Waxy.org: Links Miniblog

Regretsy gets a book deal (the anonymous author turned out to be April Winchell, collector of audio oddities)

Google Chrome OS Demo (a world without a local filesystem and apps; also, the Chrome UI concept video) [via]

Patrick Moberg's Internet Vices (funny, Tumblr feels more like beer than wine to me)

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's "Heaven Can Wait" (Keith Schofield's surreal video and insane treatment were inspired by FFFFOUND and Reddit, but maybe too explicitly) [via]

YouTube adds machine-translated automatic captions (starting with some partner channels, but auto-timing is available to everyone today)

Microsoft tries to patent Edward Tufte's sparklines (they were recently added to Excel)

Leonard Lin's Retweet Avatars for Greasemonkey (a subtle change, but a big improvement)

Web-ops god John Allspaw leaves Flickr to join Etsy (he's the last of the original Ludicorp team to go) [via]

Laptop Steering Wheel Desk (don't miss the product photos)

Interview with Ralph Eggleston, Pixar's production designer on WALL-E (from last February, but new to me; I didn't know the Axiom had three passenger classes)

NSFW: Animated pixel-art video for Flair's "Trucker's Delight" (warning: very offensive and sexist, but the attention to 16-bit detail by director Jérémie Perin is incredible)

NY Observer on Anil Dash's new government 2.0 incubator project (Expert Labs debuted at Web 2.0 today, funded with a $500k grant from the MacArthur Foundation)

Google's Dan Morrill explains how the Droid autofocus breaks every 24.5 days (this gets second-place for quirkiest Android bug) [via]

Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter on Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns (his style of comedy usually makes me uncomfortable, but this made me laugh)

The Pirate Bay shuts down their tracker for good (they're switching to DHT instead)

How Darren at Link Machine Go found Belle de Jour's identity five years ago (Brooke was part of the early UK blog scene)

ICU64, real-time visualization of Commodore 64 memory (the developer also posted videos of Paradroid and Boulder Dash) [via]

Russell Davies on pretending and "barely games" (his SAP prototype looks like great ambient fun) [via]

NYT Magazine on the indie gaming movement (nothing new here, but good overview with a wonderful closing anecdote from Cactus)

Tim O'Reilly on the pending War for the Web ("more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform")

Jason Scott rounds up Geocities' top 10 most popular MIDI files (along with a torrent with 51,000 MIDIs rescued by Archive Team)

Matt Haughey on the discovery of his brain tumor, treatment, and the Internet's response (there were about 1,000 #mathowielove tweets in 24 hours)

Belle de Jour reveals herself after six year of anonymity (only six people in the world knew, she only told her parents yesterday) [via]

Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd (great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from) [via]

Rogue Amoeba stops iPhone app development after App Store idiocy (I'm with Marco, the only fix is allowing external apps, but it's unlikely) [via]

Numb3rs on IRC ("Luckily, I speak l33t.")

Prank War 8: The Skydiving Prank (hard to say if life-threatening situations are funnier than public humiliation)

301 Works, Internet Archive works to preserve URL shortener data (the shorteners will provide regular backups and hand over data on closure, though TinyURL's conspicuously missing)

Quizipedia (simple game with trivia scraped from Wikipedia entries)

Kill Screen, funding a new art magazine about videogames (sounds like the English analogue of Amusement I was hoping for)

Auto-Tune the News on Kanye, Charlie Bit Me, and Balloon Boy (if you're in NYC next week, go see them perform live)

EyeWriter (F.A.T./Graffiti Research Lab project lets paralyzed artists draw with their eyes)

Know Your Meme on the Autotune meme (special appearance by guest memeologist, Dr. Al Yankovic) [via]

Nicholas Felton's visualization of 13 years of CNN.com traffic (the three biggest days, in order, were the 2004 election, 9/11, and the 2008 election) [via]

