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.

Hadn't encountered this – interesting tool for sketching/prototyping type selections.

Nominally, this is about making your iOS apps smaller, but it's actually a great piece on how to think about software design and production.

"In time I wasn’t plugging in my newly arrived modules so quickly. I was spending more time looking at them, admiring their structures, noting aspects unique to various individual companies. Some modules have lovely design flourishes, bits of fantastic line art right there on the circuit board, so enticing it threatens to give “cyberpunk” a good name all over again. Others have funny little phrases, puns on functionality, like where the power supply goes, or little axioms that both gently mock and encourage the beholder—Barbara Kruger by way of circuitry. This is what I now first look for when I unpack a new module." Really nice Marc Weidenbaum piece on the aesthetics and semantics of circuit-board design.