Waxy.org: Links Miniblog

8-Bit Austin (I think I'll use this map to get to Datapop 2010)

Spritely, jQuery plugin for sprite and background animation (see also: gameQuery)

Trololololololo Shreds (some context) [via]

Preview of Sword & Sworcery EP for the iPhone (looks unlike anything I've ever seen)

Sitby.us (essential iPhone-optimized site for SXSWi session planning)

Danc on the release of Ribbon Hero (turning Microsoft Office into a game, with competition against your friends) [via]

"Play" by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman (avatars as Russian nested dolls) [via]

Chatroulette Map (I think I'd rather not know, thanks) [via]

Steamshovel Harry (not sure how I missed this one last year, metagaming with music by Brad Sucks)

El Fin Del Mundo by Alberto González Vázquez (there's so much I love about this, I can't quantify it all) [via]

Wired Reread, blogging the best ads from '90s-era Wired (also, the complete SPIN archives are on Google Books)

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer (related: McSweeney's categories for the meta-awards) [via]

Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg perform Lazy Sunday live (for the first time, backed by The Roots)

Adam Savage's pursuit of the perfect Blade Runner gun replica (related: his quest for the perfect replica Maltese Falcon and dodo skeleton)

The Panic Status Board (the instant feedback made work more game-like)

Valve ports game library and Steam service to Mac (Portal 2 will be released for Mac simultaneously with PC, along with "all of our future games")

Maciej Ceglowski on the discovery, loss, and rediscovery of the cure for scurvy (fascinating story of bad science and the unintended effects of new information)

8-Bit NYC, Brett Camper's videogame map of New York (he's using Kickstarter to expand to 15 other cities worldwide)

Sleep Is Death, Jason Rohrer's new conversational two-player game (watch the slideshow for details; I just wish it was on the web instead)

Obama appoints Edward Tufte to advise on stimulus transparency ("Maybe I'll learn something.")

PS22 Chorus sings Phoenix's Lisztomania (I love how expressive they are)

Echo Nest and SCHED's guide to SXSW Music (very nicely done, uses Echo Nest's recommendation engine)

GameInformer's Portal 2 exclusive cover story (scans, since it's not on GameInformer's site yet; Valve hired the TAG: The Power of Paint team right out of Digipen)

Cal Henderson on gaming probability in World of Warcraft (he's collected 118 pets, some of which only drop 1 in 10,000 attempts)

LiveJournal rewrites outbound links with affiliate codes (looks like the regex was a bit greedy)

NYT on Chinese "human-flesh search engines" (very similar to the H+ article on the topic from last year)

YouTube launches auto-captioning for all videos (a free, automated audio transcription service based on YouTube should be viable now)

OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" (Rube Goldberg machine built by Synn Labs in Los Angeles)

Roger Ebert starts subscription service ($4.99 for a year, goes up to $5.00 on April 1)

Yelp's official response to the business extortion accusation (nicely lays out the case against the conspiracy theories)

Valve updates Portal with mysterious achievement and ARG trailhead (radio transmissions convert into Morse code and images pointing to a telnet BBS with ASCII screenshots)

Unit Testing Achievements (I'm still waiting for a ticket tracker with game mechanics) [via]

The Skull of Regret (even Pictures for Sad Children's guest comics are great)

NYT's auralization of crossing the Olympic finish line (hear the women's 1,000-meter speedskating gold medalist win by .02 of a second) [via]

Activision shuts down 8-year King's Quest fan project (even though Vivendi, the former IP owners, granted them a non-commercial license) [via]

Bioshock's lead level designer remakes Arcadia in Doom 2 (don't miss his companion article about Doom as Robotron)

Pictures for Sad Children, "Play Play Play" (Level End) [via]

Nieman Labs tallies original reporting vs. rewrites for the Google/China hacking story (121 different versions of the story, but only 13 did any original reporting)

Joel Johnson's extremely painful, personal story of sexual abuse (so horrible I hesitate linking to it, but I will, if only for Google justice)