Christian Swinehart's epic Choose Your Own Adventure visualizations (everything here is amazing, from the animations to the playable visualization of Meretzky's Zork: The Cavern of Doom)

Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer (like the Two of Us short film, Beatles alternate-history fiction inspired by this SNL sketch)

Typekit launches (huge embeddable font collection, reasonably priced, and very well executed)

The Big Pictr (Flickr photos in the style of The Big Picture) [via]

Twitter's new Trends API will use Yahoo's WOE for locations (also used by Flickr, this cements the CC-licensed WOE data as the web's placename database) [via]

The Beatles Never Broke Up (mashup of Beatles solo albums with a backstory; related: Stephen Baxter's short story, The Twelfth Album) [via]

Paul Rogers draws Name That Movie ("Six drawings per movie, in sequence, no movie stars") [via]

NYT on confusion over how Kiva loans work (nonprofits carefully balancing effective marketing and donor expectations)

Microsoft COFEE, digital forensics tool for police, leaks online (available where you'd expect; sounds like common Windows network utilities with a simple interface)

NYT visualizes the unemployment rate for different demographics (48.5% of young black men without a high school degree; 3.6% of college-educated white women over 25)

Another World level ported to Javascript (in other emulation news, a NES and Gameboy emulator in JS and SNES9x ported to Flash) [via]

Blocktronics' ANSI art tribute to RaDMaN (powered by Viewtronics, Peter Nitsch's gorgeous new Flash 10 ANSI viewer) [via]

Aaron Straup-Cope leaves Flickr, joins Stamen Design (one of my favorite geeks joins one of my favorite companies)

Unreal Engine 3 development kit now free for non-commercial use (huge announcement, along with the recent free release of Unity Indie)

The Big Picture's series on Martian landscapes (Kai's Power Tools in real-life) [via]

Preview of McSweeney's Panorama, their one-shot newspaper (as expected, looks incredibly great) [via]

The Grant-Pattishall Award (congrats, Kellan!) [via]

Birdhouse for Your Soul (Greg Knauss finds one small piece of the historical web)

Google open-sources Closure Tools (JS compiler, along with Google's huge widget library) [via]

Video montage of actors speaking the movie's title (great comments with some missed opportunities; "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to The Taxi Driver?")

The Morning News' Cloud of Atlases (impossible to guess, but look at all the pretty colors)

American Airlines fires UX designer for explaining why their UX isn't great (a lapse of judgment from both American Airlines and an employee who cared too much)

Overheating, photo series of gadgets thrown through walls (from issue 6 of Amusement, the incredible French gaming culture magazine) [via]

Ricardo Autobahn's The Golden Age of Video (insane pop culture video mashup)

The Last Days of Gourmet (sad photo series, reminds me of the dot-com carnage photos)

Put This On (first episode of Jesse Thorn and Adam Lisagor's Kickstarter-funded video series on clothing)

Jono Bacon's The Art of Community released for free download under CC license (looks fantastic and worth buying) [via]

Eric Testroete's papercraft portrait Halloween costume (incredibly creepy, like videogames leaking into the real world) [via]

Mark Pilgrim's history of the IMG element (told through annotated conversations from 1993) [via]

Every vandalism edit to Nickelback's Wikipedia page (I wonder which edits managed to stay in the longest without detection)

Mike Pusateri's Halloween costume data collection (for the fifth year, he's collected every costume name; this year, "nothing" spiked to #2)

XKCD's movie narrative charts (here's a more serious attempt at Primer's timeline)

GameCity Squared's 15-Pixel Megamix (extremely minimalist interpretations of 12 different games)

Lauren McCarthy's Happiness Hat (it measures your smile and stabs you if you're not smiling sufficiently) [via]

Auto Tune de Nieuws (needs an angry Dutch gorilla)

Facebook prank memorializes living person (the Facebook team should allow an email veto, or at least require better documentation) [via]

2D Boy's pay-what-you-like World of Goo results wrapup (don't miss the breakdown by OS and country) [via]

