"Here are ‘the obsolete industrial plants; the inadequacy of unchanged transport systems and overstrained power supplies … the shift of power from industrial capital to international finance capital’ and so on. Here is the self-consciously world-historical Lowry, showing us Britain mired in its past, and perhaps the future of China. But here and there is the old local Lowry, whose people cannot see beyond the foreground terraces to the dystopian prospect, and so seem to manage, to cope, even to enjoy themselves, on their own tight patch. People stop to chat or just to stand about; kids play; dogs and babies get taken for walks; women wear bright vermilion, the happy colour of the summer of 2013, and apparently of 1950 too. It’s hard to say this without sounding as folksy as Brian and Michael, and perhaps that’s exactly what it is, but right now what I most admire and enjoy about Lowry is the interest he shows, without any apparent agenda, in what people do. I have no idea why that should be so moving." Wonderful article from this fortnight's LRB about the Lowry retrospective at Tate Britain.

"Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped portmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pleasurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled." There is so, so much in this interview, that quoting it feels somewhat futile. It's a really lovely thing piece, that goes far beyond cyberpunk, and delves deep into Gibson's writing and history. There are at least five meaty quotes I wanted to yank; it's worth reading and rereading.

"Modli warned his listeners to be ready with their cassette recorders, then waited to see the response after he played the screeching and wailing tape into the ether. Soon he began receiving excited calls from his audience, who said they'd been able to load the program – a routine called 'Paginator' – onto their computers. But not everyone was impressed, notably the station heads. "They thought it was a scandalous event!" says Modli. "I had a big problem explaining to them that it was a revolution in radio and they should be proud."" Lovely piece of reporting, with some great tidbits, about Yugoslavia's own little z80 kit-computer from the early 80s.

Its fragments like this that make it easy to explain why I love Harrison's writing.

This is the most comprehensive breakdown of Endtroducing…'s samples that I've seen; it's mainly good for all the complete original tracks, some of which are wonderful in their own right. If you like that record, you're going to lose a lot of time to this.

These are all very true.

Write the documentation for your tool to define the interface. Very nifty, and has polyglot parsers.

"a class factory and dsl for generating command line programs real quick" I like the look of this: solves lots of things I've always made clunky workarounds for.

Great set of pictures from Evo 2013; I really, really ought to go sometime.

"x-OSC is a wireless I/O board that provides just about any software with access to 32 high-performance analogue/digital channels via OSC messages over WiFi. There is no user programmable firmware and no software or drivers to install making x-OSC immediately compatible with any WiFi-enabled platform. All internal settings can be adjusted using any web browser." Small, simple, wireless OSC-transmitting board; really nice idea, simply implemented, and noted down as a way of simplifying certain kinds of projects in future…

Bookmarked to return to at some point. Some of these I've heard, some I'd like to hear.

"The Po-2 biplanes flown by the Night Witches had an advantage over the faster, deadlier German Messerschmitts: their maximum speed was lower than the German planes’ stall speed, making them hard to shoot down." Flying by night, with no radar or radio, dropping bombs on German positions; remarkable women, all.

"I remember a Christmas as a boy where I was given both a bicycle and a copy of The Hobbit, and strict instructions to make immediate progress with both. [My dad and I] continue to find it very easy to choose birthday gifts for each other." Mainly linked just for this paragraph.