Casey Neistat's excellent short film about Chat Roulette (includes demographics, vernacular, and how men and women are treated differently)

NYT on Bloom Energy's public debut (groundbreaking fuel cell tech used by Google, eBay, others; Mashable liveblogged the launch)

Yelp accused of extortion in class-action lawsuit (I maintain that business owners are confused over both sponsorship and the algorithm; a former Yelp account exec debunks the claims)

The Effing Typeface (a NSFW font by designer Alex Merto)

YouTube removes most popular, fan-uploaded Rickroll (update: it's back, Google says it was a mistake)

Neurosonics Live (real-time holographic projection synced to turntables and drums) [via]

Andrew vs. the Collective's "Search Engine Optimization" (short fiction about an alternate-reality Internet gone amok, using words and phrases created by Kickstarter backers) [via]

Italian court finds Google Video guilty of privacy violation for uploaded video (astonishingly terrible decision, here's Google's response)

danah boyd on ChatRoulette as a throwback to the early web (I've been thinking the same thing; related: Hearts, Hugs, and Kisses on ChatRoulette)

The Spy at Harrington High (digging into the tech behind the high school webcam spying scandal)

Sushi Cat (damn you, Cal) [via]

4chan on Jeopardy (you thought Dooce's mention was surreal? now your grandma knows about /b/)

Interview with the manager of Coney Island's Cyclone (from Last Summer at Coney Island, a documentary about Coney's revitalization)

The Gruber 10 at Macworld (thoughtful look at the top issues facing Apple, with an eye to their past) [via]

Auto-Tune the News #10 (a return to form after autotuning ads for Kotaku (great) and Sony (awful))

Passage in 10 Seconds (from the creator of You Only Live Once; some context)

Twitter releases growth stats for first three years (50 million tweets per day; compare to Kottke's cumulative estimates from 2007)

Matt Haughey's updates on Mechanical Turk human spam (the numbers are relatively small compared to the amount of spam, I wonder where the rest's coming from)

Slate on the government's alcohol poisoning during Prohibition (by some estimates, over 10,000 Americans were killed drinking tainted alcohol)

Filipinos scared to sing Sinatra after "My Way" karaoke murders (superstition stemming from the song's popularity in karaoke bars) [via]

Jesse Schell's DICE talk about Facebook, reality, and the future of pervasive gaming (from the author of The Art of Game Design) [via]

CodeOrgan (listen to your favorite website, the "About" explains the methodology) [via]

Google prototypes real-time OCR and translation in Google Goggles (incredible demo, simply tying existing pieces of Google tech together)

Music Journalism Is the New Piracy (the problem isn't Google, but the DMCA and litigious media organizations)

OK Cupid covers the effects of age on dating and attractiveness (as always, some incredible dataporn mined from their community) [via]

Please Rob Me (amusing, but only dangerous if someone knows where you live)

Bunnie Huang's forensic research into irregular MicroSD cards ("Kingston is revealed as simply a vendor that re-marks other people's chips in its own packaging") [via]

Plants vs. Zombies released for iPhone (one of my favorite games from last year, a steal at $2.99)

Esquire profiles Roger Ebert (I've said it before, his journal is one of the best things around right now)

Wired's magazine concept for tablet computers (reminds me of CD-ROM magazines of the mid-1990s)

David Crane's iPhone app on Atari 2600 programming ($1.99, cheap) [via]

Clive Thompson on obscurity and social scaling ("It's no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.")

