Filing these away for future (non-Christmas) reference.

These were really, really good.

"Hazardously drinkable." Need to make this at some point.

"Elizabeth David was a revelation for me. She was a wonderful prose writer and it was a habit that carried over in to her recipes which are often maddeningly vague. You would be forgiven for wondering whether there are recipes at all. They are really just a handful of paragraphs that serve as a rough guide in the general direction of the dish you're trying to make. The recipe that follows is much longer than anything she'd write." Yeah, but it still looks amazing, Aaron.

This is brilliant: mp3s of the little mod/tracker music tracks that accompany keygens, cracks, and intros. Hundreds, and it's strange to say "hey, PHOTOSHOPCS4CRK is my favourite!" A weird little bit of culture, perfectly captured.

IF legend Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin has adapted Jason Shiga's marvellous "Meanwhile" for the iPad. If you wanted someone to adapt your interactive fiction for another format – I can't think of a better person. Really looking forward to seeing how they've done this.

"It was at that moment that I understood, more fully than ever before, why revolutionaries succeed and then fail. It's because they're switching genres. They take over the country in a third-person (or first person) action game, but then they have to play an RTS to govern the country."

"Think about it: These two guys were carrying the gross domestic product of New Zealand or enough for three Beijing Olympics. If economies were for sale, the men could buy Slovakia and Croatia and have plenty left over for Mongolia or Cambodia… These men carrying bonds concealed in the bottom of their luggage also would be the fourth-largest U.S. creditors." Um, wow.

"After a stint shuttling back and forth from his farm in upstate New York to LA, where he consulted on a project for Steven Spielberg and EA, Rohrer has now joined the roster of multimedia stars at Tool of North America, which produces high-end commercials and interactive campaigns for the top advertising firms in the nation." Hmm.

"What if Ulysses had been written before the construction of Dublin? That is, what if Dublin did not, in fact, precede and inspire Joyce's novel, but the city had, itself, actually been derived from Joyce's book?" Geoff Manaugh expands on a comment he made at Thrilling Wonder Stories; the stuff about 'quipu' is also awesome.

"I’ve always been interested in the relationship between gameplay and musical performance. Theres a remarkable structural similarity between certain game systems/mechanics and compositional ones. There is also a risk/reward/challenge aspect that is core to both practices. Anyway, for a short talk I took part in for the Leeds Evolution Festival I wrote a quick augmented chess/draughts app." And the result is a video-processing step-sequencer. Nifty.

"It is easy to have fresh bread whenever you want it with only five minutes a day of active effort. Just mix the dough and let it sit for two hours. No kneading needed! Then shape and bake a loaf, and refrigerate the rest to use over the next couple weeks. Yes, weeks! The Master Recipe (below) makes enough dough for many loaves. When you want fresh-baked crusty bread, take some dough, shape it into a loaf, let it rise for about 20 minutes, then bake. Your house will smell like a bakery, and your family and friends will love you for it."

"Explore London on foot with our suggestions for some great capital walks, including riverside rambles, architectural adventures, even the odd pub crawl." A useful page to bookmark.

"I think in films, zombies are cyclical. They come around, they get reinvigorated. I think in games, they're a constant. In games, zombies just represent this thing around which you can construct a game. There's no morality to them. There's no worries about racism that games are having right now. If it's a zombie and it's a pure zombie, a stupid zombie like the ones we have, they're a game mechanic. They're fodder, they're whatever you want to put in a game, however you want to deal with it."

"This is John Connor, leader of the Human Resistance… Microsoft’s Project Natal must never be completed, no matter what the cost. This machine, with its RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and custom processor running proprietary software, as well as its ability to track up to four human users for motion analysis, is clearly the precursor the killing machines of the near-future that haunt my dreams every night."

"BREADBOX64 is a twitter client for the C64/128 which allows you to tweet from a real C64 and show your friends timeline." Now that's a classy look.

"There was a point a few years ago whenever somebody called a meeting that I had to attend, then whoever called the meeting had to pay me a dollar. And I got a lot of dollars that way. It did make them think twice about calling the meeting, even though it was only a dollar." Will Wright has a good point.

"What we didn't predict was how cheap storage (and other computer-ish) improvements would change the market. That's called the "X Market"—it's all about how the product you're introducing changes the marketplace you're selling into rather than how much of the existing market you'll be able to capture Had it not been for the X Market, hard drives would be specialty items today… Many consumers feel cramped with 100 GB of storage. Home entertainment systems are available with over 10 TB of storage. A consequence of super-cheap storage, at the same time that it's what makes said storage a viable product."

Italians getting into rental, rather than ownership. Products become services.

"The unforgiving streets of public television are no place for weakness: either you fight, or you die. Join the courageous young brawler Large Avian as he embarks on a rampage of revenge against the animatronic gang that killed his family and defiled his nest. Watch as our hero trashes Oswald the Grump, spells out certain doom for the Cracker Beast, and puts their calculating, blood-sucking leader down for the count. New episode every Sunday!" Want this so badly.

Huge, and a bit baggy, but nontheless interesting account of a trip to the SBO Qualifiers in the US; if anything, makes me sad that there's no way we'll ever see an arcade scene like this in the UK ever again.

