Portal: Prelude, extensive fan-made Portal mod, released a day early — Gamespy loved it, but warns that it's very hard #

Inspired by xkcd comic, YouTube adds audio previews for comments — this works nicely for quick speech synthesis with simple URL hacking #

NYT to close International Herald Tribune website — I remember when their 2000 redesign blew away everyone with impressive DHTML features #

Steven Levy visits Jay Walker's insane personal library — funny, I keep all my priceless artifacts in cardboard boxes in the basement #

Yahoo! Calendar finally, finally launches redesign — ten years in the making #

Chuck Klosterman's Brief History of the 21st Century — like Kottke said, there's too much in here to like; related: Phone Sex AI (via) #

YouTube in Super HD! — after it buffers, try clicking "Restart" to get it in sync (via) #

Little Big Computer, a virtual electronic 8-bit calculator built in Little Big Planet — see also: Mechanical 5-bit Calculator in the Half-Life engine #

Mail Goggles, Gmail tries to prevent late-night drunk emails — this could also be used to keep you from answering personal email during work hours #

DJ Z-Trip's Obama Mix — very listenable pastiche of rock and hip-hop from Pink Floyd to Saul Williams with a strong political undercurrent #

This American Life's Another Frightening Show About the Economy — followup to The Giant Pool of Money episode from May #

Take on Me: The Literal Version — if songs sang what was happening in the music video (via) #

TIGSource's Bootleg Demake competition winners — best game competition ever #

Sarah Palin's evening gown entry to the 1984 Miss Alaska pageant — "In Alaska, we have mosquitoes." #

Damn It Feels Good To Be a Banksta — Banksta 4 Life #

The Big Picture on Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth from Above photographs — with convenient Google Maps links for each #

Keith Loutit's tilt-shifted time-lapse videos — reminds me of an ant colony (via) #

The VP Debate on Auto-Tune — it's got a beat and you can dance to it (via) #

Flickr adds rainbow-vomiting panda feature to Explore — finally, some innovation in the photo sharing space (via) #

Fring, make Skype calls for the iPhone — Truphone was the first VoIP app, but didn't support Skype calling (via) #

Sippey's idea for restaurants to help diners split the bill — very useful, though it'd require servers to enter the number in each group #

One Metafilter user's personal anecdote about Paul Newman — there are several other good stories in that thread; related: a Hole in the Wall camp counselor's tribute #

Weird Al to release songs on iTunes as soon as he's recorded them — he talks about how digital distribution makes topical parodies much easier (via) #

Slate releases Poll Tracker app for the iPhone — looks like they bought Aaron's Election '08 app and rebranded it (via) #

NYT's interactive VP debate transcript — searchable and scrollable with checkpoints and speaker coloring; it's only missing permalinks and plaintext #

Dan Aykroyd pimps vodka in a crystal skull — looks like Ray has gone bye-bye; related: his UFO "documentary" (via) #

Interactive Fiction Competition 2008 entries released! — like last year, the brilliant IF luminary Emily Short will be reviewing games as she plays them #

Cave Story coming to WiiWare with exclusive new content — if you've never played the freeware masterpiece, it's available for PC, Mac, and Linux #

Laser Portraits — or make your own (via) #

Obama campaign releases official iPhone app — flawlessly designed, focused heavily on participation; grouping your address book by state is surprisingly useful (via) #

Nintendo announces new DSi with camera, web browser, downloadable games — here's video of it in action #

Dabbleboard, social whiteboard drawing tool — you can draw and share anonymously, too #

Webmonkey on the clickjacking IFRAME exploit — potentially devastating hack and relatively easy to pull off, affecting every browser #

The Money Meltdown, excellent primer to the current mess — some very good links I haven't seen before (via) #

Google Blog Search launches new Techmeme-like homepage — funny, I thought they'd abandoned the site entirely; here's the announcement #

Dexter ad campaign spoofs Wired, Esquire, New Yorker magazine covers — clever campaign, though the typefaces are slightly off throughout; the New Yorker cover was drawn by regular Edward Sorel #

Visual History of Recessions since 1949 — in other words: everything is going to be okay (via) #

Dan Rather interviews FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver — applying knowledge learned from baseball analytics to electoral projections #

Apple lifts iPhone NDA, developers rejoice — Furbo released some source to celebrate #

Netflix launches public Javascript, Atom, REST APIs — as Kellan points out, it comes with OAuth, a developer blog, and an API explorer (via) #

Routefinder, analog mapping wristwatch from the 1920s — scroll your way through the UK (via) #

Sarah Palin plays the flute in Miss Alaska pageant — see also: Nixon on piano, Clinton on sax #

Splicd, permalink to a YouTube timecode — conveniently hackable URLs, too #

Try Google Search as it looked in January 2001 — extremely surreal flashback only available for one month; predates 9/11, YouTube, Sarah Palin, or this blog (via) #

Rososo, the peaceful newsreader — clean and minimalist approach to feedreading for newbies (via) #

Twitter's Biz Stone charts popular terms tweeted during the presidential debate — you can reconstruct the entire debate this way #

I Wish I Were the Moon — experimental gameplay with four endings, part of Daniel Benmergui's Moon Stories mini-trilogy #

SF Gate's profile on Flickr community manager Heather Champ — virtually nobody can understand the job's difficulty or the impact her work has on Flickr's culture #

Very Small Array visualizes #1 hit singles by genre, geographic origin, and song length — great stuff; see also: the Whitburn Project, part one and two #

Metafilter user tracks down the lead singer of Sonseed, the Christian ska band — sometimes, journalism is just picking up the phone #