FreeForm's short film on the Open Internet (impressive set of interviewees, directed by Jesse Dylan of Yes We Can fame)

Using Flickr as a paintbrush (coloring overhead maps based on the dominant colors of photos taken on the ground) [via]

Football Hero, three-story-tall Guitar Hero controlled with soccer balls (they used pressure pads with Arduino boards wired up to Frets on Fire) [via]

Chris Ware's Halloween cover and comic for the New Yorker (the masks that grown-ups wear)

Interactive Fiction Competition 2009 (14 of the 24 nominees are playable online; Emily Short has a list of reviewers, as well as her own)

John Resig on the serious spam issues with Google Groups lists (if you want to know which areas of big companies are being ignore, watch for spam taking over)

Amazon launches Relational Database Service (MySQL 5.1 with automated backups)

Mr. B the Gentleman Rhymer's "A Piece of My Mind" (new to me, love the sound; if you like that, try his chap-hop medley) [via]

Graphic history of newspaper circulations from 1990-2009 (related: the Christian Science Monitor is finding success after killing their print edition) [via]

Facebook games analyzed by an MMO player (interesting, though cynical, perspective of the underlying mechanics)

Playing guitar-less Guitar Hero with a muscle-computer interface (they should add a heart monitor that triggers star power when things get intense)

Google's Social Search experiment goes live in Labs (a little module with content from your Reader subscriptions and Gmail contacts)

Brandon Boyer's feature on Machinarium's concept artwork (if you haven't already, buy it for PC, Mac or Linux)

Jonathan Puckey's tool-assisted Delaunay vectorization portraits (don't miss the video at the bottom showing a conversion) [via]

Facebook memorializes profiles for people who have passed away (they no longer show up in Suggested Users and privacy's increased)

xkcd's homage to Geocities (Yahoo! Ate My Balls)

A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database (authoritative source for arcane timezone trivia)

Explaining the math behind ASCIIp0rtal (surprisingly understandable) [via]

iPhone game developer looks at piracy rates for their app (vaguely related: World of Goo's pay-what-you-like sale results)

Hosting Your Windows 7 Torrent Party [via]

Google Reader adds personalized sorting and recommended items (so far, the "magic" sorting is pretty great)

Torley's review of the Plogue Chipsounds VST plugin (faithfully recreates 9 vintage sound chips, including the 2600, C64, and NES; on sale for $75)

TSA responds to the "TSA took my son" blogger (blogger insisted first video was altered, they responded with raw footage from nine angles)

Everything is Terrible's Internet for Kidz (the web sure looked different back then)

Small Worlds (short, lo-fi exploration game that exposes the map as you play)

Flickr adds face tagging (great implementation, I hope it makes its way to the API)

ChinaSmack on Happy Farms, an insanely popular Chinese MMO (they were forced to limit signups to 2 million users per day)

Google Street View Guys (Dan Meth imagines life as a Street View driver) [via]

iRobot's morphing blob robot takes its first steps (hmm, this seems familiar) [via]

Mark Pilgrim on his publisher's reaction to the resale of his GNU-licensed book (funny, the copyright notice from the print version is completely contradictory) [via]

Snarkmarket's Robin Sloan posts Twitter's #5,000,000,000 tweet (technically, they stopped using sequential IDs in March 2007)

Pixar intro parody (nice touches abound, like the prison inmates) [via]

Translating Picture Books: Where the Wild Things Are (academic paper dissects the German, Swedish and Finnish translations and the visual cues they used)

Brandon Hardesty Discovered Something Amazing! (AMAZING!)

