"…nothing really gets older online; the only aging of things here comes from the erosive force of changing human sensibilities. The black of that North Face jacket looks just as black, but the point of wearing it has faded a little. Here there is only the appearance of getting older because everything else has gotten much newer. The pixels do not outwardly become worn. They are like grains of sand. If one is destroyed, it’s too small for us to know it’s been annihilated. And there is so much sand."

"I wonder if there’s a business to be gotten into where one shows movies the way everyone wants to see them: just the movies, from the very first second you start watching. It’s a naive thought; I understand that. But I can’t forget that when those lights went down, when that screen went up, and when that twangy riff kicked in, there were audible gasps and cheers in the audience, and someone behind me yelled out “whoa, awesome!” I want to believe that there’s a business to be gotten into that capitalizes on “whoa, awesome”."

Stewart Lee's dark, self-referential Christmas tale from this year, for the New Statesman.

"In other words, the more packages you send at once, the shittier job FedEx does of delivering each of them, with each package getting less and less of a delivery attempt. And the limit actually approaches zero, which means that if you somehow send me infinity packages through FedEx, they will not even knock on my door. They will take the infinity dollars and run. I did honestly not intend today to use math to prove precisely how bad FedEx is at delivering packages, but, um, here we are?" I love Ryan North.

Installing Redis on Linode.

"RequestBin lets you create a URL that will collect requests made to it, then let you inspect them in a human-friendly way. Use RequestBin to see what your HTTP client is sending or to look at webhook requests." Which is very useful.

"It's sort of a no-brainer. And a fascinating way to think about creating a sustainable source of income to allow, even in part, artists to produce works are genuinely expensive in time and cost to create. It should also prove to artists, and anyone who frets over the illusion of print rights, that they've got nothing to worry about. This stuff is an entirely other material and colour made of light, it turns out, doesn't just magically translate to colour made of pigment the way that, say, a word-processing document does. And if anyone is really going to lose sleep over the people who are already predisposed to print things out on their shitty homes printers my only advice is to give up now. Let them and understand that there are more interesting problems to solve and if projects like 20×200 are any indication there's a whole world of people who want to help with not only their moral support but their wallets." Aaron on the Hockney show, subscription app art, and drawing on iPads.

"This gem is a C binding to the excellent YAJL JSON parsing and generation library." Ooh, JSON stream-parsing.

" I think Zemeckis and Gale knew all the timely accoutrements signifying "the present" in Back To The Future would inevitably look like 1985 within just a couple of years; in fact, they were banking on it. Zemeckis and Gale were trying to create an archetypical representation of 1985 just like they did for 1955, with its soda fountains, social repression, and subjugated black people. In this way, Back To The Future only gets better the further we get from the '80s. Everything that defines Marty McFly—how he walks, talks, acts, and dresses—acts as instantly recognizable shorthand for the year he comes from." This is great.

"Let’s own the work that goes live, understand and explain why it is as it is, and work on the skills we need to make sure more good design actually makes it over the line. Otherwise, what’s the point?" Yes.

"Unsurprisingly, having recognizable cartoon characters on the boxes caused kids to rate a cereal as better tasting, affecting their subjective assessment of it."

"Here is a memory-friendly function that should be able to split a big file in individual queries without needing to open the whole file at once:" Yep, that'll do.

"Competitors should take a page from Apple's playbook here and be open about stuff that will give you a competitive advantage and shut the hell up about everything else. Open is not always better." If only because: you get a hell of a launch day. (But also because: you'll never promise things you can't deliver).

Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.

Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.

Jaw well and truly on the floor.

"Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."

"An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.