Waxy.org: Links Miniblog

The Perils of Zero-Gravity Videography (Matt Harding discovers hard drive-based camcorder don't work in zero-gravity) [via]

Screenshot: 4chan hacks MacRumorsLive during Apple keynote (the 4chan thread shows how they found the admin interface, password hashes, and finally cracked a user's password)

xkcd's Guide to Converting to Metric (even Liberia and Myanmar are mostly metric, compared to the U.S.)

Crowdsourcing an Ethical Dilemma (Dolores Labs uses Mechanical Turk to answer the Trolley Problem)

Stamen's Mike Migurski on extreme programming vs. interaction design (the linked interview is great)

Jason Scott on the closure of AOL's online communities (like physical evictions, there need to be laws protecting community data in the event of closure)

JPG Magazine to stop publishing, turn off website (with only three days notice; here's the response from Derek and the JPG community)

Wikipedia over DNS (loony hack serves summaries of Wikipedia articles; also available as JSON and JS)

Leap year bug caused every 30GB Zune to crash at 2am this morning (as strange as the Android bug that ran every keystroke as root)

Metafilter's exhaustive tour of the early origins of Adult Swim (the Cartoon Network breathed new life into old cartoons, while constantly trying to find the next big thing)

Infochimps' massive scrape of Twitter's friend network (Twitter gave their blessing on sharing the 56-million records, which includes 10M tweets and 220k hashtags)

The Lonely Island's We Like Sportz (the sequel to Just 2 Guyz)

Niall Kennedy documents the undocumented Google Reader API (whoops, this was three years ago; here's an updated version)

Sakurako Shimizu's Waveform Jewelry (the "I Do" wedding band and Atari chip ring are cute, too)

Fimoculous' 30 Most Notable Blogs of 2008 (an incredibly well-researched list, with related recommendations for every entry)

DJ Earworm's United State of Pop 2008 (mashing up the top 25 singles of the year into a single song and video)

Twit 4 Dead, four Twitter bots fight zombies in real-time (watch their collected activity here)

Facebook sentiment mining predicts presidential polls (like StateStats, Facebook Lexicon is tons of fun)

Giganews reports Usenet upload growth since 2001 (note this doesn't reflect Usenet popularity, but most likely the rise of huge Blu-Ray and HD rips)

List of Starbucks employee jargon (culled from the Starbucks Gossip blog)

Rocketboom covers the history of the Lip Dub (the Know Your Meme series is consistently well-researched and fun to watch)

Jennifer 8. Lee on the history of General Tso's Chicken (different cultures each localized their own versions of Chinese food around the world) [via]

Top 20 freeware games released by Cactus, this year (is Jonatan the most prolific game developer alive?)

Paul and Storm finish their 25 Days of Randy Newman (hosted on Bandcamp, and now with the solo piano track used in each song)

AutoPager, infinite scrolling for Firefox (love the idea, but too clunky for everyday use) [via]

Net Cafe archives, dot-com nostalgia TV show from 1996-2002 (Sergei Brin in 2000 at the newly-opened Metreon, Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing, awkward Webby broadcasts, and hundreds of dead dot-coms) [via]

The Offworld's best indie and overlooked games of 2008 (also: Gamasutra's top 5 indie games)

Left 4k Dead (lo-fi zombie shooter in 4k of Java) [via]

NORAD's Santa Tracker on Twitter (they just passed through Kazakhstan; also tracking on Google Maps and in 3D on Google Earth)

ScummVM adds support for 7th Guest (I didn't realize they expanded into non-Scumm engines last year, including the Sierra AGI games)

Double Fine's Psychopedia, official Psychonauts encyclopedia (they've been adding rare concept art and unseen videos daily)

Achievement Unlocked (meta-game where unlocking achievements is the goal) [via]

Map visualizations from BBC's Britain from Above (incredible work, from FlowingData's best infoviz of 2008) [via]

Twitter Venn (lovely visualization using Venn diagrams for keyword relationships)

Lore Sjoberg's Secret Origins of Santa Claus ("by the year 2100, Santa will be a genetically-engineered cyborg half-Yeti who can transform himself into a pure datastream")

Digging into groupsquatting on Facebook (one company registered Class of 2013 groups for 250+ colleges; the CEO responded in the comments)

