"There is a tension between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business and the Royal Mail as a public service. For most of the Royal Mail management – who rarely, if ever, come across the public – it is the first. To the delivery officer – to me, and people like me, the postmen who bring the mail to your door – it is more than likely the second." Excellent diary in the LRB from a Royal Mail postman, which at least helps explain a lot of the problems inside the postal system, as opposed to just the ones I experience outside it.

"FuckYeahSubways is a tumblelog." And it does exactly what it says on the tin: pictures of subways and metro systems, inside and out, from around the world. Really good.

"Ah – The Big Meg, where at any moment on the mile-high Zipstrips you might be flattened by a rogue Boinger, set-upon by a Futsie and thrown down onto the skedways far below, offered an illicit bag of umpty-candy or stookie-glands and find yourself instantly at the mercy of the Judges. If you grew up on 2000AD like me, then your mind is probably now filled with a vivid picture of the biggest, toughest, weirdest future city there's ever been." Jones on future cities, collating and refining thoughts into a lovely piece of structure and rhetoric. Also, the sentence "wrapping himself in Tokyo to form a massive concrete battlesuit".

"I’m not arrogant enough to believe these terms will catch on but I might start to use them just for shits and giggles. But perhaps the next time you hear someone mention that X title is linear or non-linear, before jumping down their throat ask yourself “What kind of linear are they actually talking about”."

Joe Moran (of Reading the Everday) has a blog. I did not know this. Subscribed!

"Yes kids, back in the Dark Ages, before the Coming of the Internet, your mums and dads used to use computers like this. Before your cloud-based storage and your Dropbox accounts and your Evernote applications and your mythical GDrive – before all of that, we used floppy disks." A lovely little video. I remember this well from the Mac Pluses at school, and even at seven or eight, it drove me nuts.

"On your computer exists your hobbies, your current and/or future career, and the rest of your daily life. You don’t own a snowboard, but you do have a blog, a Twitter, an RSS reader, and a pirated copy of Photoshop. You, my friend, need an Anything Bucket."

"These are my suggestions for eager first-time IF players, organized by year of release:" A few ones here that are still new to me, and some reminders of thigns I need to get around to.

"And if you the beat the game? An animation plays, showing Waters and Gilmour sitting at a pub, chatting like old mates. And as the screen fades to black, they share a little fist bump." Chris' column really is a lovely addition to Edge Online. This is a good one.

"The film Nearness explores interacting without touching. With RFID it’s proximity that matters, and actual contact isn’t necessary. Much of Timo’s work in the Touch project addresses the fictions and speculations in the technology. Here we play with the problems of invisibility and the magic of being close." God, I work with brilliant people.

"Be selective with your innovation. Keep as much of your product predictable, so people can find their way to the gem of awesome that you have pioneered. Too much innovation means you'll have to individually teach each user how to love your product and you don't have time for that." Justin Hall on the end of PMOG/The Nethernet, and lessons learned.

"Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online." Ooh, that's useful.

"I’m unfamiliar with a lot of the songs we do, and though I get to know them pretty well during the testing process, I rarely have a chance to get sick of them thanks to our relentless schedule. So when faced with a year of testing 45 very familiar songs for The Beatles: Rock Band, it seemed inevitable that I’d end up a Stones guy when the project was through. Then, last night at the company release party, I hung out in front of an Xbox with some thirty coworkers and sang along to Beatles songs for over four hours at the top of my lungs. When I woke up this morning, I actually yawned blood." Well done, Dan.

"I've developed a habit of delivering a drum solo at the beginning of every Rock Band track — just a little wailing away while the song cues up. It's a way of making the songs mine. You can't do that in The Beatles. Hit a drum pad before the song starts, and nothing happens, because that sound isn't on the original recording… More important, it's the game's way of making sure that you don't dare mess with perfection! I'm not a huge fan of that attitude. Past — and, technically, current — Rock Band games are about engaging with the music on an equal level. This game, though, is a ball-washing of the highest order. Maybe the Beatles are more deserving of such treatment than any other band, but I don't think any band deserves that treatment. Not now that I've seen the alternatives." Mitch Krpata on his problems with Rock Band: The Beatles.

"The Beatles: Rock Band is the total opposite [of Rock Band 2]. The "characters" are untouchable, and the tracks don't even toss you a freestyle section. Your only choices are to get the song right, or not. Sure, it's a cliché that most videogames make you save the world, but at least in those games, you know you're needed. I've never felt less important in a game than this one." Chris Dahlen makes an excellent point in the midst of his excellent (and otherwise uniformly positive) review of The Beatles: Rock Band for Pitchfork.

"Some pages from Willard Cope Brinton's second book (1939)". Very, very lovely.

"You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth." I like his point about us turning our experiences into stories. To be honest, I like the whole thing; one of my favourite Rands pieces in a while. And he's right: it's always worth finding Your People.

"Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change." This was really, really good – both in terms of the photography on display, but also Balog's delivery, and the message at the heart of it. Well worth your time.