"This site contains the original source code for Elite on the BBC Micro, with every single line documented and (for the most part) explained."

Assembly is, it turns out, dark, dark magic. This is a very impressive thing to pore over – like Lions' Guide, but for Elite.

I actually write READMEs a bit like Sam describes – onwards, never erased, first-person diary accounts of what I'm trying, where I'm typing it, and what happened. But the case for pen is a good one. (Also: I enjoy Sam's writing).

"Just the Docs gives your documentation a jumpstart with a responsive Jekyll theme that is easily customizable and hosted on GitHub Pages." As used by the excellent update monome docs – this is a really great template for clear, searchable documentation. You still have to write the docs, of course, but this is a great format for that output.

Oskar Stålberg illustrates some of his work on Bad North. I love illustrations of software development through animation – captures the change-over-time aspect of code work.

"All my work is tracked through a Git repository — a way to track code changes over time, complete with comments on why something has changed or what that commit was about. In conduction with that I take timestamped screenshots. These two things combined — words and image — have the side-effect of creating a document of the making process. So with that in mind I have begun to take those words and images and compile them chronologically into small books, both for myself and the client, as an historical record of how something went from A to B." Very good. I really like (in general) the idea of Project Books.

"It's 1981. Roy Richardson is a manager at a Los Angeles computer company. A devout Mormon, he has a two-year-old son, with two daughters yet to be born. He has a little over ten years to live.

I was that two-year-old and Roy was my father. I grew up without him, knowing the outlines of his life but not the details. In 2006, at my mother's house, I found three boxes of details." Leonard never fails to surprise and amaze. This is wonderful.

"This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.

No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell." Lester Dent was the creator of Doc Savage, and wrote a LOT of pulp fiction.

"JavaScript Garden is a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes, subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language." This looks really, really good. Alas, unlike Phil, I'm still not quite fully up-to-speed on Prototypes, but it's a great piece of documentation nontheless.

"Consider the process of writing the Readme for your project as the true act of creation. This is where all your brilliant ideas should be expressed. This document should stand on its own as a testament to your creativity and expressiveness. The Readme should be the single most important document in your codebase; writing it first is the proper thing to do." I like this: after all, a README is basically the story you tell about your software. Why not write it before the software exists?

You know the guy who did the 70-minute Phantom Menace review? He went to see Avatar. Yes, it's good.

ARel looks brilliant, but blimey, those are some *big* changes to ActiveRecord. Pratik's post here is probably the most comprehensive I've seen, and well worth your time.

Great round-up of all the stuff out there about Rails 3. If you're as behind as I am on preparing for this, there's some really good stuff here; nice to have it all in one place.

Anne on New Zealand's Snapper card, and getting used to the rhythm of its RFID reader. I found the fact that the government will sell you a USB reader – so you can top up at home – fascinating.

"I have to print my bed, so that I can lie in it." Lovely BruceS fiction; not just futurism, but hyperlocal futurism at that.

"Welcome to Microdungeons.com. I'm still getting this thing ready, but here's the plan: starting in the first week of January, I'm going to post 3 new microdungeons a week." Dungeons drawn on 4" x 3" stock, three a week for a year. Yet another 365-style project I'm going to end up subscribing to.

"convert man pages into PDF documents and save them to a specified directory; (batch) print or view PDF man pages from the command line". Which is, you know, clever.

This comment (linked) on this Stack Overflow thread is the clearest explanation of this yet, and it made things very clear – and doable – for idiots like me.

"Handcrafted wooden toys of recently extinct animals. I selected these four creatures for their beautiful shapes and patterns. Choosing an anthropomorphic approach, I designed them with simplified, humanistic shapes and statures. Once unfolded, the packaging becomes an information graphic about the animal inside. These toys are meant to incite wonder and interest in creatures that existed only a short while ago." Beautiful.

IGF Finalists are announced. That's a not-half-bad list.