Most Images Of Fish Sandwiches Looked At In One Minute (from the Universal Record Database, an open alternative to Guinness for stupid human tricks)

Aviary, web-based image editing suite, goes public beta (their blog and Hall of Fame shows off the power of the apps)

Touch Arcade reviews Rolando for the iPhone (the consensus is it's the best, most fully-realized game released so far)

Pitchfork interviews The Lonely Island (they talk about music, their new album, and their creative process at SNL)

NY Times' Represent, find your elected representatives in NYC (allowing community contributions and expanding this to the whole country would be brilliant)

The Pianocktail, a piano that mixes drinks based on what you play (here's video of it in action, and the development blog from conception to its Monday premiere) [via]

Yahoo! Query Language (structured data from Yahoo! Search, Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, and more using a SQL-like syntax)

Mightier, indie game lets you design levels with pen and paper (print the puzzles out, solve them, and scan it with your webcam) [via]

Paul Graham on the end of credentials (he argues that a free market's focus on performance eventually makes degrees irrelevant) [via]

Michael Bywater writes about his father's dignified death (I spoke to him earlier today; this is why his Infocom article for Wired was postponed)

Brady Forrest on the incredible growth of Open Street Map (it's unfortunate that Google Map Maker is competing with OSM, rather than contributing to an open web)

YouTube adds new HD section (plus, a much larger player for HD videos)

Flickr adds snow, Santa hats/beards for the holidays (I'll leave it to you to figure out how to use both)

Australian court allows legal papers served via Facebook private messaging (first court papers ever served on a social networking site?) [via]

New HD videos of Noby Noby Boy gameplay footage (try the "Download" link if the stream isn't working; related: Phat Knits)

Most Emailed News (aggregating popular articles from major newspapers and magazines) [via]

13-year old Guitar Hero phenom's flawless win on "Devil Went Down to Georgia" (the most impressive GH video I've ever seen; he won the Guinness record in May) [via]

Evolution of the WordPress interface from 2003-2008 (I'd love to see the same thing for Movable Type)

MTV greenlights CollegeHumor TV show (rumored back in February, sounds like CHTV stretched into a full show)

James Surowiecki on why newspapers are hurting ("We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free.") [via]

Twelve Days of EFF (animated tribute to the EFF's amazing work this year)

Chris Han's Love Songs, mashup of 33 songs with "love" in the title (watching the fullscreen output from Ableton Live is strangely hypnotic) [via]

Flickr designer George Oates on her insane layoff from Yahoo! (she was in Taipei when she got the call; her last Flickr blog post about The Commons was just posted yesterday) [via]

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes (documentary about his obsessive research, now archived at the University of the Arts London)

Siam Waxy (I think I should change my logo)

1UP's exclusive preview of Noby Noby Boy, new game by Katamari Damacy creator (Wired has more screenshots, mostly taken from the adorable official site)

MusicBox, mapping and visualizing music collections (the demo video gives a great overview of the software, created for her thesis at MIT) [via]

Parry Gripp's Young Girl Talking About Herself (Nerf Herder's lead singer is making minute-long pop gems inspired by YouTube culture) [via]

The BennyHillifier (add "Yakety Sax" to any YouTube video) [via]

People who inspired pop songs (the Metafilter thread mentions more, including Dave Couiler)

Antville's Best Music Videos of 2008 (the best music video community nominates their picks for their yearly awards)

Snowstorm, customizable Javascript snow for your website (breakable Christmas lights, too)

I Love Katamari comes to the iPhone (very slow once the ball gets big, but how could I not buy this?)

New York Times' Year in Ideas 2008 (love the selections, not fond of the un-weblike layout that's hard to link to)

Rara Racer, meta racing game in the form of a YouTube playthrough (very clever, the narration reminds me of Night of the Cephalapods)

Parkour in the 1930s (from Gizmo!, a 1977 documentary about oddball inventions) [via]

Chef, an esoteric programming language where source resembles recipes (try the Hello World Souffle, discussed in Nick Montfort and Michael Mateas' paper on weird languages and code aesthetics) [via]

Jeff Atwood on Swoopo, the most evil shopping site ever (it's a money-making machine, preying on hope and desperation)

RoboCop Rap (you down with OCP?) [via]

Jessica Delfino's I Wanna Be Famous (old, but new to me) [via]

