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 #