"We then witnessed him giving the most heartfelt and profound vocal performance, live in the control room through an SM57. He would sing us an entire string arrangement, every part. Steve Porcaro once told me he witnessed MJ doing that with the string section in the room. Had it all in his head, harmony and everything. Not just little eight bar loop ideas. he would actually sing the entire arrangement into a micro-cassette recorder complete with stops and fills." It's all there, already, in his head; and god, he hits those notes so well. No auto-tune there.

The product is delightful – the screwdriver especially – but it's that wonderful video of a screw factory that's the real reason I link this.

"It took awhile to climb this mountain, 14 months actually. So to “show our work”, we’re posting around 45,000 words that mark the trail we took. It’s not every text, skype call or even every email in our big 500+ email thread. But it’s the important stuff, and a lot of it was important to getting Threes out in the world." I'd pay for this as a book, to be honest. Really excellent stuff.

"I didn’t think I’d ever do a thing this long. I might never again. But it turns out businesses are hard, especially when they involve atoms and even more so if you want to be profitable, legal and have good customer service. Not that much of that is to do with me." In amongst so much of the nonsense of the tech industry in 2014, and East London Technology in 2014, it always makes me happy that Newspaper Club is going so well, and that my friends are doing it.

"When my brother and I wanted a new toy, we cannibalized whatever we’d made before, which had been made of all the things we’d ever made before that. So of all those years of guns and starships, I have only that Wrightian feeling for form in the fingertips — and the sound, somewhere between rustling and clinking, of a thousand plastic pieces tumbling from an overturned bucket into a disorderly pile, rippling away from a seeking hand." As Paul M pointed out, that sound is very, very visceral for many of us. This is a lovely article about what Lego does to the head.

"Even as the middle class disappears as an actual economic category, the inspirational tales of the new creative class and its artistic dupes portray the honest and loyal white-collar worker as the new kulak, an enemy fit only to be destroyed.  Ordinariness is the greatest heresy; existence is the gravest crime; providing for one’s family and future is the ultimate betrayal.  The villain of the story is never a successful capitalist (who is, as always, sacrosanct) or a jealous laborer (who is, as always, invisible), but a man or a woman who fails to pursue his or her most special and wonderful dream, thus depriving the world of not only the salvation of art, but also the inevitable financial gain that always comes from following that star." This whole post is cracking.

Really nice tutorial on 2D visibility polygons – a series of interactive demos that illustrates a point very well.

Loads .env into ENV – a simpler alternative, perhaps, to Foreman, for certain tasks.

Rather nice looking Ruby/Redis feature-flag library.

Alan Adler sounds like a smart and thoughtful chap. Really nice story of just sticking at making things, and understanding what you're doing. (And: not just for coffee fans; there's a LOT about flying rings in this).

Sixty years earlier, a precursor to Warren Ellis' _Lich House_. The terrors of the future are not those we have – the Cold War still looming large. But the depiction of the future is, whilst regimented and picket-fence-utopian… also charming. The childrens' bedroom, in particular, made me smile and want to visit; not nod knowingly at the cleverness. When we write stories about the future, it's important they're still stories.