Metro Rules of Conduct (Flash game simulates the awkwardness of avoiding eye contact on public transit)

Fetal monitor lets baby twitter kick activity from the womb (the result ends up here) [via]

Michal Kosakowski's Just Like the Movies (the WTC attacks retold as a pastiche of scenes from hundreds of pre-9/11 movies) [via]

40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes (a good way to start every workday)

Is This Your Paper on Single Serving Sites? (academic essay on the trend, with a spreadsheet of 133 sites with their registration dates)

Library of Congress releases report on success of Flickr Commons (the project was pioneered by the brilliant George Oates, Flickr's lead designer who was laid off earlier today)

Bleed the World (flawless Band Aid parody)

Sol Sender on the evolution of the Obama '08 logo (the rejected logos are fascinating, especially the speech balloon) [via]

The Majesty of Colors (reminds me of I Wish I Were the Moon) [via]

Dennis Jerz on Google Maps' "Report a Concern" wording on Street View (also: saying "I'm sorry" is an implied admission of guilt, which is why CEOs never, ever say it)

WordPress 2.7 released (the one-click software upgrade and plugin browsing is just gorgeous)

Cartoon Particles (Disney characters deconstructed into component 3D parts) [via]

David Rosen's design tour of Knytt Stories (like his World of Goo tour, explains the graphical, audio, and gameplay decisions that make the game special) [via]

Image Evolution, evolve your own image with Javascript (a Canvas-based reimplementation of the Mona Lisa genetic programming hack)

Yahoo! closing Brickhouse by end of year (management would be better served firing themselves)

How the Perceptron music recommender weights its data sources (using mixtapes and Myspace top friends is clever; give it a try)

ATMachine's House of LucasArts and Sierra Oddities (including the comprehensive evolution of Indy game maps, Guybrush and Elaine, LeChuck, the LucasArts logo, and a rare Japanese Maniac Mansion)

Anil Dash on his night sleeping in the Guggenheim (ever since I read Basil E. Frankweiler, I've wanted to do this)

Popular Science magazine archives from 1872-2008 on Google Book Search (they've expanded into magazine archives, including Popular Mechanics, Mother Jones, Dwell, and New York)

Google's Native Client, run x86 apps in the browser (their open-source alternative to Java or Alchemy for Flash) [via]

Text Message Disaster (I'm only posting this so I can link to the parody) [via]

Things Bears Love (Overweight Hikers, Drunks, and Team Building Exercises)

8-Bit Jesus (holiday chiptunes inspired by NES games) [via]

Genetically evolving a car in real-time with Flash (here's one iteration after a few hours; the author discussed it on Reddit) [via]

How GoDaddy secretly profits from expired domains (they auction off popular expired domains, and quietly keep the rest for themselves)

Pulitzer Prize extended to online "newspapers," but not online "magazines" (the distinction is meaningless, but this is still a step in the right direction)

Blog comment spam on Mechanical Turk (what does it take to get rid of these idiots?)

Evolving the Mona Lisa (using only 50 randomly-sized translucent polygons) [via]

The Lonely Island's Jizz in My Pants on SNL (Jorma and Akiva finally appear on-screen in the first single off Incredibad, their debut album coming in February) [via]

Wikiscanner2 beta (Virgil's using a new technique for identifying more organizations and conflicts-of-interest) [via]

WSJ on Elvis Costello's "Spectacle" on the Sundance Channel (I've been waiting for a show like this, about the love of music, my entire life)

POTOtoo, Pirates of the Amazon recreated as a Greasemonkey script (let's see Amazon try forcing these 60 lines of Javascript offline)

Kim Rugg's alphabetized newspaper front pages (meticulously compiled with a razor, steady hand, and plenty of patience) [via]

Amazon orders Amazon/Pirate Bay Firefox extension offline (what right does Amazon have to control how we browse their site? are they going after Greasemonkey next?)