Machinarium (new point-and-click adventure from the creator of Samorost and its sequel)

Neven Mrgan's tale of the phantom Mint.com account (he deleted his account with confirmation, and they kept both his login and financial details active)

Raphaël, JS vector graphics library (interactive charts and animation, and works perfectly on the iPhone)

Reenacting Pulp Fiction with Google Wave (also Wave-related: a believable defense of Wave for team collaboration)

Scott Baio is a Twitter jackass (I hate sharing a last name with that guy)

NYT on San Francisco Panorama, McSweeney's one-off newspaper (don't worry, the $55 price is for a year's subscription) [via]

Jason Scott's The Atomic Level of Porn (great NSFW talk covers the early history of digital porn, including teletype, BBSes, and games)

6-year-old boy floats away in homemade helium balloon (at this moment, the scary live video shows him flying through the Colorado skies; update: he wasn't inside)

The Billion Dollar Gram (relative spending visualized, with data on Google Spreadsheets)

Metafilter user's story of creating the first "Under Construction" animated GIF (includes a perfectly preserved animated GIF archive)

Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, and the Computer (includes Bukowski's poem about the 16-bit Intel 8088 chip) [via]

Artwiculate, a Twitter word game (extra points for playing the game without your friends realizing it)

Chris O'Shea's Hand from Above (augmenting reality with pure silliness) [via]

Ubisoft's career choices for girls (depressing)

What's Easier to Understand Than Google Wave? (warning: turn your sound off first) [via]

10/GUI (clever UI concept replaces the mouse with 10-finger multitouch) [via]

Guardian gag order lifted after social media explosion (#trafigura is still a trending topic on Twitter)

Google launches Building Maker (crowdsourcing 3D buildings for Google Earth by making it playful)

Guardian gagged from reporting parliament debate (reporting on their inability to report; it seems to be related to this issue) [via]

Swoopo Profits Greasemonkey Script (exposing how much money they're duping people for)

Derek Powazek on SEO (from the comments: "SEO consultants are just web designers who are incapable of doing the other 90% of the job")

Visualizing the safety of the HPV vaccine (in short: extremely safe, but costs $360 so insurance companies are fighting it)

Boing Boing Classic (Justin decided to do something about their recent redesign; update: he stopped updating it)

Team Fortress 2's Prop Hunt mod (funniest mod I've ever seen; one team spawns as props and has to hide from the other team)

Jason Scott on the Geocities' Under Construction image archive (Geocities closes forever in only two weeks)

BitTorrent communities using CSS history hack to ban users (first time I've seen the technique used for banning; it works in every major browser)

Game Informer's exclusive coverage of Epic Mickey, Warren Spector's dystopic Disney game for the Wii (the new concept art with Small World, Magic Kingdom, and Haunted Castle references is insane)

Volkswagen turns a Stockholm subway staircase into a piano (66% more than normal chose the stairs over the elevator) [via]

The Art and Motion of Beatles: Rock Band (the MK12 chapter videos are each amazing)

Brandon Boyer on the end of Offworld, my favorite gaming blog (fortunately, he's writing columns for Boing Boing and working on a big new project)

Video: Generating speech with a piano (here's a similar project explaining how it was done) [via]

Gizmodo on Photosketch (jaw-dropping tech demo turns stick figures to Internet photocollages; the paper has more examples) [via]

Law & Order SVU features Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (used as a forensics tool)

Aaron Swartz posts his FBI file (opened after Aaron downloaded 19M court documents for Resource.org)

FTC requires bloggers to disclose freebies or payments for reviews (regulating blogging for the first time) [via]

Rev. Dan Catt interviews Kids on DSP (their new "reactive album" is built on RjDj, changing music based on your input)

Dark stalking on Facebook (on teasing private information out of FQL, even for users with maxed-out privacy settings)

Google removes Pirate Bay homepage from search results (update: it was a mistake)

Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe (accurate, entertaining, and occasionally insightful primer on gaming history; all six parts)

Cabel Sasser and the Kashiwa Mystery Cafe (cafe as collaborative art)

Sophie Blackall's illustrated Craigslist Missed Connections (the NYT interviewed her about the project) [via]

Nerdrock band uses entire Zork walkthrough as lyrics ("I hate grues.") [via]

