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 #