World of Warcraft is more secure than your bank (they're selling RSA key fobs to secure accounts)

Merlin Mann announces his new Amazon blog (just buy the camera, already)

BetamaXmas, celebrate Christmas in December 1988 (my god, even the TV Guide is in real-time)

Ze Frank on ideas and doing stuff (don't get addicted to brain crack) [via]

Video bootleg of Elvis Costello and Clover's "My Aim Is True" reunion (I didn't realize anyone had shot video! here's the backstory of the benefit show)

Jason Santa Maria asks designers to share their first websites (hilarious entries in the comments, including Veerle and Cameron Moll)

Flickr adds videos to iPhone-optimized site (works flawlessly; related: their lessons learned building a site for the iPhone)

Curb This (it's the new Yakety Sax) [via]

Remi Gaillard does Mario Kart in real-life (from the prankster who did the Rocky recreation and street soccer videos) [via]

Evan Williams on what Blogger should do now (some sound Monday morning quarterbacking from its former cofounder)

The Onion: Bush Dragged Behind Presidential Motorcade For 26 Blocks (latest in a series of briefs, including Bush Passes Three-Pound Kidney Stone, Crocodile Bites Off Bush's Arm, and Bush Tumbles Wildly Down Washington Monument Staircase)

Tina Fey's pinball past (she provided voices for the 1997 game Medieval Madness)

AOL to shut down Ficlets fiction-writing community (the small but dedicated community's shattered by the news) [via]

Music and the Market, academic paper compares average BPM to stock prices (he finds that the beat variance seems to predict future market volatility) [via]

Rob Reger responds to the Emily Strange controversy (this comment sums it up nicely)

Surfing for Seniors, instructional VHS video from 1997 (only the first 3.5 minutes, sadly) [via]

Prop 8: The Musical (starring John C. Reilly, Neil Patrick Harris, Andy Richter, Maya Rudolph, and Jack Black as Jesus)

Browse uploaded photos from Amazon's iPhone app on Mechanical Turk (150 current submissions, including pens, old sneakers, plants, and the inevitable naked guy reflected in a Macbook)

Amazon's Turk-powered app for the iPhone to identify product photos (a truly harebrained idea, since SnapTell does the same thing instantly using image similarity for all CDs, DVDs, books, and games)

Sony deleting user-created LittleBigPlanet levels without warning (the gaming world is about to revisit all the lessons Web 2.0 already learned, from Friendster to Facebook)

YouTube's new video thumbnails to be determined algorithmically (they'll be representative of video content instead of cleavage shots designed to drive click traffic)

David Recordon on building OpenID in the browser (the best way to drive mass adoption, since it's such a difficult concept to understand otherwise)

Image and video manipulation in Mathematica 7 (also, it supports built-in parallel processing on EC2)

Pirates of the Amazon, Firefox extension adds Pirate Bay links to Amazon listings (similar Greasemonkey scripts exist for Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB) [via]

Songbird hits 1.0 (very exciting release, though iPod touch/iPhone aren't supported just yet)

Whole Foods subpoenas New Seasons' financial and marketing records (the local Portland chain isn't even involved in the dispute)

Wired on how Dan Kaminsky and a set of DNS all-stars fixed a serious exploit (a dramatic retelling of "the largest multivendor patch in the history of the Internet")

The Guardian publishes six unreleased 999 emergency calls (insanely dramatic life-and-death scenarios, including a solo childbirth and near-death choking) [via]

Jason Nelson's "I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies." (an exploratory Flash game/poem with levels based on sites like Metafilter and Fark)

Design lessons from World of Goo ("show, don't tell")

Magic/Replace (spreadsheet manipulation built on the underrated DabbleDB; don't miss the demo) [via]

How Jeremy Keith's Flickr photo ended up in Iron Man (it was CC-licensed, but attribution in the credits costs money, so he signed a release instead)

Six Apart acquires Pownce, which will shut down in two weeks (unlike most acquirees, they thoughtfully built an exporter tool)

Lolcats postcard from 1905 (here's a completed auction for the same postcard)

Kottke on the "broken windows theory" applied to online communities (if graffiti can cause more crime, can the ugliness of a message board create more trolling?)