Mayor of the North Pole (Jim Bumgardner comes clean with his Foursquare API cheating)

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented reality maps at TED (in addition the recent Flickr integration, live geospatial video and space visualization)

Augmented hyper(Reality): Domestic Robocop (with an ad blocker, I'd be all over it) [via]

What makes Blip tick? (opening up a mechanical Pong-like toy) [via]

Chatroulette creator outs himself as Russian high school student (19k people currently online)

"Who else loves ice cream?" (also, just noticed that anyone can comment on any public Buzz post)

Nathan Myhrvold's Death Star laser kills mosquitoes in flight (built from parts found on eBay to fight malaria and demonstrated at TED)

Google Chrome for Mac beta gets extensions (I switched primary browsers last month, my first change since Firebird in 2003) [via]

YouTube's Video Speed History (not related at all: Google's fiber announcement) [via]

Ars Technica covers moot's TED talk (low-quality video of his talk; 4chan's raw nature is fueled by anonymity and no memory)

Bing Maps adds augmented Photosynth street views with Flickr photos (a detailed window into time using every CC-licensed geotagged Flickr photo from Seattle, Vancouver, and SF; requires Silverlight)

Confused Facebook users think ReadWriteWeb is the new Facebook login page (they're searching for "facebook login" on Google, using FB Connect, and posting hundreds of confused comments)

CNET's Daniel Terdiman digs into the evolution of Glitch's back story (including rejected concept ideas, inspired by paper cutouts, automatons, and daydreams)

Logorama (official full version of the Oscar-nominated animated short, using over 2,500 logos)

Adam Kempa helps spot the hidden image on New Yorker's 85th anniversary covers (covers by Brunetti, Tomine, Clowes, and Chris Ware, who also wrote an essay)

Google launches Buzz, social updates and sharing (Friendfeed makes its way into Gmail and mobile; now live, with Reader integration and APIs)

Mirror Scare Supercut (related: SNL's The Mirror) [via]

Tiny Speck announces Glitch, Flash MMO coming later this year (CNET has the exclusive behind-the-scenes and in-depth preview of the game)

ChatRoulette, videochat with a random person (like Omegle with a webcam, randomly NSFW; YouTube has some great video captures) [via]

Recursive webcast on Justin.tv (turn your radio down)

Penn & Teller's Invisible Thread (1987 short film finally digitized by a fan; cameos by James Randi, Andy Warhol, and Whodini)

We love xkcd (geek all-star remake of the comic on the Discovery Channel ad)

Choire Sicha interviews Paul Ford, Harper's web editor ("YOU ARE THE STUPIDEST WEBSITE IN STUPIDTOWN BECAUSE I WANT EVERYTHING FREE RIGHT NOW!")

Record Tripping (turntablist-inspired game samples Alice in Wonderland and music by Gorillaz, Beck, Death Cab for Cutie, and Spoon) [via]

Patrick Stewart on Twitter, the Internet, iPhone, and games (simplicity, not brevity)

Help Giant Robot (raising money for another year of publication)

Shutup, disable comments on popular websites (related: Engadget disables comments and the Macheist team adds them to Daring Fireball)

Where We Remain (you might also like Beulah & the Hundred Birds, also built on Flixel)

Loudon Wainwright III on the Sound of Young America (very personal interview and great performances inspired by Charlie Poole)

Google Chrome 4 adds support for native Greasemonkey scripts (yay!)

Greg Knauss time-travels to visit his 1990 self (everything is amazing, nobody's happy)

Gnilley, indie game where you kill enemies by screaming (see also: Racing Pitch)

Ze Frank's Pain Pack (songs built from samples of people in emotional distress)

HacKey, chart popular keys in your Last.fm favorites (38% of my favorite songs are in C) [via]

Kate Beaton illustrates the Gorey book covers (so good)

Echo Nest previews new APIs (the search_tracks method sounds amazing)

Bram Cohen takes on Freenode (even if the policy's dumb, this isn't the way to handle it)

How to Report the News (from Charlie Brooker's News Wipe) [via]

The Virtual Piano (way more fun than it should be) [via]

Alaska Nanooks 2010 Hockey Intro (true to the spirit of the original, though more polished)

Comedian asks New Yorkers to carry him across Manhattan (155 people carried him 9.4 miles in below freezing temperatures) [via]

