"Bear in Space has an unusual premise for a children's book. It is the fictional story of a bear who shares film of his vacation to the Moon with his animal friends, but that is not the unusual part." Bear faked his trip; his photographs are clearly manipulated. The child should pick up on that, but will Bear's friends? A Russian tale of space travel from 1970.

"A Vim plugin which shows a git diff in the 'gutter' (sign column). It shows whether each line has been added, modified, and where lines have been removed." Lovely. Also available for emacs and Sublime Text 2.

"Culture is about power dynamics, unspoken priorities and beliefs, mythologies, conflicts, enforcement of social norms, creation of in/out groups and distribution of wealth and control inside companies. Culture is usually ugly. It is as much about the inevitable brokenness and dysfunction of teams as it is about their accomplishments. Culture is exceedingly difficult to talk about honestly. The critique of startup culture that came in large part from the agile movement has been replaced by sanitized, pompous, dishonest slogans." This is all very good.

"The most impressive request thoroughly embraced the nature of TCP/IP, and arrived in a number of packets, out of order and with some data corruption (see the missing data on the envelopes), which we had to reconstitute into the actual request within our ‘server’." Everyone involved in this post is brilliant.

'"Screw this,” said Horace, downing his Babycham. “I’m going skiing.”' As niche fiction goes, this is very niche, but it is quite a thing. I am not sure how many people Horace fiction is relevant for, though.

Newspaper Club is a great product – but I'm really glad Tom's written about the technical underpinnings of the latest version of the code, because it's super impressive. They threw out InDesign and replaced it with their own renderer, written in Cocoa; they have a gorgeous, rich Javascript client that's a joy to use; and they have a development team of 2. TWO. Brilliant work, folks.

"Brasfrwrw" has got to be witch-rain, right? This is great.

"She is omnipotent. She can conjure up an army of parkour chimney sweep ninjas! But she also has to come and go with the weather, and where there is technology, if you like, it does not always do what it should. It plays up. The umbrella handle is a bit shitty with her. The toys don't always clean themselves up at her command." I always like Schulze on Mary Poppins, and whilst it's quotable, it's probably not the most representative quote of this marvellous article. The main reason I use it is this article, more than many I've read, explains what being in a room with Jack at work is like. It's also lovely to see all the threads, some of which I saw beginning, come together. Good photos, too, of what work looks like.

Charming. My favourite thing about this is that it's a picture of home, and, weirdly, it arouses the same emotions in me as it would if it were a poster of a real place.

"Use PiP to show video from any webcam on your screen, nicely integrated as "Picture in Picture" which makes it ideal for live presentations, screencast recordings and in the educational sector." Or filming your hands…

"In this post, I want to pay tribute to my favorite “games” of 2012 – specific performances, instances, and events that really meant something to me. The list is admittedly idiosyncratic, subjective, and a little self-indulgent. And that’s the way it should be, I feel (um, unless you’re a journalist or something), because games, at their best, are deeply personal affairs. Games generate memories, and I want to share some of mine with you." Doug is smart.

"I think it’s valuable to have an understanding of assembly language. Assembly language is the lowest level of abstraction in computers – the point at which the code is still readable. Assembly language translates directly to the bytes that are executed by your computer’s processor. If you understand how it works, you’ve basically become a computer magician." I don't, and this looks like a lovely way to learn. Also: I think I finally get this. Nine-year-old me sure didn't.

"EasyMotion provides a much simpler way to use some motions in vim. It takes the <number> out of <number>w or <number>f{char} by highlighting all possible choices and allowing you to press one key to jump directly to the target." This is very clever.