The Simpsons takes on Apple (a narwhal reference, too; full episode's on Hulu)

Give Me Something to Read (meatier articles bookmarked by Instapaper users; related: the toread tag on delicious)

Change.gov switches from copyright to Creative Commons (small decisions like these, made quickly in a time of transition, are inspiring)

Bio-Bak, the portfolio site of Dutch Flash artist Coen Grift (I've never seen anything remotely like it)

Emily the Strange character inspired by Nate the Great's Rosamond? (noticed before, but the phrasing on the sticker and book are virtually identical)

NYT on Mark Allen and Machine Project at LACMA (one of the most interesting people I know gets a writeup of his most recent project)

MIDI Hero, Guitar Hero hack with a drum kit (the author later wired up his Roland V-Drums kit) [via]

Danah Boyd on Lori Drew's conviction in the Megan Meier suicide case (the lawsuit centered on technology, when the fact it happened online was incidental) [via]

Rogue ported to iPhone (get your 1980s dungeon crawling on)

New York Times' visualization of one year of NYC parking tickets (they had to file a FOIA request to get the data for the 9.9 million tickets)

Helvetireader, minimal Google Reader redesign with Greasemonkey (very sexy, though maybe a bit too minimal)

The L.A. Times data desk (all their research projects collected in one place, though some raw data dumps would be nice too) [via]

Rick Astley rickrolls the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade (quite possibly the widest instant exposure of an Internet meme ever)

Barack Obama's weekly address on YouTube (stylistic notes: his team's using the new widescreen format and comments are enabled)

Ed Piskor's Wizzywig #2 released (the perfect blend of autobiographical comics and geek subject matter; I bought both books, highly recommended)

The Time Machine, an interactive YouTube adventure (see also: Tube Adventures and its sequel, Samsung's Follow Your Instinct, and A Car's Life) [via]

Zoetrope, search and visualize the historical web (in-development tool creates a window into past versions of a page) [via]

Vinylscrobbler (packet sniffing Shazam to update Last.fm from analog sources) [via]

William Shatner responds to the new Star Trek film (funny, I thought it'd be more like this)

Fimoculous' List of Lists 2008 (as always, check back often; last year's had over 600 lists)

StateStats, find correlations between search queries and U.S. state characteristics (Myspace users are violent illiterates in warm climates, Gmail users are skinny and rich)

Fleet Foxes on La Blogotheque's Take-Away Shows (directed by Vincent Moon in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais)

Processing hits 1.0 (seven years in the making, the artsy programming language leaves beta) [via]

Bad Hacks, a repository of vulgar ROM hacks (including Super Nazi Bros., Naked Metroid, and Zelda as erotic fanfic) [via]

Kottke on Shaq's first week on Twitter (I like that Shaq is following Not Shaq)

John Gruber on the iPhone's deprecation of "http://" (I'm a little surprised they didn't merge the search and location bar into a single field)

Twitter acquires Rael Dornfest (along with Values of n, which will be shutting down Sandy and Stikkit next month)

Autographed Zork first edition manual sells for $2,300 on eBay (from Brian Moriarty's personal collection, less than 100 copies were sold for the PDP-11) [via]

Disney World's Haunted Mansion map in Counter-Strike Source (from the creator of the Van Gogh Starry Night map)

Doom ported to Flash 10 (built with Alchemy, which could bring a flood of PC emulators and ports) [via]

Feedback Army, cheap and quick usability testing built on Mechanical Turk (get 10 random people's feedback for $7)

Esquire profile of Passage creator Jason Rohrer (touches on games-as-art and the lack of popular auteurs in gaming)

YouTube Live's archived highlights (some online were overthinking this, but I thought it was good fun; personal highlights: Julia Nunes, Bo Burnham, Mythbusters, Charlie the Unicorn, and DJ Mike Relm remixing memes)

Freddie Wong responds to the Bike Hero controversy ("What's up, viral marketing douchebags? I'm gonna show you punks how a real man plays Bike Hero on Expert!")

Google's collaborative pixel art in Google Spreadsheets (they're even sharing the template and tips on making your own)

Perspectives, video interviews with all dialogue removed (um, uh, hmm)

Robbie Cooper's Immersion, heads-on video of kids playing video games (from the guy who made Alter Ego, the book of people with their online avatars)

Clive Thompson's long NYT feature on the the Netflix Prize and singular value decomposition (the same technique we used on Memeorandum Colors) [via]

Boston College to stop offering email accounts to new students (students come in with fully-formed online identities, so they'll just redirect to their existing email addresses) [via]

Pixel typography from the 16th century (from an Italian embroidery guide) [via]

19-year-old commits suicide live on Justin.tv (it should surprise nobody that he was egged on by 4chan, who always adore an hero)