Steven Frank on the iPad and a generational shift in computing (the single smartest essay I've read about the iPad yet)

xkcd's Spirit (NASA's own WALL-E)

Brandon Boyer asks indie game all-stars about the iPad (new music apps, cocktail-style gaming, and more complex game genres)

J. D. Salinger, dead at 91 ("Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody.")

Rafe Colburn on the iPad and the closed future of consumer computing (I'm concerned it'll shift creation to consumption; even the iPhone was better on that count)

The Prisoner's Dilemma recreated in Mechanical Turk (gauging altruism and how priming changes behavior)

Anil Dash on geek attention on the iPad vs. tonight's State of the Union (a little perspective)

Apple iPad official promo video (starts at $499, unlimited AT&T 3G for $30/month; see Gizmodo's roundup and hands-on)

Nieman Lab's interactive calculator for estimating effects of newspaper paywalls (uses some best guesses from the NYT as an example, though 60% seems insanely optimistic)

David Cole on metagaming and boundaries in reading the web (thoughtful and cleverly designed) [via]

If Global Warming Is Real, Then Why Is It Cold? (cliche watch from editorial cartoons and the funny pages)

Directed Edge opens up recommendations API for free non-commercial use (the first recommendations service worth using)

Roman Cortes' 3D coke can in pure CSS (view the source and the can label)

App.itize.us (the iPhone app blog I've been waiting for, carefully curating underrated gems from the App Store)

Lookwell (new-to-me 1991 pilot starring Adam West, created by Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel)

Bandcamp starts record "unlabel" with first vinyl release (no ownership over music, just recouping costs and splitting profits with the artists)

Wisconsin jail bans Dungeons & Dragons (the inmate was serving time for killing a man with a sledgehammer; a new trend?)

Confessions of a Book Pirate (a voracious reader, each book takes him at least 5 hours to scan, OCR, and proofread)

Weird Al directing his first feature film for Cartoon Network (he's writing and directing in the live-action movie, but will only cameo) [via]

Gnop (control the ball) [via]

Robin Sloan on telling stories with interfaces (riffing off the Google Search Stories ads)

Vanishing Point (I'm waiting for real-time music visualizations like this) [via]

VVVVVV (Terry Cavanagh's brilliant new platformer built around a single game mechanic)

CNN's 360° video of Port-au-Prince (don't miss the second and third videos) [via]

YouTube's Music Discovery Project (Pandora-style playlists based around an artist)

Caleb Larsen's sculpture perpetually sells itself on eBay (here's the currently active auction) [via]

OK Cupid's myths of profile pictures (more amazing data diving)

Zeldman on posthumous hosting and the fragility of the creative web (maybe a nonprofit focused on archiving individual authors? Archive.org's wonderful, but it's darkweb)

Joseph Ducreux, 18th century French artist turned 4chan meme ("I've acquired 99 predicaments, but a wench is not one of them") [via]

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are engaged (that's a celebrity couple I can get behind)

The Sixty One undergoes major redesign (compare with the old version; some beautiful, risky decisions)

Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers (Wu Tang vocals with beats built from Beatles samples)

Lukas Ketner's retro style artwork for GET LAMP (from the artist behind the Panic Atari 2600 boxes)

New York Times to charge for frequent access next year (subscribers get unlimited access, everyone else can view a set number of articles per month)

Charting the Beatles (gorgeous work visualizing collaboration, song keys, work schedule by month, and more) [via]

General Larry Platt's "Pants on the Ground" (I can't get this out of my head, so you'll suffer too; the General was a crusader in the Atlanta civil rights movement)

Caterina Fake on participatory media (a rebuttal to Jaron Lanier's paranoid WSJ op-ed)

GameSetWatch's Best of the 2009 Demoscene (if you have a PC that can handle it, watch it real-time instead of the videos)

OK Go explains why their new YouTube video can't be embedded (a microcosm of the current state of the music industry) [via]

WSJ writer follows a man trying to rescue his family in Haiti (the story's being updated in real-time on Facebook)

Baratunde Thurston speculates how MLK might have used Twitter ("I just became mayor of The Albany Jail on @foursquare!")

