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Images captured via Google Streetview cameras; some are incredible, others, beautiful.
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"It’s different things at different times, a serious research tool, or a communication device, but it’s a toy, I can play with it and find things I didn’t know existed." Tom Phillips has made a version of A Humument for the iPad, and I am very excited about this new.
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Bot that buys dirt-cheap goods on TradeMe and tells Twitter what it's buying/bidding on. Seems we need a Rule 38: if software is described in an XKCD comic, the chance of it being brought into reality approaches 1 as t approahces infinity.
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"…the game of chess is much more than the set of instructions needed to move the pieces on the board: the players’ intellectual and emotional interaction during a game is also the system of chess. The media hubbub surrounding Kasparov’s loss to Deep Blue: that is chess. The southwest corner of Washington Square Park where New York City players wager, talk trash, and square off across stone tables: that is chess too." So much good stuff in this essay from Frank Lantz and Eric Zimmerman
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In which Laura Parker looks at what "mainstream" games can learn from the type of success indie titles such as Limbo have had, with contributions from Nels Anderson, Manveer Heir, and – would you believe it – me. It's a really nice feature; I hope Laura can get more of this sort of stuff published on Gamespot, because it deserves a bigger audience than being buried on the staff blog.
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"Simple javascript (+backend) library for web-annotation". Looks really good.
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"Raise a glass of something, then, to celebrate how Harmonix lived, not how they died. It was a magnificent run, filled with some of the greatest games ever made. I don't think any other gaming company ever made so much sheer fun in such a short span of time." I desperately hope there's a happy end to this, somehow.
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As recommended by John Gruber: replaces video flash with HTML5 equivalents in Safari. Nice.
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"'…consciousness enables us to make conjectures in which someone called “I” can be seen in a hypothetical situation or a story; and from that flows the ability to make judgements, plans, decisions. In short, consciousness takes the vastness of the physical world, whose coordinates of time and space we cannot really grasp, and gives us a model, a working version – a simplified, toy version if you prefer – in which we can more usefully and successfully operate.’" Seeing the "I" in the world, as a way of making things understandable.
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"HyperDock adds long awaited features to your Dock: Select single application windows just by moving the mouse on a dock item, use mouse clicks to quickly open new windows and many more." Nifty.
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"Too many times proponents of interactive fiction talk as if it’s a new thing, as if interactivity were never part of the reading experience. How many of us has written in the margin of a book, turned down a corner of a page or smoothed the book back at a particular passage, felt our attention wander as we gaze out the window? We each interpret a story in different ways; it’s how we can re-read a book without getting bored, or watch the same film twice." This is cracking stuff from Kat; I am glad she's written it down.
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Kars on games, cities, and biology. Lovely. And: he's exploring game-design for *pigs*, which makes me impossibly excited.
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"The jQuery Cycle Plugin is a slideshow plugin that supports many different types of transition effects. It supports pause-on-hover, auto-stop, auto-fit, before/after callbacks, click triggers and much more." It's efficient and well-documented, too. Thumbs up.
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"Over on a forum called teamliquid, a user by the name of Lomilar posted a fairly long thread about a program he had written that optimized build orders for the zerg race in starcraft. He eventually cleaned up his code and posted the code to googlecode. The program is called EvolutionChamber (a clever name, as it’s the name of one of the buildings in the game), and it uses genetic algorithms to find build orders. This I had to see." Great analysis of EvolutionChamber. Super-interesting, too, as a concept.
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"I think the appeal lies in the keys moving “on their own,” and in the fact that it is in the guise of a familiar object." Nice little project – self-typing typewriter that plays Zork.
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This is a really nice article on using vim as your primary editor. Also: I like the way subheads appear in the margin when they're off-screen.
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"In their wisdom Sega had connected the console’s power board to the console with six wibbly-wobbly pins and made the disc tray’s lid switch from wishes. Dummying data to the edge of the CD was the least you could do for the asthmatic old dear’s clunking and whining laser." Wonderful piece from Five Players on Dreamcast piracy – and how the pirate community kept life in an undersupported piece of magic.
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Jonathan Blow's game prototypes; some interesting stuff here, especially in the READMEs.
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"Please don’t believe any of this. Go instead to the data and have a look for yourself." Which is, for this audience, a very good way of putting it.