"Bike Hero" video was Activision's viral marketing, as suspected (I still think it's great, but Derek disagrees; then again, I always assumed it was faked to some degree)

Kottke on Brian Battjer's I Keep A Diary (no joke, I just spent the last hour reading his photojournals of South Korea, Japan, Dubai, and NYC)

Star Trek theme played on a homebrew Wii theremin (here's how it works) [via]

Chicken Head Tracking (strangely hypnotic, other birds have the same ability) [via]

Torben Sko's experiments with camera-tracked head gestures in first-person games (he uses a simple webcam, FaceAPI, and the Half-Life 2 engine)

Cover Browser's collection of every TV Guide magazine cover (trivia: Macrovision sold TV Guide to an equity firm for $1.00 last month, less than the cost of a single issue)

Dr. Awesome game for iPhone lets you perform surgery on your friends (perfectly nailed as Qix meets Trauma Center, it imports names from your address book)

Metafilter on John Ziegler vs. Nate Silver (and David Foster Wallace) (great writeup of a perfectly terrible person's recent misadventures)

Google to shut down Lively next month (the most baffling of all Google products, this one is closing after less than six months)

Jack Handey's The Plan (it's foolproof) [via]

Snaptell, product lookup for the iPhone (like Shazam for product packaging, price comparison's coming soon)

Interactive augmented reality demo in Flash with Papervision (very quick with my iSight, I get much higher FPS than in the video) [via]

Very lucky kid on The Price is Right (still, nothing beats Daniel)

Space Invaders anime video produced for 30th anniversary ("All this time we've been... and all they wanted to do was... We're horrible people!") [via]

Derek Powazek revives Kvetch! a decade later (appropriately backed by Twitter, a primary outlet for kvetching)

Bike Hero, biking a Guitar Hero level in the real world (most likely a commercial viral, and maybe even fake, but does it matter? beyond awesome)

Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy (mostly posting this just to beat Rex to it)

The A.V. Club's 27 popular websites that became books (though they missed Belle de Jour, The Washingtonienne, Fucked Company, Fark, and ZUG)

Speed Guitar goes to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (every hour, on the hour, for one solid minute of metal complete with gothic arch and smoke machine)

MGMT's "Kids" on the iPhone Ocarina ("the iPhone Ocarina officially replaces the recorder as the nerdiest instrument I can play")

Mena Trott responds to Valleywag article about their Disneyland vacation (my favorite was Space Mountain Snob)

LIFE Magazine photo archive hosted by Google (millions of high-res photos, most never published)

Amazon launches CloudFront, their pay-as-you-go CDN (very complementary with S3)

John Hodgman, Jonathan Coulton, and the Long Winters perform "Tonight You Belong to Me" ("Thank you, normal-sized man.")

Jerry Yang stepping down from Yahoo's CEO post (it never really fit him well, though I'll miss his e.e. cummings memos)

Woman asks Apple community about an unusual iPhone glitch (no, raunchy photos don't accidentally attach themselves to outbound email)

Greasemonkey script to pull WikiDashboard visualization into Wikipedia (I made a LazyWeb plea for this last week, and Paul Irish came through)

Lee Byron's Fireflies, anaglyph 3D game for Mac (part of Kokoromi's Gamma 3D showcase of anaglyph games)

Flickr Boundaries, tool to explore Flickr's shapefiles (read Tom Taylor's entry for more information)

Cooking Mama, the Unauthorized PETA Edition (a strangely obscure target for their attention, with a petition to write to the game's publisher) [via]

Boing Boing launches gaming blog, Offworld (good writing in a nice design from Brandon Boyer, former news editor of Gamasutra)

"Violet" wins the Interactive Fiction Comp 2008 (play it online; glancing at the charts, it looks like Buried in Shoes was the most divisive)

Trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek prequel (looks surprisingly good, but I'm a sucker for origin stories; I even liked Enterprise)

What would Depression 2009 look like? (Tim sums up the thought-provoking Boston Globe article)

The Pirate Bay hits 25 million simultaneous peers (that's not unique people, but concurrent connections; Napster peaked at 26M users)

Peter Hirschberg releases Adventure as a free iPhone app (related: Chasing Ghosts will finally be released on ~~BitTorrent~~ Showtime in December) [via]