ASCIImeo, Vimeo videos in text (the block mode is my favorite)

Visual timeline of Crayola color changes from 1903-2010 (Crayola's Law: "The number of colors doubles every 28 years")

2010: Living in the Future (1972 futurism for kids)

Frank Cifaldi's annotated Mr. Gimmick playthrough (obscure NES gem I'd never heard of, the annotations are expertly done) [via]

Google Australia censors Encyclopedia Dramatica in search results (offending someone is a really low bar)

Oink founder cleared of fraud charges (still amazed he was pulling in over $200k in donations a year)

Acme Novelty Library in Chinese (beautiful, well-integrated translations) [via]

Nick Montfort on the origins of the word "Zork" (zork the fweep)

Retro Sabotage's Jumping

Dispersion of sound waves in ice sheets (when nature acts artificial)

Gordon, an open-source Flash runtime in Javascript (SWF v1 support only, with no sound or video naturally, but still) [via]

Google to stop censoring Chinese search results or close China office (they imply the Chinese government intercepted Gmail accounts of activists)

John Kricfalusi's 1998 illustrated letter to a young cartoonist (he's answering questions over on Reddit) [via]

The Kickstarter Awards: Best in Show (fourth and final installment, highlighting the best of Kickstarter so far)

Al Gore requests a typeface tweak (the VP has an eye for type usability) [via]

What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google (the answers match up nicely) [via]

Maciej Ceglowski on six months of Pinboard (by charging a small fee, he's earned enough to work on it full-time) [via]

100 Games Cupcakes (here they all are in one image) [via]

Gumby creator Art Clokey dies (don't miss Gumbasia, his pioneering Claymation film from 1953 that predated Gumby)

Python script takes a webcam snapshot when code commits fail (and posts your frustrated face to Twitter)

Russell Davies on RIG's dataviz Christmas ornaments (the more Twitter followers, the larger the snowman's head)

Newspaper Club announces prices for custom-printed papers (UK-only for now, includes delivery; examples: Last.fm's newspaper charts and Rev. Dan Catt's photo paper)

Zach Gage's Antagonistic Books (from the creator of temporary.cc, a book that burns itself when opened and another that can't be closed) [via]

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (Wherefore the nihilist weeps and cries for 'fair'?)

The Third & The Seventh (a nicely shot, but otherwise unexciting short film, until you realize it's 100% CGI)

Roger Ebert on losing the ability to eat, drink, and speak (his journal's been consistently great lately)

Blink-182's Tom DeLonge tries to sell Vampire Weekend a social network ("call it a space cam")

Boing Boing's guide to the IGF 2010 finalists (videos and descriptions for all 20)

Project 880, summary of James Cameron's original Avatar treatment (more backstory, new characters, and more depth)

Vintage Ad Browser (Philipp Lenssen collected and categorized over 120,000 images from online and offline sources)

The Kickstarter Awards, Part 1 (highlighting the most successful, popular, and prolific projects from our first eight months)

Metafilter community on the tragic death of Brad Graham (I still can't believe he's gone)

Rex's 30 Best Blogs of 2009 (thoughtful list following some interesting trends)

Volker Shreiner's Counter, short film from 2004 (found footage from classic films counts down from 266, mostly using door numbers) [via]

One Frame of Fame (crowdsourced music video, judged by Mechanical Turk and rendered with new frames hourly)

15,740 self-proclaimed social media gurus on Twitter (gurus, ninjas, and experts) [via]

Daniel Raffel's favorite new geek projects of 2009 (an unusually great list) [via]

Spam Assassin scores any email in 2010 as spammy (they hardcoded a regex for 2010-2099 as "grossly in the future")

Adam Parrish on The Joking Computer (a bot that can make up bad puns)

