-
"nanoc is a tool that runs on your local computer and compiles Markdown, Textile, Haml, etc. documents into static web pages, ready for uploading to any web host." Easily build static sites with a teeny bit of templating.
-
"This library implements the Software serial Arduino library to establish a serial connection to a Mobile phone. The methods methods hides the AT+ commands from the user allowing messages to be sent by passing the method on a phone number or email and the message." Oh, now that is interesting.
-
"Late last year, my family found a line-a-day diary maintained by my great-aunt from 1937 to 1941. She was in her early teens, living on a small farm in rural Illinois with her two brothers, one of which was my grandfather." Now it's being syndicated, one line per day, on Twitter.
-
"This is the real line-a-day diary of a young farmgirl in 1937. It is maintained by @griner."
-
"We should be an embodied person in the world rather than a disembodied finger tickling a screen walking down the street. We need to unfold and unpack the screen into the world." Wonderfully put. I love Jones.
-
"Reputation with various factions are being rebalanced. The gradated reputation scale was erroneously being overwritten by the binary For Us/ Against Us flag." Entertaining explanation of the changes in the White House in the style of World of Warcraft patch notes. No, really.
-
"News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period."
-
"Drop7 combines the easy fun of casual drop-and-break games with the smart, brain-stretching enjoyment of simple number puzzles." Chain Factor as-was hits the iPhone. It's very, very good. It's also $0.99 or 59p right now, so you should buy it.
-
Lots of suggestions for simple but yummy puddings here. Will need to check this list out again.
-
"If you need to perform data analysis, provide graphics for your users in your webapp, or produce high quality plots I encourage you to investigate the combination of ruby, GSL and GNUPlot." Looks good. I should probably give this a poke some time; could come in handy.
-
"Feed cake to the cat for a megaburp; use the owl to block bullets." Lovely: you control the fat cat *and* the owl; the owl makes a path for the cat. It's slightly bulletty in places, and juggling two controls is tricky, but still quite laidback. A lovely, lovely flash shmup. The artwork and music helps, too.
-
"So much joyful digital stuff is only a pleasure because it's hugely convenient; quick, free, indoors, no heavy lifting. That's enabled lovely little thoughts to get out there. But as 'digital natives' get more interested in the real world; embedding in it, augmenting it, connecting it, weaponising it, arduinoing it, printing it out, then those thoughts/things need to get better. And we might all need to acquire some analogue native skills." Yes. I am slighty frustrated by the attitude that you can make anything physical with an Arduino and some other stuff. It's the "other stuff" that's the important bit.
-
"Our tireless multi-touch team is pleased to announce another bit of software meant to make your prototyping life a bit easier, via support for using a wiimote with our flash API to quickly turn any TV or projection surface into a multi-touch environment" Nice, simple, hacky.
-
The comments thread on this is pretty epic, and I'm really not wading into that one. Suffice to say: it's quite a while before somebody mentions the word "criticism", and it's not in the main body of the article at all. That's the important word, to my mind.
-
"Of all the adverts I’ve seen this year, I think this (late entry) surprised me the most. Not because of the concept – the hilarious coincidence that sometimes people who are not famous share names with people who are famous has been used before – or the clumsy copy. It surprised me because I actually know the person in the photograph. And she really is called Julia Roberts." So do I. She really is, you know.
-
Lovely article about the White House cinema, the first occupant of which was Eisenhower. I came upon this post-"If Gamers Ran The World" if only to find out who the first film-literate (ie: willing to have it inside the White House) president was. The article is a gem.
-
"Obama polled 62% across the whole Azeroth population, with McCain been favoured by Alliance whilst Obama is the pick of the Horde." Oh. That *is* interesting.
-
Detailed write-up from Alice of a presentation from Turbine – the stuff on where to draw boundaries between game and web is really, really interesting.
-
Oh god, pets now have talent trees. Why does the game get complex just as I've begun?
-
"Making games is easy! Well, okay, maybe it's actually kind of hard, but starting out is easy at least! Especially when you have Kongregate's shootorials (shooting tutorials) to guide you through the process." Tutorial on making a 2D shooter in CS3. Awesome!
-
"So to recap, we have scraped some data from a wikipedia page into a Google spreadsheet using the =importHTML formula, published a handful of rows from the table as CSV, consumed the CSV in a Yahoo pipe and created a geocoded KML feed from it, and then displayed it in a Yahoo map." Wow, etc.
-
"The dataspace of the well-tempered environment will soon be invaded by logos, credits, banners and offers. The financial temptations will, I suspect, be too hard to resist." Loads of excellent stuff in here besides this, though. Can't recommend enough.