Google Docs adds free OCR conversion API (throw it into the OCR toolbox)

Os Gameboys' Super Mario Bros. medley (this Brazilian band does the best live Mario cover I've ever seen) [via]

OKCupid's analysis of race and religion in online dating (more fascinating dataporn)

Ed Champion edits every product mention from a single Jay Leno show (related: Bill Hicks on Jay Leno)

Fall on Your Sword's Back to the Ship (from the creators of Shatner of the Mount, mashing up the brilliant audio from the Kasper Hauser comedy podcast)

We Are Colorblind (design patterns for colorblind users; one of my favorite examples and how they fixed it)

Dan Bull responds to Lily Allen's anti-filesharing drama (in case you missed it, Techdirt was at the center of the drama)

Pomplamoose's cut-up Single Ladies cover (loving their other covers, too) [via]

DocumentCloud adds MSNBC, New Yorker, Trib, WaPo, and more to primary-source news database (the entire list is incredible, and all the code is open along the way)

Hipster He-Man (illustrator envisions Masters of the Universe meets American Apparel)

One sentence contained in every HTML tag in alphabetical order (almost, view source to see where he cheated) [via]

No Signal (massive supercut of cell phone cliches in modern horror films) [via]

Nokia to buy Dopplr? (I feel mixed emotions with acquisitions lately; thrilled for the team, sad for the community)

Cabel Sasser remixes the Windows 7 Party marketing video (from the company that brought you the Microsoft Songsmith commercial)

ASCIIpOrtal released for Windows, Mac, Linux (I mentioned it when it was just a mind-bending screencast)

Flickr gallery of the Sydney dust storm (is there life on Mars?)

Chrome Frame plugin turns Internet Explorer into Chrome (Alex, you sly dog)

Paul Ohm on anonymization and reidentification of the Netflix Prize 2 dataset (don't miss Paul's research paper, which explains even innocuous movie ratings can reveal your political, religious, and sexual leanings) [via]

Icycle, ride a tricycle naked through the next Ice Age (Flash game with gorgeous art direction)

Emoji Dick (using Kickstarter to hire Mechanical Turkers to translate Moby Dick to a CC-licensed book of emoji icons)

Fan replaces nearly every sound in Half-Life 2 with his own voice (reminds me of Petra Haden's acapella version of The Who Sell Out) [via]

SquarePixelz, collection of five vintage videogame films (hasn't been updated since April 2008, but these all look great)

Time Fcuk (very quirky lo-fi platformer by Edmund McMillen)

Deep Green, the pool-playing robot (don't miss the augmented reality pool at the 2 minute mark) [via]

List of all 22,802 spawnable objects in Scribblenauts (and the developer says it's not even a complete list)

Scientists cure colorblindness in monkeys with gene therapy (exciting news, since I'm red-green colorblind, along with 8% of all white males)

Monetizing the Hate (Dooce publishes her hate mail; for the full effect, read the backstory and turn off AdBlock) [via]

Incredible, awesome, amazing Apple keynote (supercut of every superlative) [via]

Christopher Niemann's Good Night and Tough Luck (very funny painted infographics from Abstract City, his illustrated blog)

Khoi Vinh's Craigslist redesign for Wired (also: Craigslist redesign from SXSW 2006)

Nick Montfort's Interactive Fiction suggestions for Fall 2009 (updated list of ten games, a perfect primer to the genre)

Modern Pixel Art (hand-drawn subpixel renderings of favicons; see also: his teeny, tiny typeface)

Lukas Biewald demonstrates CrowdFlower (just launched today, amazing tool makes crowdsourcing tasks dead simple)

OK Cupid analyzes 500,000 intro emails to give online dating advice (self-effacing terms made men's messages more appealing, but didn't affect women's) [via]

Book Titles If They Were Written Today (many more in Kottke's comments) [via]