Anil Dash on the perceived vs. actual value of Twitter's suggested user list (most new users aren't active or engaged, so clickthroughs and replies don't change with the influx)

Demo of Proswitcher, multitasking for jailbroken iPhones (the only thing that makes me jealous of the Pre) [via]

DJ Earworm's United State of Pop 2009 (mashing up Billboard's Top 25 of 2009 into a completely new song)

PVRBlog's The Decade of DVR (Matt Haughey gets some help from web superstars for his last post before the transition)

Tuper Tario Tros. (Mario meets Tetris mashup, with a challenging ending)

Robin Sloan's Annabel Scheme (brilliant novella about quantum computing and the digital occult)

Slate on Sweden's Christmas Eve tradition of watching a Disney clip show (in 1997, over half the country watched the animated special, first aired in 1958) [via]

CrowdsMachine (find popular links across all your feeds, and surface a new feed of the results)

Reverse engineering Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" in Ableton (someone do DJ Shadow and the Avalanches next!)

Alma (haunting short film by a Pixar animator, only viewable for a short time) [via]

4chan founder to speak at TED (I fully expect Anonymous to show up)

Yahoo! to close MyBlogLog next month (what a waste)

Fimoculous's List of Lists 2009 (related: Kottke's best of the decade lists)

Jonathan Zittrain's "Minds for Sale" (great talk on crowdsourcing and the fine line between volunteering and exploitation)

Metaplace closing January 1 (horrible shutdown procedure: ten days' notice during the holidays to save everything manually)

Wired on the Duke Nukem Forever saga (like the Phantom Menace, the lack of constraints can lead to disaster)

HP's face-tracking software is racist (in their official response, they blame "insufficient foreground lighting") [via]

Every day the same dream (think outside the box) [via]

Ed Piskor releases Wizzywig Volume 1 and 2 for free download (fictional comic history about the hacking/phreaking scene; I bought both and am anxiously awaiting Volume 3) [via]

Chris Dixon's anatomy of a bad search result (great followup to Paul Kedrosky's original post about trouble in the Google ecosystem)

Multiplayer Basketball (even a simple basketball game becomes compelling with multiple realtime players)

_why's Estate (an archive of artist/coder _why the lucky stiff's known works) [via]

Swedish Pirate Party launches public Etherpad service (using the newly open-sourced code base)

Pomplamoose, "Always in the Season" (a new Christmas carol, with Anton Patzner on violin and Zoe Keating on cello)

Browser Pong (only works in modern browsers, uses HTML5 audio)

Matt Haughey defends the use of Twitter during personal tragedy (I wonder how much of the criticism stems from perceptions of Twitter as frivolous)

70-minute video review of the Phantom Menace (more than half the length of the film itself)

Dresden Codak's Lantern Season (every one of Aaron Diaz's comics are fantastic; don't miss The Sleepwalkers and Fabulous Prizes) [via]

Michael Johansson's obsessive-compulsive sculpture (packing feats and ordinary objects reassembled to look like model toys)

Kleptones to release new album for free on January 1 at midnight (so exciting; I still think Night at the Hip-Hopera is the best mashup album ever)

Google Maps India evolves driving directions to use local landmarks (street names are often unknown, so they just describe what you'll pass by)

Reddit community forms largest Secret Santa gift exchange ever (4,500 members spent $115k on gifts; here's an interview with the founder)

Mag+, digital magazine UI design concept (the most thoughtful and realistic I've seen)

OK To Go (a collage of hyperspace scenes in film) [via]

Facebook Data team releases study on user ethnicity (they compare it to the demographics of the Internet and United States)

Google Browser Size (this would be great for Analytics, to view your community's actual screen sizes)

Let's Enhance (montage of zoom in and enhance scenes; I blame Ridley Scott) [via]

Plotter Drawings from the 1960s (from the Digital Art Museum) [via]

Desaturated Santa (she should hang out with pixelated girl and polygon guy)

Nifflas releases Saira (PC exploration game, like the Knytt series with a more elaborate storyline and gameplay)

