Rick Trooper — The Empire rolls you. #

Mocha VNC Lite, free VNC client for the iPhone — link opens in iTunes; like others, I'm hoping an SSH client is next #

Annalee Newitz on Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog — exceeds the hype; the site's been down all day, so I just bought the season in iTunes for $3.99 #

The Sound of Young America Live interviews Ze Frank — strange interview, but talks about the end of The Show and current projects; see also: Jay Smooth from Ill Doctrine (via) #

Defender of the favicon — staggering hack puts a playable Defender clone in your browser's 16x16 favicon; Firefox and Opera only #

Twitter officially acquires Summize — search.twitter.com is now live #

Deep Note, the Guitar Hero bot — it got 820k points and 98% playing Through the Fire and Flames; amazingly, some humans can still beat it, for now (via) #

Unofficial RSS feed of newly-added App Store applications — until Apple adds their own, I've been keeping tabs using this #

Daily Mail tries to unmask Banksy's secret identity — unconfirmed, but definitely seems likely #

Trailer for August, indie drama about the dot-com bubble — the fictional dot-com is called Land Shark, but they never explain what they do (via) #

Lee Byron maps walkability in San Francisco — built using Walkscore, Google Maps, and Processing #

Radiohead releases dataset for House of Cards video — 370MB of CSV point data, Processing code, and a 3D viewer of Thom Yorke's face (via) #

Preview video of Last.fm's iPhone app — no scrobbling from your iPod, but an outstanding streaming player (via) #

Wall-E Down to Earth — fan film takes a Wall-E toy on a tour of real life #

Ask the Pilot covers his recent experiences with the TSA — they wouldn't allow a pilot to carry a butter knife used for in-flight meals #

Techcrunch runs the numbers on App Store's first day pre-sales — sadly, Apple removed the download counts this evening #

Patton Oswalt's commencement speech at his old high school — "There Is No Them." (via) #

I Eat Beats — drum sequencer built with webcam, Processing, and a bag of Skittles #

Journalist examines America's rail system on an 85-hour trip from NYC to Oakland — nobody cares about the railroads anymore (via) #

Bush jokes about America's pollution record to G8 world leaders — "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!" #

iPhone 3G or Millionaire — the choice is easy #

Flickr user hit by lightning while recording a rainstorm — "because you insisted, here's the unedited screaming version." #

Wall Street Journal on 4chan and YTMND — coming soon: The Financial Times on Something Awful and Encyclopedia Dramatica (via) #

Snarkmarket on John Culberson, the Twittering Congressman — agreed, it's inspiring; don't miss the Qik videos #

iTunes 7.7 and iPhone 2.0 software released with App Store update — browse the App Store after installing iTunes with this link, and download the iPhone 2.0 firmware manually to use them #

Tapulous' Mike Lee on launching three of App Store's biggest releases — Jobs told the NYT 500 apps will launch tomorrow; 25% are free and one-third are games #

Schrödinger's Cat Was Probably Nicer Than Mine — comic with five random endings #

All You Need Is epMotion — biotech equipment manufacturer tries viral video; amazingly, they're not the first (via) #

Google Image Search in real life — SafeSearch is off (via) #

Fractal Robots, robots building robots — recursive fun built with Processing; see also: Screamy Guy's other sketches #

Western Spaghetti, new stop-motion short by PES — deliciously weird (via) #

Warren Ellis on the post-curation years — "The world does not need another linkblog." (via) #

Thsrs, the shorter thesaurus — enter a long word to get a shorter synonym #

Square Enix's Song Summoner turns your iPod tracks into playable characters — it's like Audiosurf as an RPG (via) #

Handwritten Typographers — comparing type designers' handwriting to the typefaces they created #

Improv Everywhere's Human Mirror — Cam Barrett, a participant, mentioned an aborted four-hour prank at Starbucks (via) #

Google launches Lively, their Second Life-ish virtual world — XP-only for now; more on the launch including an interview with Niniane Wang #

12:01 PM, time-travel short film from 1990 — Kurtwood Smith lives a grim version of Groundhog Day where time repeats every hour #

The Quiet Earth — apocalyptic "last man on Earth" film from 1985, in its entirety on YouTube #

Wil Shipley's Greatest Bug of All — I love a good bug-slaying yarn (via) #

Exposure, third-party Flickr app announced for App Store — with two versions, free ad-supported or $10 with no ads #

The iPhone's Gaming Mettle — DS and PSP comparison from Touch Arcade, a new weblog devoted to iPhone gaming (via) #

How It Turned Out, the fate of the Peanuts gang — pulled from this collection of Peanuts futurism, with more in the comments #

Google ASCII Art — hmm, no results (via) #

Totem Destroyer — like a stripped-down, Flash version of Boom Blox #

Wii-style controls for the Commodore 64 — also, the first C64 LAN party was held last weekend #

R. Lee Ermey on VB.NET — it's like boot camp that never ends (via) #

Thumber, OS X app for making one-second movie mosaics — in the style of Brendan Dawes' Cinema Redux; see also: a similar technique using averaging (via) #

Rabble on the gentrification of geek news communities — I hadn't thought of it in those terms before #

Lee Byron's bubbly infographic in the New York Times — bubbles try to push themselves out when clicked; the first infographic with physics? #