"Some time ago, Simon Schama wrote an article for the Guardian on the perfect bolognese sauce. Like any other enthusiastic cook, I've been finely honing my sauce for years and finally had it nailed down to what I considered to be Very Good. However, I saw the article as an opportunity to challenge myself, rip it up and start again and above all, get one over Schama. So here's my recipe:" Epicly epic bolognese recipe. Should try this some time.

A rough guide to building your own ExceptionNotifier for CodeIgniter. Might come in handy.

"A dude by the name of Phoebus has posted a collection of his research on Left 4 Dead's infected and weapon damage statistics over on the official Steam forums. I think that it'll be of great interest for any serious player of the game to delve into this information." There's a question over their accuracy, but there's still a decent amount of detail here, and the details on tail-off of weapon damage is useful to know. Also a relief to have the hellacious friendly-fire damage on Expert confirmed.

Fascinating to watch some of the body shapes – the hunched run, and in particular the the saut du chat – carry through to modern Parkour; that which is practical has always been so. As with all parkour: parts of it are beautiful, parts of it entertaining, and parts of it superhuman.

"Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armour, in ways that Old Etonians could never even dream of." More on this topic from Jones; still think there's something we're not quite hitting yet, but it's all good stuff.

Stack lets you subscribe to a selection of independent magazines; you choose how many you want a year, and they send you a selection. A really nice idea, although it'll be interesting to see them broaden their horizons a bit.

"Program recipes should not only generate valid output, but be easy to prepare and delicious." Chef is a programming language where the programs are also valid (if strange) recipes. The syntax description is proper crazy; gives Homespring a run for its money, easily, in the realm of metaphorical programming languages that embrace their metaphor.

"This recipe prints the immortal words "Hello world!", in a basically brute force way. It also makes a lot of food for one person."

"Economics has been defined as the science of distributing limited means among unlimited and competing ends. On 12th April, with the arrival of elements of the 30th U.S. Infantry Division, the ushering in of an age of plenty demonstrated the hypothesis that with infinite means economic organization and activity would be redundant, as every want could be satisfied without effort." Remarkable article; fascinating for its subject matter, when it was written, what it describes, and the patterns that hold up inside such a regimented economy. A must-read, really – can't believe it took me so long to get around to it.

"Our attempts to bridle the player's freedom of movement and force our meaning onto him are fruitless. Rather, it is a distinct transportative, transformative quality– the ability of the player to build his own personal meaning through immersion in the interactive fields of potential we provide– that is our unique strength, begging to be fully realized." Some great Steve Gaynor; reminds me of Mitch Resnick's "microworld construction kits" all over again.

"It's an easy, irresistible, almost childish pleasure: the ground meat dissolved into a dark blood-red sauce until they are one and the same; no hacking, slicing or cutting needed; a slurpy goodness; the oily bolognese hanging on to the slippery pasta; guaranteed joy in a world that's just ruled it out." Recipes for ragu.

"Suddenly, instead of Pong, Nolan Bushnell unleashes a stark, monochrome rescue challenge on the world. AVOID MISSING PRINCESS FOR HIGH SCORE burns itself into the brains of a generation. A couple of sequels expand the world of this strange new hero and, keen to bring its popularity to bear on the 2600, Atari execs strong-arm Warren Robinett into populating Adventure with mushroom monsters and making the green dragon friendly." Delightful alterna-history from Margaret in her Offworld column.

"Soon enough, amid the daily grind of his obsession, he would see in the game itself a way out of the bleak hole he had fallen into. He would take a clear-eyed, calculating look at what he and his fellow players had been doing all those months—at the countless hours they'd given over to the pursuit of purely virtual but implacably scarce commodities—and he would recognize it not just for the underexploited form of productivity it was but for the highly profitable commercial enterprise it might sustain." Fantastic article from Julian Dibbell on IGE, the massive real-money trading operation.

"We will both have to take responsibility for our consumption. A product that keeps working for longer uses less-resources in the end. The key ingredient to all this is quality. To make something well, you know, the best you can do. To go the extra mile that it takes to do that. Every stitch, every zip, every little feature considered. The weakest points made strong. Then, and only then, have we made something that will last the test of time. Guaranteed for a minimum 10 years. Each product will come with a hand me down contract. You will sign who you want to leave the product to. This is legally binding."

"Trust begins when I can see the design intention of an application." Great stuff from Rands on how sync should work – namely, in the dumbest way possible – and what building trust into application design looks like.

"Throughout most of the year, gaming is distraction and entertainment. November separates the proverbial patriarchs from their upstart offspring. In November, the Gamer! and the With Job! blur. I spend my ill-defined work hours thinking, talking and writing about games. And the time I'm playing games become a form of work – a struggle to keep up no less frenetic than that of the clock-manager in Metropolis." This year's November release schedule was crazier than most, too.

"the brains behind the siduhe bridge decided to ignore all those options and break another record instead. they attached the 3200ft cables to rockets and accurately fired them over the valley, becoming the first people to do so." Woah. The photographs are awesome.