Infinite Mario AI contest winner releases source code (don't miss the slo-mo video of the mouse-controlled AI as it analyzes every possible path in real-time) [via]

Philadelphia shutting down all public libraries in October (discovered via the Internet Archive's new blog) [via]

Facebook pranks Techcrunch with a working "fax this photo" feature (I'm late on this, but it's still hilarious)

Stamen and Radian 6's MTV VMA visualization of Twitter activity (as I watched, the Kanye bubble exploded because of this debacle) [via]

Justin Hall on shutting down PMOG and starting Dictator Wars ("If someone can't figure out what to do in the first five minutes... you are hosed.") [via]

Everything Is Terrible's Advanced DOS Strategies (always format b:)

UK PM issues official apology for persecution of Alan Turing (the result of a petition from 31k British citizens, including Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry)

Llamasoft's vintage footage from 1980s computer conventions (feels like E3 circa 1986)

How one team tracked down missing Wired reporter Evan Ratliff (part of the contest published in last month's Wired; another perspective from the ground) [via]

Google's undocumented embeddable PDF viewer (death to Acrobat Reader!)

Birds on the Wires (transcribed from nature) [via]

Designing a Popularity Algorithm (with examples from Hacker News, Reddit, del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon) [via]

Adam Mathes compares "new entry" UIs on blogging services (only Wordpress and Twitter have inline posting tools on the homepage)

The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions (phone call trumps text message trumps Twitter)

O'Reilly ends Etech conference (very sad to see it go; I heard the last one was great though sparsely attended)

C64 emulator for the iPhone approved by Apple (as far as I know, the first official emulator in the App Store)

Piano instrumental version of Auto-Tune the News #2 (at 1:38, very thin ice; also: The Gregory Brothers on CNN)

Gawker crowdsources Russian translation of GQ's Putin article (Conde Nast's gone to great lengths to keep the article hidden) [via]

MC Frontalot releases "Diseases of Yore" single featuring Jonathan Coulton (how could I not link this? a song about medieval medicine) [via]

The Beach Boys' rehearsals from 1967 (related: isolated vocal tracks)

Extensive photo study of corridors in sci-fi movies (apparently via myself)

Japanese programmers' hidden gossip in 8-bit Famicom games (one message wasn't discovered until 2007) [via]

What the Internet Knows About You (exploiting the old CSS :visited trick)

Ben Fry visualizes changes to Darwin's Origin of Species over time (changes across six editions and 13 years; more on the project)

Smule and T-Pain release auto-tune app for the iPhone (as seen in Auto-Tune the News)

Ben Lee, Lou Barlow release new Noise Addict album for free (using Bandcamp, their first new album in 13 years) [via]

Derek Yu's Spelunky hits 1.0 (free procedurally-generated platformer for Windows, highly recommended) [via]

Infomercial Hell (from Everything Is Terrible, who also recently released a DVD) [via]

Auto-Tune the News #8 (featuring T-Pain; yes, really)

AT&T dumps Kevin Mitnick as a customer (rather than fix their security issues, they asked him to leave)

GameCyte on the history and psychology of game achievements (a year old, but new to me)

Robin Sloan's Google Adwords experiment for naming fictional characters (testing to see which names are most compelling to random Google users)

Verizon the latest ISP to close free Usenet access (joining AT&T, Time Warner, and Sprint; only a handful of paid feeds will be left, which will be easy for the RIAA/MPAA to attack)

Media outlets paying sources in Dugard (one source claimed her Facebook page was hacked by reporters) [via]

Sunlight Labs (opening government through code and design; check out the projects and vote for ideas) [via]

Canabalt (atmospheric, one-button platformer; just needs checkpoints and more story)

David McCandless visualizes recent swine flu activity (using data from the Guardian Datastore)

NPR on the end of Reading Rainbow (after a 26 year run, thanks Levar)

Pretweeting (virtual stock exchange for Twitter trends) [via]

