"As serious intellectuals often do, we spent hours discussing these questions, what data we would want to collect to answer them, and even how we might go about collecting it. It sounded like a fun project, so I wrote a program that takes video captures of our Mario Kart 64 sessions and picks out when each race starts, which character is in each box on the screen, the rank of each player as the race progresses, and finally when the race finishes. Then I built a web client that lets us upload videos, record who played which character in each race, and browse the aggregated stats. The result is called Kartlytics, and now contains videos of over 230 races from over the last year and change." Yes, it's a plug for manta, but it's also a nifty piece of engineering.

"Termshows are purely text based. This makes them ideal for demoing instructions (as the user can copy-paste), making fail-safe "live-coding" sessions (plain text is very scalable), and sharing all your l33t terminal hacks." Really lovely: record terminal activity, upload it to a URL, share it with others, dead simple. And the client playback is all javascript. Lovely.

Write the documentation for your tool to define the interface. Very nifty, and has polyglot parsers.

"a class factory and dsl for generating command line programs real quick" I like the look of this: solves lots of things I've always made clunky workarounds for.

Great set of pictures from Evo 2013; I really, really ought to go sometime.

"Python has one. Ruby has one. Clojure has one. Now PHP has one too. Boris is PHP's missing REPL (read-eval-print loop), allowing developers to experiment with PHP code in the terminal in an interactive manner. If you make a mistake, it doesn't matter, Boris will report the error and stand to attention for further input." I use PHP increasingly little, but the lack of a REPL drives me insane. This looks… useful, at the very least.

"DataFart lets you easily graph data from the command line." So it does.

"jq is like sed for JSON data – you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text." Sounds super-useful.

"Let's Go Find El Dorado is a physics-based remake of Oregon Trail which plays a bit like Excite Bike." Seriously, do you need to know any more to click the link?

Comprehensive notes on Ben's talk from Ruby Manor – looks really, really good, and lots of things I should probably know. This is the kind of hacking I'm a big fan of.

"All yeahs in a baby are always the same height." Crazy markup preprocessor of the day, with suitably entertaining documentation.

"It seems to me that Transgaming have done more to hurt the Mac gaming world than anyone else. The idea that you can turn your product into a Mac game OVERNIGHT, without employing ANYONE WHO SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT THE PLATFORM is an absurd thing to peddle."

"Tig provides a simple command-line yet visual interface to Git." An explanation of what Tig does, and why you might find it useful.

"Tig is a git repository browser that additionally can act as a pager for output from various git commands."

Marvellous – case study of all the packaging concepts for the bonkers House Of The Dead: Overkill. Lots of gnarly, grindhouse-inspired graphic design going on here, and many things that are as good as the final version.

"Little command line REST interface that you can use in pipelines." Ooh. That looks nifty.

"See why I say I can't play like a player?" Richard Bartle dives deep into Stranglethorn Vale to explain what he "sees" when he plays MMOs, and to try to explain why he can't play them like, say, I can. It's a nice reading – even if I'm not sure the zone works as well coming from the Horde perspective – and his insights are strong.

"From Liverpool 1995, to Nevada 2035, to a PlayStation somewhere near you. Once upon a time, I helped to write the world of WipEout." Nice article from the writer who helped write a lot of the texture and world for Psygnosis' Wipeout. Glad that writing like this is still somewhere, even if it's in the furthest recesses of fansites.

"But these arguments aren't getting us anywhere because the problem isn't the games. The problem is the _play_. When we engage with games, we _play_ with them. We don't read them; we don't attend them; we don't view them in a gallery. We _play_ them. And that's a big problem."

"This has to be the most quick-and-dirty data visualizer out there: I wrote an ascii art plotter script that takes a column of numbers on stdin and throws out a plot on your console." Oh, that's going to come in handy.

"The future is terribly easy to predict. It’s predicting the instantiation that’s hard."

"These travel posters by Steve Thomas, Amy Martin and Adam Levermore-Rich promote travel to exotic eras and destinations, such as the Crimson Canyons of Mars, Tranquil Miranda, or the Winter Wonderland of the Ice Age." Beautiful.

Lots of sed-goodness here.

Javascript demoscene craziness from Matt Westcott; 3D, music, and the most incredible editing tool I've seen in JS ever.

"The rest of this article will be a tutorial showing you how to host and manage Git repositories with access control, easily and safely. I use an up and coming tool called gitosis that my friend Tv wrote to help make hosting git repos easier and safer." Nice guide to getting up and running with gitosis.

"Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever internet memes." Lols.

"The Mugen (infinite) series of toys from Bandai Asovision has now brought us the Mugen PeriPeri, a keychain toy that aims to replicate the pleasure of opening a package for the first time. Snacks, boxes, and other tear-open packages tend to reveal good things, so perhaps experiencing this sensation boosts endorphins and sends us into pleasure mode." Tear-off wrapping you can tear forver.