Tenochtitlan: I am a sucker for architectural reconstructions of the past. It’s easy to forget that the Aztec Empire was huge and developed completely independent of the Greco-European civilization with which we’re more familiar.

GPS: fantastic, thorough, and interactive explanation.

Virtual Ancient Rome in 3D: impressive work! I enjoy the detail and expanse but it’s bereft of people—thus barren and lifeless. (One thing you notice is how much statuary there was.)

Clash: this is jarring but fun. {via}

Iceberger: surprisingly satisfying.

Brand New Roman: your text in rendered using logo letters. {via}

MousePoint: stupid, pointless but compelling.

WebGL Lathe Workshop: I think I’m ready to work in a machine shop now.

Heaps legit links: this is a funny idea, though no one will ever click on your URL even if it’s perfectly safe. For example, Google -> click.on.this.verylegit.link/pcspeedup=116crackedspeedu.sh.html.pdf.

Online Flag Waver: pointless, but pretty impressive.

Family fun with deepfakes: I particularly liked his closing paragraph imagining legitimate uses of the technology. (It’s so easy to think of the evil that can be done: Black Mirror‘s “Shut Up and Dance” episode but without having actually done the initial act.) {via}

Google Maps’s Moat: this is an impressive insight into Google’s mapping efforts. (It’s also impressive in its depth—I’d highly recommend looking at his other essays.)

80×40: a collaborative ASCII art canvas. Naturally, it quickly devolved. (Click the back arrow and you’ll see what I mean.)

Namez: it’s a good problem to attack, as I’m sure a huge portion of the population has difficult-to-pronounce names. However, it’s a longstanding problem that people have been working around for forever, no one would ever pay for this service, and people with hard-to-pronounce names are more likely to have thicker accents that make their recorded pronunciations hard to understand—compounding the problem.

The Simpsons in CSS: holy crap, that’s slick!

Google World Wonders Project: this is fascinating. {via}

INCREDIBOX: enh, kinda cool, I guess.

Writers Diet: cut the flabanche.

Google Maps Floor Plans: I could see retail locations participating in this, but who else would?!

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON Image Generator: irritating meme.

Numbers API: cool way to assess number facts.

Share a secret – One Time: nice little idea.

Google Search for “sin(x)+0.5*sin(2*x)+0.333333*sin(3*x)”: now with graphing.

Google Maps: that is nuts—wait until Google Street View goes indoors as well. Oh, never mind.

WeatherSpark: man, that is a rich interface to put it mildly.

Nerdy Day Trips: nothing in Arizona?! Well, I guess that’s probably true.

How The Martha Graham Google Logo is Animated (Short Explanation): wowsers, impressive technique.

How Google Works: it’s an amazing piece of work.

Books Ngram Viewer: see the evolution of language.

Mapping America — Census Bureau 2005-9 American Community Survey: this is a fun little tool.

Reddit User Stylesheet: now it looks like you’re not being unproductive. {via}

FriendMosaic: neat idea. Here’s mine.

Hidden features of Google: there’s some really good Google tips in there.

“How black people use Twitter”: good look into this phenomenon that I’ve wondered about for a long time. I agree about the “tight-knit cluster” hypothesis.

JS1k: cool stuff in very little JavaScript. I like the gravity simulator

Edison: online tool to help you experiment with your life.

Books of the world, stand up and be counted! All 129,864,880 of you.: fascinating look into the task of counting books.

Comic Fireball: Chrome extension to change Daring Fireball‘s font to Comic Sans and Marker Felt. (Note to non-avid readers of DF: John Gruber hates those two fonts.) {via}

A Sliding Alternative to CAPTCHA?: love it. But what about the “I don’t have hands you insensitive clod!” crowd? {via}

First-Person Tetris: awesome idea, highly disorienting in practice.

Google Living Stories: not a fan of the name, but the idea behind it is intriguing. It’s like a minimally-sourced, whiter-spaced Techmeme.

CSS3 Sideways Google: from the because-they-can department.

Scroll Clock: mesmerizing.

Google Image Swirl: very cool way of looking at Google Images, sort of like mind mapping meets photos. I liked the one for “ghost town”—if you look in the second row, there’s a stack from the movie of the same name—and “Frank Lloyd Wright.”

Google Translate: I love the new look and AJAXified translation. Avez-vous vu mon chat malodorant?

Awkward Suggestions: no one lies to a search box. Very fascinating. {via}

Pacman: Pac-Man version run off of Google Maps. It’s a little rough around the edges.

Twoogie: oh yeah. Update Twitter à la Doogie Howser’s journal. It’s damn slow, though: are they running it on his 286?

Dickensurl.com: a URL lengthener that takes a long URL and turns it into a URL with a quote from Charles Dickens.

Tweeting Cat Door: cat door that tweets when a cat enters or exits along with a picture. Uhh.

Zappos Map: not my scene, but damn if I didn’t sit mesmerized by it all the same.

MINI Augmented Reality Ad: another good example of the sort of technology also used in this GE one. {via}

Cornify: make any site suitable for little girls to visit.

SecretTweet.com: why use post cards when tweets are so much quicker. No funky graphics though.

Amazon Windowshop: sure, it’s a little Apple derivative but it’s a great idea and I bet it makes Amazon a killing.

