Lots of things I didn't know – but will make my life much easier – about the Chrome console API; tools for logging and debugging Javascript.

"Tux dresses up sinatra in a shell. Use it to interact with your helpers, view rendering and your app’s response objects. Tux also gives you commands to view your app’s routes and settings." Handy – will definitely be using that in future.

"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.

Truly beautiful: a games console built around patchcords, in Eurorack format; the system exposed to the user, and directly manipulable. The direct manipulation of the physics is kind of brilliant, the more I think about it. Just wonderful.

"Aside the proportions and general ‘80s cuteness, I get obsessed with the PC Engine’s moulded details. Such fine relief work doesn’t seem to appear on modern consumer electronics; it’s all transfers, printing or stickers these days. I personally think really good relief moulding is something of a lost art so it’s nice that the PC Engine has a surprisingly large amount of such details." Which Tony goes on to describe and photograph at length. Lovely post about a beautiful little piece of hardware – but which Tony loves for its stains, scorching, and dust.

"A recently-surfaced 1980s brochure reveals that Nintendo nearly released a knitting add-on for the NES. Posted on the Facebook page of former Nintendo employee Howard Phillips, the brochure shows off the Nintendo Knitting Machine, a device that would have connected to the NES and allowed players to create and print their own designs." This would have been brilliant; I'm trying to imagine games with knit-out (as opposed to print-out) elements now.

"It's a debugger for web pages, like FireBug (for FireFox) and Web Inspector (for WebKit-based browsers), except it's designed to work remotely, and in particular, to allow you debug web pages on a mobile device such as a phone." Blimey. That's, um, remarkably useful. Duly noted.

"I hit upon a card game mechanic that I thought would work. I explored it a bit and it wasn’t long before I realized that in order for the design to really sing, it needed to be a collectible card game with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cards. This sprawling design would create the sense that a large part of the story is happening outside the realm of the game currently being played, much like the feeling you have while reading the novel." Corvus' own entry for his roundtable is bloody marvellous.

Blimey – 1.68gb multisampled Yamaha C7, for most popular soft samplers, for no money.

"No consoles are launching in 2009, right? Not so. Brazilian manufacturer Tectoy, most notable outside of South America for its long partnership with Sega and official distribution of its consoles in Brazil, will be releasing an entirely original product called Zeebo. Centered around downloadable games distributed only over a 3G wireless network, the console is designed for emerging markets…" and, even if it's not exactly powerful and the business model still seems sketchy, this could be really, really interesting.

"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.

"These concepts are not complicated by Cern standards. We are entering a zone which is weaponised to boggle."

Simple, straightforward, pretty much correct.

Yes, this is going to come in handy.

"This javascript function can then read in the current content of the text area, format it using a trimmed down version of textile, and then set the content of a DIV with the resulting HTML. The end result of all this is live comment preview, with textile formatting." Live textile preview functionality.

"Trying to over-explain the cause of a disaster often detracts from its more tangible impact. … Instead, Faliszek says, it is more effective to create resonant gameplay experiences that players will remember, particularly if the setting in question, such as a zombie invasion (or a tornado outbreak, for that matter) is already familiar." Why games don't always need tangible villains.

A nice approach to doing some of the typical monitoring you'd want to do with Google Analytics, eg monitoring PDF downloads. I'm not totally convinced by some of his syntax, but the functionality is good, and the regex trick is nice.

"It's just an Nintendo in a toaster, but I like it."