The Big Picture on the California wildfires (also: first-person coverage on Twitter and YouTube, like this freeway on fire and aftermath)

Tim-Tams available at Target until March, first time available in the U.S. (best chocolate cookies ever, the Tim Tam Slam is a chocolaty revelation) [via]

JS-909, a Javascript drum machine without Flash (through a hack, it even works in IE 6)

Esquire's hosting Between, the new two-player networked game by Jason Rohrer (from the creator of Passage)

"What's that buzzing noise from my BBQ?" (he thought he was killing a few bees, but ends up annihilating an entire colony) [via]

Kottke explains how to embed high-quality YouTube videos (I knew how to save, link, and change the default, but the embedding hack was new to me)

Web 2.0 Origami (lazyweb, please build a converter that creates folding patterns from an uploaded image)

Pixar's Burn-E short on YouTube (here's an interview with the director)

Valleywag folded into Gawker, all but Owen Thomas laid off (I won't miss it; they hurt a lot of good people and interesting projects in the quest for pageviews) [via]

YouTube engineer adds "Actually Good" tab when viewing Onion video (here's a screenshot in case it goes away)

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow wears pajamas on-air in solidarity with bloggers (maybe Palin was too busy reading every newspaper to actually read a blog)

Jimi Hendrix drummer Mitch Mitchell, dead at 61 (I wish more newspapers would link to YouTube videos)

Brandon Hardesty reenacts Alec Baldwin's Glengarry Glen Ross monologue (I first linked to Brandon way back in March 2006)

Videos of CNN's election-night countdown globally (the collective response was spontaneous and virtually identical around the world) [via]

Washington Post blogger shuts down company sending out two-thirds of all spam (in his investigative report, he turned over four months of data-gathering to the colo, who sut them down)

Michael Lewis revisits "Liar's Poker" and writes about the current Wall Street meltdown (a gripping look at who foresaw and acted on the mess) [via]

Japanese isometric PSA about the future of food (lovely design, this could easily be adapted to the US) [via]

QWOP Olympics, ragdoll physics running game (hard to believe, but with practice, it's possible to sprint) [via]

Sluggo ponders the fundamental question of existence

LittleBigPlanet's TV commercials, built entirely with the in-game tools (the first one seems inspired by You Suck at Photoshop, no?) [via]

What We Own and Where It's Made (Dorothy's slowly been categorizing all her possessions)

Slate on aXXo, the most popular movie distributor on BitTorrent (this comment explains the drama between aXXo and other competing groups)

The Yes Men pranksters distribute fake New York Times issue across NYC (100,000 copies with the headline "Iraq War Ends" post-dated July 4, 2009)

where the things in Cloverfield happen ("this is where things in Cloverfield happen okay") [via]

Google.org tracking flu spread using search queries (brilliant use of search data; get a flu shot before it gets to your state!) [via]

Google Groups expands to search web-based message boards (if "Sort by Date" appears to be missing, check your ad blocker)

"Dark Days" director explains how the Pentagon cancelled his followup film on the Iraq war (after two years of filming, he sold all his equipment on the same forum)

Dark Days, 2000 documentary about NYC homeless living in abandoned train tunnels (classic documentary with music by DJ Shadow)

Interview with the NASA writer behind the MarsPhoenix Twitter account (written in the first person, more than 38,000 people have followed its adventure) [via]

Touching story of Eugene Allen, a butler who served 34 years in the White House (a must-read with a sad ending) [via]

Super Mario for Busy People (You Have to Find the Princess) [via]

Google Reader adds automatic feed translation (I'm testing it out by throwing some Japanese blogs into a special non-English group)

Worst. Bug. Ever. (the Android phone executes all typed text, so don't text "rm -rf /" to a friend)

CaptionX, multiplayer photo captioning game (built on App Engine with CC-licensed photos on Flickr, with clever YouTube interstitials) [via]

WikiDashboard, Wikipedia mirror with real-time infoviz of edit history (for example, see Barack Obama or Star Wars Kid; I need a Greasemonkey script to pull this into Wikipedia proper)

How many guys in Spider-Man suits can fit inside Jamba Juice? (one customer in the store recorded the madness) [via]

Tetris recreated in LittleBigPlanet (a jetpack-powered sackboy readjusts all the falling pieces) [via]

