A nice talk on type, with some great faces referenced in it; Brandon Grotesque is a stunner.

"Reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, get a digest with what everyone on the team got done." As a management style, I like that.

"Xray is the missing link between the browser and your app code. Press cmd+shift+x (Mac) or ctrl+shift+x to reveal an overlay of what files are powering your UI – click anything to open the associated file in your editor." A lifesaver, if only for working with other people's code.

This looks lovely: the right balance of editor-as-environment (ie: multiplayer level-building, which people recognise from Minecraft) with scripting, full control, and a learning curve. Really need to poke this.

"I wanted to compile a list of online, Web-based tools that Web engineers can use for their work in development, testing, debugging and documentation." It is a really good list (I say this mainly because the first thing on the list is RequestBin, which is the thing I always forget the name of).

"jq is like sed for JSON data – you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text." Sounds super-useful.

"My interest in materials… is like my interest in tools. What can be made with this? What can this do that other materials cannot? Materials with special properties are cool because they can open new possibilities in manufacturing, design, or even behavior. Additionally, they’re such an amazing cultural artifact. Where and how something gets made says so much about us as people, as a species, even. In a beautiful fabric, the simplest thing can be magic."

"I spend every day writing Rails code in vim, and I’ve optimized the heck out that process. The screencast contains the best of what I’ve learned for creating and editing Rails code at top-speed. Come look over my shoulder and I’ll show you my best stuff." Might give this a pop at some point.

"The (for now) final end product seems incredibly obvious. And popular.

Yet it took decades of iterative innovation, from some of the cleverest minds in the field, to make something so apparently simple yet powerful.

And every step was astonishing." This is great stuff from Francis.

"So, as some of you may know, the old shrine got re-activated as a working shrine a few days ago, and the Church classroom cleared away for meditation and contemplation, led by Fa Zang (Rinpoche), the guy in the buddhist monk robe who has been doing a lot of sewing in the craft area recently." I love mailing lists. And this is a remarkable post.

"Using vim is like talking to your editor in ‘verb modifier object’ sentences, turned into acronyms." Which is a good way of thinking of it.

"Calepin reads Markdown-formatted, plain-text files stored in your Dropbox and converts them into blog posts for you." Which is pretty clever.

"A photograph has to be rational. It has to be rational in itself. It has to be rational and complete. … it is the illusion of a literal description of what the camera saw. From it, you can know very little. It has no narrative ability. You don't know what happened from the photography. You know how a piece of time and space looked to a camera." As usual, I'm reminded how much I love Gary Winogrand.

The ninth day of the Hindu Navaratri festival, the "Worship of Implements", where "weapons are worshiped by soldiers, and tools by artisans"; "In the cross cultural development that has revolutionized the society, with modern science making a lasting impact on the scientific knowledge and industrial base in India, the ethos of the old religious order is retained by worship of computers and typewriters also during the Ayudha Puja, in the same manner as practised in the past for weapons of warfare."

Jon is smart, and one of the best writers of interactive fiction (in all its forms) that I know. So I am looking forward to this.

"The easiest way to share localhost over the web." Very nice. Smart pricing model, too.