Palin as President: click around, you betcha. {via}

Where is Your Username registered: nice service. I went ahead and registered my username at a couple of places where it was available. {via}

Suicide Kittens: moderately enjoyable. Meh.

Google Circa 2001: they’ve restored the index that was present back then. I’m glad that I’ve moved up from result #7 to result #4 for my name. {via}

Flickr Memory Game: Ze Frank’s little Flash app that uses your photographs in a game of memory.

Google Maps – Missile Over Utah: I have no idea how people spot these things but I’m glad they do.

SlickSpeed: benchmark test suite that compares the various Javascript frameworks. I really like how they did it even though MooTools came in third. Maybe the head in Subversion blasts the others out of the park and this is a marketing ploy. My, I’m cynical, aren’t I? {via}

Wordle: I saw this a while ago but I never checked it out. It takes a document and generates a tag cloud for it, so you can see for some reason which words occur a lot. {via}

Ball: this neat, simple game provided conclusive proof that I am an uncoordinated, robotic oaf.

Bowser’s Minions: addresses all the underlying arbitrariness of the Super Mario Brothers franchise. The ending really ties it all together. {via}

Delicious: I miss del.icio.us and the geeky undesign of the previous version but I have to say that the individual’s page is better. And at least I still have my extension—it never changes up on me. *sniff*

Super Mario Brothers Tribute in 20 Lines of Javascript: the lines are a little long, but I’ll concede them the point.

Fake Twitter Status: now that’s some choice parody right there. {via}

Unicode Graphic Domains: neat. I forgot that their were dingbats in Unicode. D’oh.

Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America: this is a really neat visualization. {via}

Totem Destroyer: excellent little Flash game. I played until I beat it and wished there were more levels. {via}

ExpressionEngine v2.0 Sneak Preview: mmmmm, CMS-y.

Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles, California: Lost would have been very different using these directions. (And what’s with the Washington detour?)

Field Guide to Firefox 3: I’ve been using the release candidates and 3 is pretty different from previous versions. And it is officially released on June 17th so get yourself prepared for the upcoming changes now.

Google Maps Street View Scene: boy I hope that’s not a real gun!

Favrd: Twitter API service that shows you tweets that have been favorited. Gah, neologism overload!

Instant Rimshot: this is terribly useful!

Cubo: Kottke calls it creepy but I think it’s realistic enough—past the valley. {via}

Down for Everyone or Just Me?: this is a very useful service—it validates that some site is having problems and it’s not just your pathetic computer. {via}

Password Checker: nice little implementation from Microsoft. Happy to say that my password algorithm was always green.

The Meme Obfuscation Machine: I just whipped this up. It’s an easy way to mask a meme or prank. And I think the only cost for me is domain registration since it uses very little bandwidth.

Animator vs. Animation – The Game: a more interactive version of those awesome videos I’ve covered before.

The Budget Graph – A Visual Guide to Your Taxes: the Flash version of the poster is really kewl.

IE7.js: awesome Javascript library to make IE5-IE7 behave.

Cursor * 10: fun little Flash game. I got to Level 11 at best. I’m not sure how one could get to Level 16 but I’m no gamer. {via}

WordPress.com: what’s with the falling snow? I’ve seen this on a few sites this winter. Is it retro 2003 or something? I look forward to letters that follow the cursor around the screen.

Factory Balls: I could only get to Level 9 once I figured out how to play it. (Incidentally, you drag a ball onto one of the tools or through a succession of tools until you get it to match the one on the box. Once it matches, you complete the level.) {via}

Handbell Hero: guitars are so tired, handbells are wired.

Design: dang that is one slick bookmarklet! Kind of like XRAY but more for layout. {via}

We Love Holiday Sweaters: design your own Christmas sweater. There is no limit to its garishness. Unfortunately, there’s no way to save or share your creation.

Amazon SimpleDB: I am in awe of Amazon. It would be incredible if in a decade Amazon’s revenue primarily does not come from ecommerce. The other amazing thing is that applications built on their EC2, S3, and now SDB platforms really don’t have anywhere else to go; I wonder if that’ll result in a backlash eventually.

Rotten Neighbor: look for the crazies before you move into a house. Of course, without names, it’s impossible to know if the reports are current. {via}

Google Chart API: that is so cool. 50K queries per day seems like a reasonable amount.

Comet Daily: ooo, now this is interesting. It’s the yang to Ajax’s yin in that it pushes server-side events up to client-side Javascript. And it’s surprisingly mature—surprisingly in that I’d never heard about it until Simon Willison’s entry.

Universal Digital Library: 1.5 million volumes digitized by Carnegie-Mellon. My favorite grammar book is in there!

Google Maps for Mobile – My Location: this new feature uses cell phone towers to discern your 10-20. From tests at work and home, I’d say that cell phone towers must disclose their ZIP codes because that seems to be as close as it’s getting for me.

NPR – Intelligence Squared: damn, that looks like some seriously hott debate! There’s also a limey version but they’ve got some weird accents and I’m not sure that it’s even English.

Nymbler: not too shabby for a baby naming wizard. You put in some names that you like and it returns other names that you’d probably also like. {via}

Kiddie Records Weekly: awesome children’s music and recordings from the 40s and 50s. {via}

VisuWords: ho hum. This is so much more useful than say a dictionary or thesaurus.