks historical inventions using stuff in his closet)

Microsoft debuts new Vista ad with Gates and Seinfeld (aside from Bill's mugshot, a rambling and unfunny ad) [via]

Jason Scott on Phil Lapsley's upcoming book on the history of phone phreaking (wonderful goodies within, including the YIPL/TAP FBI files and readable guides to filing FOIAs and reading FBI files)

Metallica thrilled new album leaked online a week early ("happy days")

PDF Format's 8-bit cover of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" (see also: Julia Nunes' uke cover, and even more ) [via]

John McCain and Tina Fey's LIFE cover photo from September 2004 (yes, it's totally real)

Tomorrow Museum on Elitism in the 2008 Elections (I've been reading way too much about the elections, but this resonated with me)

Unplug Your Friends, Meetup.com's viral video about "screen addiction" (beautifully made)

Amazon's Mechanical Turk used for fraudulent activity (I've noticed the search engine spam myself)

The American People (time to revisit Greg's project, extracting mentions of the cliched phrase from the news)

The Reemvoweler (came in handy trying to read the modified comments in this Boing Boing thread)

New Yorker's candid profile of Alec Baldwin (Kottke left off an underrated favorite of mine, Prelude to a Kiss)

"about:internets" Easter egg in Google Chrome (don't clog the tubes!) [via]

Wired documenting the development of a feature article in real-time (emails, pitches, assignment, design, editing, and production for a Charlie Kaufman profile in November's issue) [via]

Aether, thoughtful art game from Gish artist (solve each planet's unique puzzle) [via]

Picasa adds facial recognition for tagging photos (watch the demo for an example)

Google leaks details on Google Chrome, new open-source browser (with a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud)

Adam Savage's "Obsession with the Dodo Bird" from the Last HOPE (great talk about geek obsession and DIY; he built a dodo and a Maltese Falcon!) [via]

GameSetWatch's roundup of NVScene's demoscene contest (second the recommendation on ASD's Midnight Run; here's the video cap of the real-time demo)

Bush covers REM's "The End of the World As We Know It" (don't know how I missed this mashup from Rx, creator of the Sunday Bloody Sunday remix)

Koyaanisqatsi, 1982 film about urban life, technology, and nature (full-length in 420p; the spliced-in Hulu ads break the mood a bit, but worth watching) [via]

First public release of Gazelle, open-source software for BitTorrent communities (brave move, opening up what.cd to potential attacks)

McCain's prickly TIME interview (I'd recommend listening to the MP3, which is different from the transcript, and in some ways much more painful)

WolfenFlickr 3D, mashing up Wolfenstein with Flickr's Javascript API (browse your photos in 3D, hit ctrl-click to view photos in high-res; more on the project) [via]

John McCain's POW Bros. (like Mario, he should only be able to use it three times before it disappears)

Net mob searches for iPhone girl's identity (the "human flesh search engine" tracked her down to the fifth floor of a FoxConn building in Shenzhen)

Roz Savage, on 95th day of solo trans-Pacific row, approaches Hawaii (she's been blogging and podcasting the whole trip)

Bubble flow chart of things to say during sex ("Thanks... for that.") [via]

Larry Lessig on McCain's technology policy (he argues McCain's taking a strong stance against Internet growth in the US)

The inspiration behind Guns n' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" (great origin story) [via]

Introducing the Chinese to fortune cookies (from the full article, "they always think it's contamination of some sort") [via]

iPhone password useless; allows full access to contacts, email, and web (not mentioned: you can dial any number with the "Emergency Call" button)

YouTube on letting copyright holders make money from infringing videos (they're automatically detecting cam video; only 10% of detected videos are blocked by the rights-holder)

Scott Campbell's 8-bit Showdowns (see also: great showdowns from the movies, and its sequel) [via]

Soulja Boy on getting his Myspace account hacked by 4chan (they did it for the lulz)

Aza Raskin on Mozilla's Ubiquity (extremely powerful add-on, like Quicksilver for the whole web; more in the tutorial)

The untold story of Lucasart's two cancelled Full Throttle sequels (with concept art, sketches, and prototype screenshots)

Rihanna takes on the Numa Numa song in T.I.'s "Live Your Life" (this is the actual single, not a fan-made mashup; what's next, a duet with Tay Zonday?) [via]

OpenTape, open-source Muxtape clone (nicely designed but requires PHP hosting, ruling out most Muxtape users) [via]

Brian "Boom Goes the Dynamite" Collins back on the air (he's got a reporting job and he's improved since college, but that's not saying much)

Aviary's How to Draw Anything in One Step (step 1: draw a dog)

Burning Man's Black Rock City on Flickr Maps (nice implementation)

X Girls Y Cups (I'm going to pass on "7 girls 3 cups," thanks)

AIGA designs a better ballot (amazing how awful the original is; "Vote for Not More Than One (1)") [via]

Tris, free Tetris clone for iPhone, pulled over copyright claim (it's hard to compete with free; will they C&D TetoTeto, too?)

