"While cruising through the LIFE archive, I found a mesmerizing series of images of Mr. Billingsley demonstrating his own brand of nightclub-code via hand gestures. The full set of images are below." Brilliant.

"Since I got my iPhone 4S, I’ve been intrigued, fascinated and alarmed by Siri’s fast-growing capabilities. I thought it would make sense to introduce her to my psychotherapist, Eliza." Now I think about it, surprised it's taken someone so long to do this (considering all the other Siri 'gags' floating around).

"The claim is that by avoiding the daylight hours, fewer customers will be impacted by the rollout.  Problem 1: You presume there will be problems that impact availability.  You have no confidence in your code quality; or (or maybe, and), you have no confidence in your infrastructure and deployment process.  If you lack confidence that your new system is ready for production, you probably shouldn’t be pushing it to production!"

"Send in your child's drawing – one that they drew and coloured and Child's Own Studio will handcraft a unique stuffed toy, to be cherished for a lifetime."

"Software development is not pure coding, engineering, architecture, management, or design. It is cross-disciplinary. Better yet, it is its own discipline. It is more akin to making a movie than to building automobiles on an assembly line. The studio revolves around talent. Great software talent means renaissance developers who have passion, creativity, discipline, domain knowledge, and user empathy. These traits are backed by architecture, design, and by technical know-how that spans just knowing the technology flavor of the day. Process is the studio; it has structure but is flexible enough to optimize talent and tools." This post is as dogmatic as what it rails against, but it's good at finding flaws in dogma and then pushing towards a more sympathetic view. And this paragraph is the best bit.

"All operating systems know when they were born. Their internal clocks start counting then, so they can calculate the date and time in the future. It is unclear whether it was Mr Ritchie or Mr Thompson who set the so-called start Unix time at January 1st, 1970. That moment came to be known as the epoch. Mr Ritchie helped bring it about. And with it, he ushered in a new era." Which is as poetic a way as any of expressing how deeply rooted K&R are in the modern world.

"OSTRICH offers a micro environment in which to take a warm and comfortable power nap at ease. It is neither a pillow nor a cushion, nor a bed, nor a garment, but a bit of each at the same time. Its soothing cave-like interior shelters and isolates our head and hands (mind, senses and body) for a few minutes, without needing to leave our desk." want so much

"A great deal of what is called `digital art’ is not digital art at all, and it seems many digital artists seem ashamed of the digital.  In digital installation art, the screen and keyboard are literally hidden in a box somewhere, as if words were a point of shame.  The digital source code behind the work is not shown, and all digital output is only viewable by the artist or a technician for debugging purposes.  The experience of the actual work is often entirely analog, the participant moves an arm, and observes an analog movement in response, in sight, sound or motor control.  They may choose to make jerky, discontinuous movements, and get a discontinuous movement in response, but this is far from the complexity of digital language.  This kind of installation forms a hall of mirrors.  You move your arm around and look for how your movement has been contorted."

"If I were in London now or in the next few weeks, instead of Frieze I'd probably be getting to these shows." Rod's lists are always good.

I've used the Settings plugin a lot, but it's very old and dusty. This is a nice fork of it, ported to Rails 3, and saved for future reference.

"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope. The game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach."

Lovely behind-the-scenes on how the Guardian iPod app slowly evolved.

"I've long held that all media transit from being "functional" to "art" when they are no longer economically viable. It is that transition which dampers the cost and the consequence of failure and makes the space necessary for people to experiment and play. Think of lithography which was born of purely utilitarian needs and sherparded the arrival of the mass-produced image only to become capital-O objects as soon as the offset press was invented." I love Aaron.

"This is a cross between Minesweeper and an RPG. You gain levels by killing weak monsters and win when you defeat them all. It's a bit different than Minesweeper in that the number you reveal when you click on a square is the total of the levels of the monsters in adjacent squares." Uh-oh.

"His earliest revelation about how the TV medium worked—one that heavily influences Community—came courtesy of a Cheers board game he spotted at a toy store. He realized that the characters were so relatable and their dynamics so clearly defined that anyone could step into their lives—even in a board game." Brilliant interview with Dan Harmon – but this paragraph really leapt out at me.

An unexpected place for a Le Guin interview, but it's great nontheless.

"It’s hard to believe that there was a time when any of these weren’t conventional wisdom, but there was such a time. Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I’ve seen or am likely to see in my lifetime.

It is impossible — absolutely impossible — to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I’ve been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."

List of all 58 fonts now in iOS, mainly for reference. (Although, eesh, Zapfino AND Papyrus? Really?)

Critical, critical, to the world we live in today.

"And all this time I can’t help thinking that this was because I’m working with games. If I was a fimmaker, this is issue would never crop up. But games have to constantly defend their status as a way of creative expression. When creating games, you are by default suspected of either selling out or producing nothing of value what so ever. Or both." Seriously, Vimeo need to sort this out: it's embarrassing, and contrary to the messages they send out.

"I wanted to talk about the Occupy $CITY movement here (in fact, that’s where this post started); a protest movement that is not about the event, or the movement through the city, or even the disruption per se. It is protest as part of the fabric of the city; a constant questioning and reassessment of a conversation with both the fabric of the city physically, economically and politically; taking the concept of Wall St and Main St and making it suddenly concrete, forcing a conversation to take place."

"If this doesn’t seem like a big issue imagine the state of cinema if film students were only able to study films made in the last two decades? Or if English Literature students no longer have the ability to examine the works of Shakespeare or Twain? What might be lost?" Seriously, companies: stop turning servers off. Processor power is cheap.

"Q: I don't imagine that a design meeting with Takahashi is a typical PowerPoint affair.

A: He has singlehandedly invented the animated GIF as the design spec. It's fucking hilarious." Animated GIF as design spec. Superb. (And: nice interview with Stuart Butterfield about Glitch).