"The point is that making one-click tools that force the entire web to play catchup, whilst putting people at risk, just isn’t a sensible way of talking about security. There’s a reason we (most of us, anyway) don’t secure our houses with turret guns and dogs, and that’s because most of the time, a lock and key is good enough. We want just enough security to feel safe at night, and not to cause us too much hassle. And that’s why this tool makes me sad. Because it’s a symbol of an arms race – a fight to the death over unimportant things, when really, I’d rather not have to remember to lock my windows at night." Yes.

"Today's video is 'Boys vs Girls', showing the relative points and badges etc. accumulated by boys vs. girls over the course of the day. It ends with a "get running, girls!" message, and I love that data visualization is being used as a way for a brand to tell a story, in something close to real time, in a specific way tailored to the events on the ground."

"The GPS looks forward for me, projecting all my future successes and failings. Every bit of information helps to optimise my path. Contour maps spring out of the hills surrounding, and round the corner ahead. It took a space shuttle and an army of volunteers to help me shift down a gear, and hopefully the data exhaust I leave behind will help someone do it better next time." Tom is brilliant. I miss him.

"Nolan’s cities are iconless places. The Hong Kong sequence in The Dark Knight omits the harbour, the HSBC and Bank of China buildings, and that city’s famous apartment buildings, instead focussing on vertiginous aerial view of the masses of anonymous buildings in Central. Cobb and Mal’s ideal city four dreams deep in Inception is an infinity of curtain walled downtown, ordinary in the extreme and all the more unsettling because of it. In any case it will be interesting to see where Nolan takes Gotham city in its third outing, likely deeper into the fantastic generic." Interesting take on Christopher Nolan's nowhere-cities. Worth also noting that whilst Cobb and Ariadne build cities, Arthur's dreams tend towards interzones – airports and hotels. There's something on the Interzone and its relationship to that film to be said, too.

Straightforward guide to making bots work with OAuth.

"You could say that it’s tidal, but with the television schedules, rather than the moon."

Tom on writing the Noticings Uploader – and making the code open-source.

"Smells like Dwarf Fortress". An illustrated account of a the nightmares of one particular fortress of dwarfs. Pretty, funny, and I still can't quite get my head around that game.

"Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled." (Lots of other good stuff here, but I wanted to note this one down).

"Oddly, it feels a bit weird to watch the videos from inside MAST. There’s something about the combination of these being taken in the visible light spectrum inside a reactor, at super high speeds, with a CCTV-like aesthetic, makes me feel like I shouldn’t be able to observe what’s going on. Somehow reams of sensor data is fine, but watching the actual reaction feels… wrong. Like you’re looking into the soul of something amazing."

"High time resolution video of a MAST plasma showing the L-H transition (transition from low to high quality confinement) and ELMs (a form of instability in the plasma)." Wow. And: this is visible-light spectrum. Double-wow.

A little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of fact, a few reminders of the past. Especially the old Kit-Kat wrappers.

"In the game you are rewarded for keeping your tracks together while navigating through the surreal world of an "architectural" diagram. The camera moves in continuous motion and the object is to finish the course with as many points as possible." Watch the trailer; it's astoundingly pretty. Can't wait for this one!

"On my todo list still is an evil twin of iamnear, designed to be difficult and disorientating in use, but rewarding in unexpected ways should you persevere with it. As Kevin Slavin recently said in his talk at the BLDGBLOG book launch: “a world and a life in which you are always the centre of the map… fuck that”."

"I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books." Bookmarks, dedications, receipts, adverts. Lovely.

“We went through a bit of a rough patch a couple years ago, and I honestly believe that it has something to do with the fact that Metal Gear Solid has no music when you pause it.” Oh dear.

"Being interesting is as important as being useful. Making things that delight and inspire is as important as creating value. Old systems are crumbling; the best you can do is be nimble, smart and make some trouble." Hurrah. Tom's going to be next door again, and we're going to hang out. And maybe make a whole lot of toruble.

"This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript." Nifty.

"…when we step into the shoes of that avatar, be it 1st-person, 3rd-person or otherwise, we exit the darkened movie theater paradigm and enter an intricate, performative, exploratory lab of untested ideas and speculation. We enter a playful space that feels and responds much more like a live theater rehearsal than an interactive movie or a triggered series of movie clips." Michael debunks the games-as-cinema analogy with an interesting take that considers them as more like theatre rehearsal.