Hands On A Hard Body, full-length documentary from 1997 (24 Texans compete in an epic endurance contest to win a truck, last one standing wins)

10 Zen Monkeys interviews Mat Honan on "Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle" (great interview with the backstory and repercussions of the site)

Approval Ratings: The Public vs. McCain (fan-made campaign ad, which is way more effective than Obama's new negative ads)

YouTube Comment Snob, Firefox extension hides idiotic comments (customizable filter based on spelling errors, punctuation, and capitalization; the result is stark)

Lenticular portraits of YouTube memes (meme artifacts left behind in real-life places)

Richard Nixon's Piano Concerto #1 (a story related to one of the best videos buried in that Metafilter post)

Metafilter's collection of US presidential campaign commercials from 1958-1998 (use the play icons to watch the videos inline)

BoomBot (addictive Flash game from the maker of Bloons)

MySQLGame, multiplayer database manipulation game (very odd use of SQL statements as a proof-of-concept game UI) [via]

Chromeo goes to Daryl Hall's house (occasionally awkward but mostly awesome, I really love this format)

Mycrocosm (very, very similar to Daytum, but supports OpenID and a mobile/email interface)

Foxkeh Dance, celebrating 10 years of Hampsterdance and Mozilla (could only be better if they used the original sound clip instead of the dance remix from 2000) [via]

Bear Creek Apartments (a mini-comic written by Hope Larson and drawn by Bryan Lee O'Malley) [via]

Dear Lulu, sample book for testing digital printing on Lulu.com (pushing the edges of color, type, patterns, weights, and cuts; download the PDF) [via]

Daytum, collecting the minutiae of your daily life (private beta service from Nicholas Felton, author of the Feltron Annual Reports) [via]

Tom Armitage on what games can learn from social software (I love this talk, great reading for both game and web geeks) [via]

Fleshmap's infographic of body parts mentioned in song lyrics, by genre (mildly NSFW; I love the sharp distinction between hip-hop and everything else) [via]

Gamasutra's long oral history of Atari's golden years (23,000 words! also, don't miss Steve Fulton's earlier feature on Atari's roots)

Steven Frank's torn feelings for the iPhone App Store (a Panic co-founder weighs in with a thoughtful criticism and defense) [via]

Joshua Callaghan's sculptures based on charts & graphs (very minimalist, stripped of labels and axes) [via]

Does The New Business Of Music Change The Way Music Sounds? (some heartfelt predictions from Ian Rogers)

The Chameleon, the many lives of Frédéric Bourdin (long New Yorker tale of the arrest of a serial imposter) [via]

Clive Thompson on Weight Watchers as an RPG (making the painful playful)

Review of the first three SSH clients for the iPhone (a fourth, simply called SSH, was added yesterday)

Ex-Daily Show staffer reveals details about their TiVo setup (also, how they research current and archival video) [via]

Chicago Tribune Magazine's cover story on EveryBlock's Adrian Holovaty (Adrian was still wearing makeup from his cover shoot when we ate deep-dish last month)

SIGGRAPH 2008 papers on the web (I could spend all day looking at these)

Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness (also presented at SIGGRAPH: Face Swapping)

University of Washington team uses static photos to enhance, edit, and modify videos (insanely cool video tech demo; don't miss the sign removal at the 6:00 mark) [via]

Cliffski's response to the game pirates (he solicited feedback from people who pirate games, with hundreds of replies) [via]

Illustrated book of cat stories created with Mechanical Turk (experiment idea: can random turkers create a compelling narrative?) [via]

Constant Setting (real-time photos added to Flickr of the sun setting around the world; more from the developer) [via]

Slate on China's CCTV coverage of the Olympics (along with HD quality, perhaps why the Chinese have been dominating torrent activity)

TechCrunch digs up prototype screenshots of Gmail and Google Groups (dating back to 2002, very fun to see how it evolved) [via]

Mygazines, community for sharing print magazine scans (publishers are trying to shut it down, but having trouble with jurisdiction)

Jason Scott on GIF News, graphical newsletter from 1988-1993 (the largest archive of the lovingly-crafted e-zine, now available on Flickr)

Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet, full-length chiptune documentary freely viewable for one week only (watch it before next Friday!)

Boss battle lasts over 18 hours, causing players to vomit and pass out from stress (people paying money to be abused)

Coign of Vantage (rotate playing field with your mouse to assemble icons ) [via]

Antivirus software fails to detect fresh viruses ("the criminals are innovating faster than the antivirus vendors can keep up") [via]

Jason Scott's collection of BBS-era graphics and advertisements (when an 8-bit VGA image was a show of graphical might; culled from cd.textfiles.com, back from the dead)

View from our room in Kauai (or: why updates are even more sporadic for the next 8 days than normal)

Google Insights shows state-by-state usage of popular websites (also: the spread Twitter and YouTube over time)

Extreme Toothbrushing (viewer warning: this is extreme)

Frotz interpreter added to iPhone App Store as free download (with downloadable games from interactive fiction repositories)