The irRegularGame of Life (includes a history of Conway's Game of Life) [via]

Sugar Cubes (lovely Flash animation by the creator of Cursor*10) [via]

MS Paint Adventures (interactive games where the artist acts as parser, drawing the results of the community's actions) [via]

Girl Talk's "I'm A PC" testimonial for Microsoft (no mention of Apple, but still a refreshing approach) [via]

Photoshop in Real-Life (this behind-the-scenes photo gives you a sense of the scale) [via]

Get Your War On: New World Order (the earnestness of this comment made me giggle) [via]

2009 Dance Your Ph.D. Contest (science grad students do interpretive dances on their obscure thesis topics)

Stairway to Heaven played on the iPhone Ocarina app (also, the Zelda theme; surprisingly deep for a $1 app)

Spit DNA evidence leads to arrest in Craigslist/inner-tube robbery (the story keeps getting stranger)

Investigative report into the "Single?" lawn signs across America (completely OCD net research, tracing them all back to a huge Texas dating franchise) [via]

Ze Frank's From 52 to 48 With Love (help repair the damage from the election cycle with a small gesture)

Howard Stern rants on blogs, Facebook, and Myspace (Gary V. responds to the King of All Dead Media)

Factory Balls 2 (I promise to stop posting about politics soon, really) [via]

Salon rounds up the worst election predictions from political pundits (also, Nate Silver's electoral predictions were dead-on across the board; go math!)

Colbert and Stewart talk about Twitter (some people use Twitter like Colbert's SimulTube)

Jim Ray's collection of election night homepages (automated screengrabs every half-hour from 3pm-10pm Tuesday night) [via]

Channel 101's Sony commercials (unfortunately, Sony didn't bite; more product ads here) [via]

United Features' website goes free, including every Peanuts strip (and, finally, full comics in RSS feeds)

Mark Newman's 2008 election maps and cartograms (weighted by population, fun to compare to the 2004 election)

South Park's "About Last Night..." (absurd reimagining of the election as an Ocean's Eleven-like diamond heist)

Tim Schafer releases Grim Fandango's 70-page design document (tons of unreleased information; character sketches, layout, cutscenes, and every puzzle)

Newsweek's exclusive Election 2008 report, embargoed behind-the-scenes story from both campaigns (they were given major access on the condition nothing would be released until today)

Giraffes! (rare cameo by Akiva from the Lonely Island)

The Onion: Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress (this feels the 2008 counterpart to their unbelievably prescient 2001 article)

Sean Tevis, the xkcd candidate for Kansas state rep, discusses last night's loss (his opponent used deceptive robocalls and direct mail borrowing photos from Sean's Facebook and Flickr accounts)

Kottke's collection of election maps (interesting to see how each designer tackled the same problem so differently)

xkcd on the end of the election (don't miss the alt-text)

Video of CNN's first hologram interview (a bit glitchy, definitely different from Cisco's Telepresence)

99 Bricks, like Tetris meets World of Goo (build the tallest stable structure with 99 Tetris bricks) [via]

Voting machines elect voting machine as President (DRE 700 IS LEADER) [via]

CNN to interview 3D hologram guests on tonight's election coverage (guests will be interviewed from remote locations, Star Wars-style)

ABC News streaming raw video feed on Ustream.tv (including reporters applying their own makeup and chatting with cameramen)

Philipp rounds up every YouTube video I've ever linked to (about 20% are no longer online, proving linkrot is alive and well in YouTube)

How Nate Phelps escaped the Most Hated Family in America (inside story of living with the Phelps family, with comments from Shirley Phelps-Roper herself)

Nate Silver's guide to what to watch for on election night (a handy guide to tonight's events)

NYT's Choosing A President: A Look Back (concise video sums it up)

LittleBigPlanet as a Shmup (or: why 2009 will be the year of social, user-generated gaming) [via]

Yahoo! Live to go offline (disappointing)

Rob Manuel's I-Spot Internet Humour (illustrated Internet memes in the style of vintage I-Spy children's books)

Spot.us, crowdfunded journalism (pay journalists to dig deeper into stories; their blog's doing original reporting funded with the site)

Ras Trent, the complete lyrics (glad to know I'm not the only person in the world to find this Samberg sketch funny)