Craigslist unblocks Yahoo! Pipes (good to hear, thanks Jeremy)

Colbert joins Alicia Keys on New York State of Mind ("I own this town from 41st to 47th")

The LOST Underground Art Show (from the gallery that started Crazy 4 Cult 3-D)

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins of "Friendster" Civilization (they were acquired last week for $26M by a Malaysian company; the pre-IPO Google offer could've been worth $1B today) [via]

Brandon Boyer's top 10 indie and iPhone games of 2009 (my top 10 would be virtually identical; I haven't played Saira yet, but soon)

Bygone Bureau on the best new blogs of 2009 (they asked several people, including me, for our favorites)

Capitol Records sues Vimeo over lip dubs (mind-numbingly stupid, the videos are free viral ads for their catalog; related: ASCAP demanding fees for Guitar Hero parties)

How MC Frontalot quit smoking with Dungeons & Dragons (roll a D20 saving throw whenever the GM tries to poison you (i.e. when you feel like smoking)) [via]

Todd McHatton's Christmas Songs (my brother-in-law's free holiday EP, for fans of Van Dyke Parks and Nilsson)

Christmas Light Hero (former Disney Imagineer wires his house to play "Cliffs of Dover," with a Wii and 21,268 lights) [via]

Health insurers paying Facebook gamers virtual currency to oppose health care reform (strangely, the writer quotes a Gmail error as an official response) [via]

Nelson Boles' "This one time..." (otherworldly hand-drawn animation; mood feels like Kevin Huizenga meets Grickle)

Gina Trapani on Dan Bricklin's Note Taker for the iPhone ("30 years after VisiCalc shipped: Another app from me that starts out on Apple hardware")

Matt Haughey selling PVRBlog.com on eBay (180,000 RSS subscribers, no reserve! )

Interactive Fiction Competition 2009 winners announced (several are playable online, but not the winner)

Teux Deux (elegantly-designed to-do list by Swiss Miss and Fictive Kin) [via]

SMBC on the future of generational prejudice

Super Pork and Beans All-Stars (fanmade megamontage of ten years of web memes)

GET LAMP now available for preorder for 25% off until December 31 (an unbelievable deal, the text adventure documentary will be released on two DVDs in March)

Brandon Boyer's top 10 console/handheld games of the year (skewing heavily towards the innovative, quirky, and otherwise underappreciated)

NYT's 9th Annual Year in Ideas (Kickstarter made the cut!)

Kotaku profiles a young mom addicted to Xbox achievements (she's addicted to grinding through terrible games for the ranking)

TW1TT3R ART (ASCII art in 140 characters) [via]

Jason Louv argues that 4chan is the future of human consciousness (a dystopic take, but there's some truth in here, especially related to attention)

The Web Is Large (very funny mashup of tech digerati quotes out of context)

Facebook's new privacy controls default to publicly viewable (expect a large-scale userbase freakout and real-world repercussions)

Pixeljam's Mountain Maniac (it's like an angry, bearded pachinko for the Atari 2600)

Norman Rockwell's photographic inspiration (I never knew his illustrations were drawn from staged photos) [via]

The Manhattan Tongue Project (funny, these look older than 1998 to me)

"Mysterious letters" flood Pennsylvania town (the art project frightened some residents, reminiscent of Boston and Ohio)

Panic's lost applications for the Atari 2600 (incredible retro artwork and game boxes; I've seen these in person and they're ridiculously accurate)

Target point-of-sale system uses game mechanics to speed checkout times (cashiers have informal speed contests and sometimes cheat using a "suspend" function) [via]

SiON, Flash 10 software synthesizer (chippy music and sound effects without samples, uses MML for describing music; try it out here) [via]

Google Chrome launches Mac/Linux betas and support for extensions (how long before an ad blocker tops the charts?)

