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“It wasn’t the concept of roleplay in D&D that birthed the genre, it was the way the rules encapsulated the core ideas behind it” Wonderful post from James (following the death of Gary Gygax) on the significance of D&D for gaming as we know it.
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“it’s official, this is the best thing on the internet, ever.” Let’s Play Ukelele skims your last.fm tags, works out which songs or bands you like are the easiest to play, and gives you the tab and the chords. Delightful.
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“we’re getting to the point where the pioneers are not going to be here forever. We need to get it recorded for future generations before it’s lost, in the same way that lots of early film history is lost.” Warren Spector interviews many of his pals. Wow.
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“LINC is leased to the user as a service, not a product.” Lovely concept design, especially for the process of migration from an old device to a new one.
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“Trism uses the touchscreen to manipulate the triangles on the screen, but in a really smart twist, the blocks will fall down in a different way, depending on which direction you’re tilting the phone”. Wonderful. Watch the video, and try not to grin.
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“[GitHub] is my kind of social software. You want to “friend me”? Send me a patch. Fork me.” Nice post from Ryan Tomayko looking at GitHub from a slightly different angle.
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“Webby is a fantastic little website management system. It would be called a content management system if it were a bigger kid. But, it’s just a runt with a special knack for transforming text.” A nice idea for simpler, single-user sites.
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Some nice notes on using Webby to build sites. Now, if only I could get the gem working…
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‘Each bet costs $10 and all the money bet will go to First Book, “a nonprofit organization with a single mission: to give children from low-income families the opportunity to read and own their first new books.”‘ Ten winners will get a prize. Lovely idea.
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“In this year’s Hollywood Portfolio, Keira Knightley, Javier Bardem, Seth Rogen, and other stars channel iconic moments from [Hitchcock’s] greatest hits.” Strange, wonderful, ersatz photo shoot from Vanity Fair.
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“Castanaut lets you write executable scripts for your screencasts.”
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“I’ve written many times that the two most important skills for a programmer (IMHO) are communications and learning. In this book, I’m taking a hard look at expertise, thinking and learning.” Interesting looking new book from Andy Hunt.
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Exciting-looking new title from O’Reilly, being developed and written via a wiki. Interesting seeing the emergence of several titles on software engineering as craft rather than science at the moment.
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“I live in … Point Hope Alaska, the oldest continually inhabited settlement or village in ALL of North America.” Wow. Some remarkable photographs from Point Hope resident of 27 years.
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“Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What’s up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world.” Fun physical computing project.
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“TimesMachine can take you back to any issue [of the NYT between 1851 and 1922]”. Some lovely flourishes in the interface, and some remarkable content, as you might expect.
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“A Walking Skeleton is a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It … should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel.”
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“Graticule is a geocoding API for looking up address coordinates and performing distance calculations. It supports many popular APIs.”
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“Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design is a booklet I wrote and designed to introduce advocacy organizations to basic principles and techniques of information design.”
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Wow. Bookmooch has some seriously comprehensive data available from it, if you fancing munging their entire dataset (security-sanitised, obviously).
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“With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.” Wonderful article about education.
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“The problem exists only with binary distributions of MySQL and is related to the installation location of the libraries for the MySQL client that DBD::mysql uses.” Ran into this problem today; wasted an hour on it. Never again.