Moldover's circuit board CD packaging (headphone jack and light sensor makes a portable musical instrument)

Dooce's washer saga (less about the power of Twitter, more the failure of customer service)

Worldwide Lexicon's Firefox Translator (automatic language detection and translation, with community editing tools)

Morph by Skylined (real-time ASCII art Javascript demo)

Google search for "ASCII art" (and it's actually text, too)

Yelp iPhone app adds augmented reality easter egg (in other iPhone news, Apple approved Spotify and Facebook 3.0 is out)

LA Times profile of Jani, a 6-year-old girl with early onset schizophrenia (her father's blog is simultaneously heartbreaking and terrifying) [via]

Visualization of time travel plots in popular TV and film (the source data's in the Google Spreadsheet)

Tile Drawer (drop-dead easy way to run your own OpenStreetMap install on EC2 with custom styles)

Wikipedia to trial moderated edits for articles about living people (the debate is archived here; Jason's predictions are slowly coming true)

The Pirate Bay forced offline by Swedish authorities (they've moved ISPs, but it's still down for me)

Typedia, encyclopedia of typefaces (created by an all-star team; long look into the logo design and great use of Flickr machine tags)

Bill Wyman on why newspapers are failing (his solution is deep local coverage, the only area newspapers weren't made redundant by the web) [via]

xkcd's Tech Support Flowchart (so true; the only thing holding newbies back is the fear of making it worse)

Gabe Askew's fan-made video for Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" (lovely cut-out art direction, I want to play a game in this universe)

8-Bit Trip, insane stop-motion Lego film (like a real-life PC demo)

Ultimate Muscle Roller Legend (mildly NSFW) (the fusion of a number of Japanese memes from 2chan and Nico Nico Douga)

Bokode (very clever barcode design uses out-of-focus photos shot from a distance) [via]

The Boy Who Heard Too Much (Rolling Stone profile of a young, blind phone phreaker) [via]

4chan users launch embarrassing attack on Christian Facebook users (using passwords from a Christian university, they've been posting fake entries on Facebook)

tldr, app to visualize discussions on Reddit (don't miss the gallery) [via]

Paul Ford's Unicode Table for You (go vote for his SXSW panel, while you're at it) [via]

Tipjoy shuts down (they argue it's the lack of official support that stifled growth) [via]

Kit Williams reunited with Masquerade's treasure after 30 years (the original treasure hunt had a bitter ending) [via]

Twitter adding geocoded tweets (this should make real-time news reporting much more viable)

Uncanny parallels between Avatar and Delgo (these screengrabs show a striking similarity)

Tanaka's Friendly Adventure on Kongregate (collect them all! don't miss the hand-drawn map)

The Grownup's Guide to Indie Rock (guide to new music for the layman, written by a 57-year-old convert)

Study finds smaller banner ads more effective than skyscrapers (plus, 94% less likely to make you want to gouge your eyes out) [via]

Mark Pilgrim's preview of Dive Into HTML 5 (just gorgeous) [via]

Pirate Bay torrent archive spawns a clone (fully functional backup created by a fan)

One-time stock photo model tracks her own sightings (related: Unsolicited Commercial Love Story and The Everywhere Girl)

Newly-discovered Disneyland home movies from 1956 (incredible quality; did you know they had a Space Bar?) [via]

Longest Poem in the World (aggregating tweets that rhyme, compiled into an ever-growing poem with 344,000 verses) [via]

Matt Thompson on the missing parts of news coverage (too much focus on "news" and not enough context)

Codepad (like Pastebin with a built-in compiler/interpreter; examples: Hello World, 99 Bottles) [via]

Fig. 8 (elegant Flash game inspired by architectural blueprints and diagrams) [via]

Aaron Zinman's Personas (barcode visualization of "how the Internet sees you")

John Resig's eulogy for _why (he treated his online presence like a temporary sand mandala; don't miss the song)

