"I think for a while journalism thought it couldn’t afford the difficult bits, the investigations, the new technology skills, the legal teams, the time for the more complicated problems. We could only secure our survival with automatically generated dancing hamsters and robot-written press releases.

Now when we look at the mighty new networks of our age, I hope we all realise, Us and Them, that these are the very things we can’t afford not to do."

P6: DIY, virtual-analog polysynth; €200 with case in a kit. Looks really nice – sounds good, too, and has a warmth to it.

"Some of the best field naturalists I know grew up in working-class rural communities, skipping school like Billy Casper to practise forms of natural history that bent or broke the law: they ferreted rabbits, collected eggs, broke into quarries, kept pigeons, reared finches, climbed fences to poach for fish. Today they can still spot a linnet’s nest in a furze bush at 50 paces and possess fieldcraft skills that would put many a birder to shame. There’s little room for them in today’s culture of nature appreciation and even less so in nature writing, which tends to entrench a sense that the correct relation to the landscape is through walking and distanced looking." From the section on 'Landscape and Englishness', which sounds excellent.

Jessamyn West on the useful things one can do to make one's digital legacy easier on the bereaved. But there's lots more in here too – on how we adopt or inherit both things and identities; on the nonsense some companies expect you to go through; on how history fades in and out as the meaning of 'forever' changes. (Added timeliness: I'm reading Soul of a New Machine at the moment).

A bunch of Packers players are really, really into Catan. It's quite a sweet story, really.

Yeah, this is important: just learning to Do Stuff without reflecting, or exploring the world it fits into, or prior art, isn't necessarily helpful. Papert, Papert: tools to think with, not just tools to program with.

Via Denise. Useful reminders.

That looks like a good overview of flexbox to me.

Darius Kazemi on writing aphorism detection; if nothing, it's a lovely insight into how he thinks about problems, as well as some neat code examples.

Rather wonderful interview with J G Ballard in 1984, in the Paris Review; effusive, head-screwed on, but god, his working process is hardly something you can emulate: such absolute control and certainty!

Nice, clear explanation (as clear as it seems anything involving M4 can be) of this process, which I've used a lot but not thought about that much.

Just beautiful.

Mike Senior on gain staging, which I'm still terrible at.

Found these useful, just on going from composition to final mix – and a particular simple take on something approaching mastering (or, at least, bus compression). Not just useful for Live, either.