"This is not a book about the VCS, nor breakout, nor video games and video game culture; it is a chronicle of the experience of that entity we might call “the player.” Oddly, there is little I can take from it in terms of approaches to video gaming or thoughts on the VCS Breakout. But it did enlarge my perspective and help me think about physiological, cognitive, and, let us say, monomaniacal aspects of video game play. Nervous, very dreadfully nervous Sudnow has been, but why would I say that he is mad?" Sudnow passed away very recently; I really ought to read his book, more than ever.

"[s3fm]… lets anyone run a streaming radio station, with just a folder of MP3s. Put those MP3s in an Amazon S3 bucket, and give your friends the S3 FM link."

Matt's talk (in English) from Lift 09, on scientific fiction, stories, and the design process. Good stuff – not too long – and wonderfully filmed: the cameraman focuses on his hands as much as his face, which is just perfect.

NeoGAF users band together to make a perfect, eight-stage, LittleBigPlanet rendition of Contra. Remarkable, especially the behind-the-backdrop puppeteering that makes the walking-into-the-screen levels possible. This had better not get a takedown slapped on it, because it's phenomenal.

"Perfect gift for any World of Warcraft player or other MMORPGer in general. You get one "main" glass and one "alt" glass. Serving idea: fill your main with your alcoholic beverage and your alt with your chaser since mains are typically stronger than alts." Oh dear. (But: good gag, and dangerous for drinking games).

"SFZero is a Collaborative Production Game. Players build characters by completing tasks for their groups and increasing their Score. The goals of play include meeting new people, exploring the city, and participating in non-consumer leisure activities."

"One of my enduring passions is exploring graphic design with programmatic and generative systems. While some aspects of design require the skilled hand of the designer, others can be formalized and explored by computer. For those tasks, Mathematica is an exceptional tool." Some lovely thinking around generative design.

"Sometimes, when the wind is warm and low, when the gear ratio is perfect and the tyres pumped, and when the road is soft and quiet, I feel weightless."

"A few lonely zombies are looking for love on the Bay Area Craigslist." Lovely.

"…while there will no doubt be a small but vociferous core of Third Strike veterans who cry foul over the series' apparent simplification, they will be vastly outnumbered by those players who get to fall in love again with the Street Fighter of their youth: one that's easy to pick up and play, yet near-impossible to master. As a result this is, in almost every way that matters, the perfect Street Fighter." Very excited. Very, very excited.

"I've had too many conversations with game-makers (particularly from my Scottish locus) who, when presented with a range of possible game motivations and scenarios that don't involve spectacular male violence in urban settings, shake their heads and say, "just don't see the game in that, Pat. You gotta see the game." I've always suspected that this was male geek laziness on the industry's part. Incidentally, this report is based on a sample set that was 85% male." Maybe; but sometimes, "seeing the game" is an important part of game design. That doesn't always call for free-roaming urban-carnage, but I'm not sure I can entirely agree with Kane's quotation here.

"Red dot fever enforces a precision into your design that the rest must meet to feel coherent. There’s no room for the hereish, nowish, thenish and soonish. The ‘good enough’." Dingdingding. +5 points to Taylor, as usual. Place, not location.

"TinkerKit is an Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals. The interest in physical computing as an area in development within the creative industries has been increasing rapidly. In response to this Tinker.it! is developing the TinkerKit to introduce fast iterative physical computing methodologies to newcomers, and particularly design professionals." Standardised modules, standardised connectors, Arduino-compatible. I remember Massimo showing me his keyboard-emulating board ages ago. Nice to see Tinker productising the platform, too.

"The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior." Dark, dark voodoo, but very impressive – and excellently explained by Doug Bowman. It's nice to see Doug blogging again.

"If 2009 is going to see the emergence of high-quality browser-based games, then 2009 is going to be the year of Unity. It has: lots of powerful features; iPhone support; Wii publishing; a developing community; quality developers using it; and an upcoming upcoming PC version. In short, it is about to make a major splash. I feel compelled to jump in with it — the indie license is cheaper than the Flash IDE."

"bash completion support for core Git." Ooh. This looks really, really nice.