Hacker/artist _why the lucky stiff deletes projects, online presence (still no clues why he killed his blog, Twitter, Hackety Hack, Why's Poignant Guide, Shoes, Try Ruby, and more)

Shnabubula's alternate-reality Super Mario World medley (live jazz improvisation using classic SNES sample sounds)

Neven Mrgan on Zingerman's product illustrations (staggering amount of love put into an online store)

Internet University (if websites were cartoon characters) [via]

Joanne McNeil on the Daily Death (I've wondered this myself, the effects of a microcelebrity culture aging)

Dinosaur Comics meets Twitter (reload for new ones)

Songs from The Point! (Nilsson tribute with songs by Martha Wainwright, Andrew Bird, DeVotchKa, and Nada Surf)

Kind of Bloop released! (Bygone Bureau wrote a great behind-the-scenes feature about the album)

MSNBC acquires EveryBlock (wow, congrats to the team)

Pirate Bay backup archive available on Pirate Bay (21GB dump of 873,671 torrents on the site, packaged by a user concerned about the sale)

Ars Technica on how ICANN's fees killed domain tasting (from 17 million withdrawn domains in June 2008 to only 58k last month) [via]

Timeline visualization of global media scares (from Y2K to swine flu)

Offworld's gallery of vintage videogame factories (imagining the real-life locations where Tetris's blocks and Sonic's gold rings were made)

Dinner at El Bulli (a travelogue in comic format with video) [via]

Yahoo shuts down Term Extraction API (with a quiet three weeks' notice to developers) [via]

Nieman Journalism Lab's series on the AP's online strategy (asked about Associated Repress, the AP's lawyer said that I'm "wonderful")

Q-BLOCK, 3D pixel art drawing tool (drag to rotate the objects)

Tiny Sketch (Processing competition with submissions limited to only 200 characters)

RECAP, Firefox extension open-sources public court records (if you've ever dealt with PACER, you'll know how vital this is)

District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's short films and commercials (don't miss TempBot and Tetra Vaal; District 9 is 95% positive so far)

Artist Jon Rafman on Google Street View as art (more of his captures on his site)

Know Your Meme's t-shirt shop (YA RLY)

Multitask (87 points on the first try) [via]

How a Macworld cover is made (timelapse of the photography, Photoshop, and magazine design) [via]

NYT Mag cover story on the making of The Beatles: Rock Band (great discussion of the difficulties and appeal of rhythm games) [via]

Second Skin, documentary about the real lives of MMO players (looks great, only available free until the end of tomorrow) [via]

BackUpMy.net, online backup of blogs, tweets, mail, and photos (yes, a cloud service that backs up your cloud services) [via]

Silent Conversation (game that plays with text and words as side-scrolling platforms)

How the Soduko Grab sudoku solver for iPhone works (simple explanation of a practical use of computer vision)

Mike Sacks interviews Dan Clowes for McSweeney's (including gossip about his foibles with the New York Times during Mister Wonderful) [via]

Joshua Schachter's A Tiny Thread, very simple Twitter conversations (208 lines of Python on Google App Engine)

Google opens up next-gen search infrastructure for testing (try it out; seems speedy and seems to rank real-time results higher)

Visualization of a Choose Your Own Adventure book's outcomes (8 out of 42 endings were favorable)

Facebook buys FriendFeed (will it get sucked into the black hole, or help Facebook open up? Techcrunch says it's a talent acquisition)

Ars Technica on the worries of high-frequency algorithmic trading (used for years, it's accelerated since the Wall Street crisis)

Full House, Alternate Intro [via]

Tr.im shuts down, breaking millions of shortened links by year's end (we were warned; someone should call Archive Team)

Waterloo Labs' FPS with real-life guns and shovels (needs more crowbar) [via]

Ice T repairs a Macbook Pro (the YouTube comments are a nice blend of racists and PC/Mac wars)

You Only Live Once (more meta-gaming: This Is The Only Level) [via]