Virgin Galactic unveils first commercial spaceship ($200,000, cheap! don't miss Branson's introductory video) [via]

Crunchpad renamed to JooJoo, goes on sale Friday for $499 (Fusion Garage claims no contract with Arrington existed at all; note that TechCrunch isn't covering the news at all)

Dean Allen elaborates on why he shut down Favrd (a peek into the dark and needy side of social media; I just wish he'd left the archives online)

WPA Cracker, cloud-based WPA cracking service (400 CPU cluster runs a network capture through 135 million words in 20 minutes ) [via]

Google tests real-time search from Twitter, Facebook, news sources (try it here; it's like a live, expanded version of this Greasemonkey script I love) [via]

Beatles 3000 (reminds me of Idiocracy's Time Masheen (amazingly, not on YouTube))

Dean Allen shuts down Favrd without notice (good discussion on Zeldman's entry)

Effect Games (web-based toolkit for making and sharing hosted JS games; see the platformer tutorial for an example)

Phoenix on La Blogotheque's Take Away Shows (directed by Vincent Moon in Paris)

Michael Jackson anonymously co-wrote music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (a gaming urban legend confirmed; here's some audio samples)

Paul Spinrad's unpublished 1988 Ayn Rand "interview" for Wired (culled entirely from quotes from her published work, interviews, and marginalia)

Said the Gramaphone's 75 Favorite Songs of 2009 (great list, wonderful writing, and a 315MB download)

Sports Illustrated's design concept for a tablet-based magazine (also, the NYT's Article Skimmer is a more practical experimental UI for online news)

Google launches Public DNS service (lookups are permanently logged but not shared inside Google; 8.8.8.8 is a great IP)

CutCopyPasteGnome (other games I've enjoyed recently: The Next Floor, Saut, and Continuity)

Too Much Joy's Tim Quirk details a Warner Bros. royalty statement (is the lack of transparent accounting due to malice, stupidity, or both?) [via]

Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson no longer identifies with right-wing (feels more like he shifted his own priorities, from foreign policy to science)

Craigslist blocks Yahoo! Pipes (Pipes makes it hard for them to stop commercial use of the feeds, but this is excessive) [via]

Mark Coleran's portfolio of fake interface design for films (I liked his comments on designing the Bourne Identity UIs)

Google Zeitgeist 2009 (Paranormal Activity was the fastest-rising U.S. query this quarter!?)

Khoi Vinh on the design of Basic Maths, his new Wordpress theme (I love seeing his design process)

Hollywood vs. New York (scenes of NYC getting destroyed in film, set to Rhapsody in Blue) [via]

Internal disputes kill the CrunchPad (Arrington claims Fusion Garage decided to sell it without them; I'd like to hear their story)

Automatic Mario cover of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" (the amount of work here just hurts my brain) [via]

Roger Avary taken off work furlough, back in prison after Twitter notoriety (too bad, it was shaping up to be a great read)

David McCandless visualizes the safety/efficacy of the H1N1 vaccine (a ton of research boiled down into simple charts; see also: Kottke's explanation of how it's made)

A Life Well Wasted episode 5: "Help" (the best gaming podcast interviews Desert Bus for Hope, plus a lovely Olly Moss poster)

Waze turns crowdsourced mapping into a game (agree with the commenter, it's unfortunate they're not contributing to OpenStreetMap)

27b/6's David Thorne responds to a client about spec work (he's on Twitter)

Wikileaks releases 573,000 private pager messages from 9/11 (a massive privacy breach, Declan McCullagh's trying to find the source; Reddit users are discussing the interesting ones)

Quake 1 ported to Flash with Alchemy (ported by Michael Rennie, source is on Github)

Neven Mrgan's Pie Guy, impressive web game for the iPhone (installed from a webpage, swipe controls, and works offline; 3GS only, older iPhones are too slow)

An academic history of chiptunes (related: 8bitcollective visits CSIRAC, a digital computer that made music in 1951)

Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young singing the Fresh Prince theme (was hoping for Neil himself, but this is a great impression)