"A rats nest of wires on a breadboard is not a finished project, it is an easily damaged mess." So true. Some good examples about designing your hobby projects for maintenance and simplicity.

Great CDM post on using pd on the Raspberry Pi, along with hardware controllers, for a headless MIDI interface. Makes me think about what you could do with this, an MBED, and some cunning.

"The least important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What did he build?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to admire him, to stand in awe of his achievements, to worship him as a hero. But worship isn't useful to anyone. Not you, not him.

The most important question you can ask about Engelbart is, "What world was he trying to create?" By asking that question, you put yourself in a position to create that world yourself."

"It has some unique perspective every once in awhile, but honestly, America can be super derivative. Most of the stories have already been on The Simpsons."

"I’ve attached a 16-step sequencer to the original Auduino lo-fi synth and have added 8 LEDs and 5 buttons to the original design, and thus the Groovesizer is born." Fun.

"I like the idea of mining my data in thirty years or so, realising I spent most of my twenties at trendy coffee shops, airports, and places that don’t exist." Yes, this. This is the main reason I wrote Ghostcar – which is now one of my main reasons for using Foursquare.

"I like the idea of mining my data in thirty years or so, realising I spent most of my twenties at trendy coffee shops, airports, and places that don’t exist." Yes, this. This is the main reason I wrote Ghostcar – which is now one of my main reasons for using Foursquare.

"Instead of using a dolphin model, we would, for example, use a colored rectangular solid or some tapered low-polygon basic shape. This plan would save us all a lot of headaches. Or it would have had I stuck to the plan. More on this later." This is a great post from Robert Hodgin about process, showing-everything, and how sometimes ambition leads to way more work, and is probably the right thing to do. Also: I'm still jealous of people who can think in 3D. That's part of my work for this year.

A great post on the detailed design of an iOS app; I particularly like the focus on animatics, and also on rearranging the screen rather than always swiping to a new one; it's a thing I've sketched before.

This is super-good – not just on ARGs, which aren't necessarily flavour of the month, but on designing difficult puzzles for a large number of people to solve, and how not to be surprised by how fast groups are at solving things when they have the network. Gating the experience with slow tasks – MD5 brute-forcing, for instance, is one nice idea; I also really like Adam's points about making sure players know precisely what is in-universe and what isn't, so there's never a question of whether something is right or not; just like a good cryptic crossword.

"If we were managing a brand would we have been so brutal and focused with these things? Probably not. It would have been someone's job to think of these as valuable brand assets and argue for their preservation. For some reason, as soon as you describe something as a brand all this fake science marketing mysticism gets invoked and paralysing decisions get made." Russell on GOV.UK

Hello Lamppost ends up on the Creative Review blog.

"Analog a la carte is an experiment I (@urtubia, @bigrobotstudios) am conducting for rendering sequences on real synths remotely. This webfrontend will enqueue sequences into a job list that is read by a raspberry-pi at "headquarters". Once the raspi receives the job, it then both sends the sequence via midi to a synth and records it in realtime. Finally it encodes the resulting audio file into an mp3 file and uploads it to Amazon S3, so that this server is nice and ready for getting more sequence requests."

"About 1 minute and 4 seconds after Gunpoint became available for pre-order on the evening of Monday the 27th of May, it had recouped its development costs. This was not entirely surprising, since the only direct development cost was buying Game Maker 8 for $30 three years ago.

The surprising bit happened next." It is really lovely that Gunpoint has worked out so well for Tom. It's an interesting little game, and I'm glad he's going to keep poke "interesting" games rather than having to make a pile of money. Well done him.