Tom Wiltshire on various classic oscillator designs based around the Curtis 3340.

"One way to illustrate that most technologies are, in fact, pretty "hi," is to ask yourself of any manmade object, Do I know how to make one?

Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for "low" or "primitive" or "simple" technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention." Ursula le Guin with strong truth about technology and science fiction.

"Do you ever feel like all you’re doing is copy/pasting from Stack Overflow?

Let’s take it one step further.

from stackoverflow import quick_sort will go through the search results of [python] quick sort looking for the largest code block that doesn’t syntax error in the highest voted answer from the highest voted question and return it as a module. If that answer doesn’t have any valid python code, it checks the next highest voted answer for code blocks."

Oh good lord.

Good writeup on the LM386, and the fact the basic application note is garbage. (This solves many noise issues I had years ago).

James is keeping weeknotes on designing a product based around an EFM32 microcontroller – I enjoyed this first installment; it's nice to see how other people think about projects.

"HTML goes in, games come out. HTMLE is a project template and a set of scripts that take care of a lot of the work involved in setting up these tools and simplifying everything." Might well be useful for things that aren't games, too…

Utterly lovely writing about music – and playing in Holy Trinity, Blythburgh – from Laura Cannell.

"From 1950 to 1990, Tinsley had been the world champion of checkers whenever he wanted to be. He’d occasionally retire to work on mathematics or devote himself to religious study, but he’d eventually return, beat everyone and become champion again. In that 40-year span, he lost five total games and never once dropped a match." Brilliant article from Alexis Madrigal on the race to solve draughts/checkers, one man and his computer, and another man and his faith.

Sure, it's just a Max4Live device to map a monome Arc to parameters. But I love the detail and thoroughness in the implementation, and how tactile it seems – the varibright LEDs, and the number of them, help a lot there, as does the bidirectional feedback.

A Tumblr full of cutaways.

Latest OSXs only but: this does – with a nice template, and JSON options – what a pile of terrible Ruby I regularly update also does. I'd go with this over my terrible Ruby any day.