David Friedman's suggested design for cut & paste on the iPhone (not as elegant as Adam's, but a clever alternative)

Brett Erlich's Viral Video Film School (entertaining rambles about found footage on YouTube) [via]

Doveman's Footloose (Thomas Bartlett covers the entire album for a friend, with absolutely no irony) [via]

Blue Screen of Death during the Olympic torch-lighting (appeared for a split second in the broadcast, but attendees took photos) [via]

Google Translate optimized for iPhone (with one release, wiping out the need for pocket dictionaries)

Chatroom, short game simulates a post-apocalyptic IRC (Windows-only, great concept for the One Room One Week game design competition)

Barack Roll [via]

Yahoo! Answers tackles a tough question (perfect example of an incentive system optimized for quantity, not quality)

Actionsprite's Switch (addictive, mindless Flash fun) [via]

AOL starts offering mcom.com email addresses (blast from the past)

The Art of Braid (how the painterly style evolved, with tons of early concept artwork)

New York Times says Girl Talk album "may be illegal" (you don't say! I think the labels are waiting for the physical CD to drop next month)

Temp Fortress 2 (clever machinima built on Team Fortress, spliced with live video)

Fuelly, track gas usage with friends (built by Matt Haughey and Paul Bausch in two weeks using bits of the Metafilter code base)

Adaptive Path posts second Aurora video (a futurific Upcoming is featured, and a G-Man sighting)

Jonathan Blow's Braid released to critical raves (like Portal, it forces you to rethink what you know about platformers; amazing to see how many people complain about the $15 price tag)

Calvin and Jobs (Gizmodo doesn't mention they're from Mad Magazine's July issue) [via]

Crazy Sprinkler Lady (way, way more paranoia on her YouTube page)

The Girl in the Window (horrific story of a little girl raised feral by neglectful parent; don't miss the video slideshow) [via]

Adaptive Path's Aurora, imagining the future web (part of Mozilla Labs' Concept Series)

Jason Fortuny gets sued for Craigslist trolling (I first broke the story two years ago; from his personal statement: "This was never a plan to embarrass people")

Zinc Oxide and You (from the Kentucky Fried Movie) [via]

Audio Damage's Automaton, audio plugin controlled by cellular automata (Conway's Game of Life as a beatmaker)

Sneak peek at Google Translation Center (get text translated by volunteers and pros, likely designed to improve their automatic translations)

Microsoft researchers find an average 6.6 degrees of separation between MSN Messenger users (they looked at 30 billion conversations from 240 million people to validate Milgram's findings)

Merlin Mann on YouTube's "cash gifting" pyramid scheme subculture (learn more about Cash Duke's Cash Givanation System)

WSJ reporter's sources for "Obama's too skinny for president" article came from trolling Yahoo! Message Boards (I thought the quotes were suspicious this morning, but should've dug deeper) [via]

Pigeon plays Tap Tap Revenge on the iPhone (I'm surprised the beak's conductive enough to register clicks)

John Gruber on the NetShare tethering app for the iPhone (despite reports of being removed by Apple, it's still available and I just purchased it seconds ago; and, it's gone again)

The Last Guy, Japanese game turns any website into a battlefield (move around with the mouse to pick up people and return them to the safety zone) [via]

The Big Picture on CERN's Large Hadron Collider (The Economist explains the LHC's importance for the layman; see also: Large Hadron Rap)

Tube Adventures, Spanish interactive adventure game on YouTube (constructed using YouTube's annotations and 67 videos)

Get Your War On, the first animated episode (via Rex, who's been tearing it up lately) [via]

NYT Magazine on Internet trolls and lulz culture (journalist spends a few days getting to know Jason Fortuny, weev, ED, and the /b/tards; and yes, I'm part of the problem)

Michael Wesch's Anthropological Introduction to YouTube (highly recommended viewing from the creator of The Machine Is Us/ing Us) [via]

Del.icio.us 2.0 goes live as Delicious.com (tag combos still work perfectly, so I'm happy)

YouTube introduces text search for political videos (their speech-to-text transcription gets a public trial in limited fashion on their You Choose section) [via]

Librarian responds to complaint about "Uncle Bobby's Wedding" (incredibly thoughtful and well-reasoned defense of a mildly controversial children's book) [via]

Deerhoof releases new single as sheet music, asks people to record their versions (Matthew Walker's cover is fantastic; Lucas Gonze contributed a MIDI score and guitar tab to work with) [via]

Caterina Fake joins Hunch.com as CPO (stealthy startup I'd keep a close eye on)

Speed Racer Video Mosaic (every frame of the video is composed of hundreds of individual thumbnails)

Judge Judy taping interrupted by L.A. earthquake (also: the set of Big Brother, KNBC News, KABC, L.A. City Hall, and Judge Jenny)

Diesel Sweeties leaves unprofitable print syndication, back to web-only (Lore Sjoberg interviews R. Stevens about the switch) [via]

12 Glowing Men (also: the 1957 version of 12 Angry Men is on YouTube in its entirety ) [via]