-
This is wonderful "wilfully fictional" advertising: an affectionate pastiche of the geek's love of unboxing videos, with some wish-fulfillment as to what unboxing ought to really look like.
-
"And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge? I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago." Too many quotations to choose from in this; wonderful writing from Simon Parkin.
-
"The upcoming presidential election has seen record fund-raising by the candidates and a host of new donors. Now we want our users to be able to analyze and reuse some of the data we’ve been looking at while reporting on the campaign."
-
"Do you really want them campaigning in your hobby? I don’t."
-
Fascinating to see such emphasis on the manufacturing process, accompanied with wonderful footage of factories that takes me straight back to the documentary sections in Playschool and Sesame Street. The milling sequence is beautiful. (The product isn't bad, either, but I'm mainly interested in raising awareness of mass-production in an age of coming scarcity).
-
"Alternate movie posters about film brand integration." Beautiful, typographically speaking, and definitely honest.
-
"Imagine if Apple had decided to make a MacBook that was priced like an iPod. That's what Asus is doing."
-
"If you've ever needed to produce PDF documents before, in Ruby or another language, you probably know how much it can suck. Prawn takes the pain out of generating beautiful printable documents, while still remaining fast, tiny and nimble. It is also named after a majestic sea creature, and that has to count for something."
-
"EA has confirmed that the advert was paid for by Obama."
-
"I wasn’t concerned when Netscape started losing market share to Microsoft. I didn’t sweat it when the stock price stalled. The reason I started thinking about my next gig was, months before either of these two events occurred, one of the lunchtime bridge team left. The game stopped. The small group of four no longer spent a long lunch quietly, unknowingly defining the culture of the company and everyone who was watching noticed."
-
"The 2 opponents perform magical gestures with their hands to create their supernatural weapons – spells. Some are so potent as to be able to blind a man, call forth terrifying creatures, or even kill the unfortunate victim instantly. Consequently each wizard must rely on his own cunning to be able to time enough defensive spells to avoid the brunt of his adversary's attack, yet force in sufficient offensive spells of his own to crack the magical armour of his opponent, and kill the wizard outright. The game is an attempt to capture the spirit of such a battle in as simple yet exciting way as possible." The "waving hands" game by Richard Bartle.
Obama for America, the MMO
07 October 2008
Almost everybody’s linked to the Obama ’08 Official iPhone Application by now. With just cause, as well; it’s a nifty, attractive piece of crowdsourced software development that focuses on a single task that’s well suited to mobile – canvassing – and provides the amateur campaigner with the tools to canvas more effectively.
Skimming over the official page, though, I couldn’t help but notice this in the list of features:
See nationwide Obama ’08 Call Friends totals and find out how your call totals compare to leading callers.
So whilst you’re canvassing your friends and recording just how many of them are going to vote for Barack in November, you can also compare yourself to how everybody else using the app is doing. In one click, you’ve got a massively multiplayer high score chart – and of course, you’re going to want to beat everybody else on there, so you go off to canvas some more.
Obama for America just launched an MMO, and nobody noticed.
-
"…then, after destroying his nano-network, as an admonition to the audience, extended [Arthur C Clarke's metaphor]: 'Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage.'" Excellent summary of what sounds like a wonderful GDC Austin keynote from Bruce Sterling.
-
"'What we've done in MMOs and what we tend to lean toward is building an enviroment for the new player to explore that is essentially a safe environment… the newbie zone. For our explorative learners, we've given them safe zones to explore.' But that doesn't work for imitative learners." Excellent article on styles of learning, with particular attention to how MMOs teach players game mechanics.
-
"Very recently an anonymous poster on /b/ claimed to have hacked Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account." 4chan members get into Sarah Palin's barely-disguised Yahoo mail accounts which she used for business.
-
Oh boy.
-
“I decided to create Flatshare fridge because there is nothing more disgusting than a dirty fridge in a shared flat,” he says. “At the time, I was living in such a flat!” Amazing.
-
"It occurred to me that if I could somehow tether a DSLR to an instant-on device like an Arduino microcontroller I would have less weight to carry around and could get more work done. After mentally spec’ing out what I would need, I realized the solution was right in front of me – because I bring it with me for Mario Kart wireless races on long night jobs – (In the manner of John Lasseter’s slow epiphany voice): “Use-the-Nintendo-D-S.” Duh." Oh wow.
-
Soulja Boy reviews Braid. Oh dear. (Although: much as I want to mock it, he is correct that time-rewind mechanics are, usually, a lot of fun in and of themselves. But still.)
-
"To be seen as art, games need to be easier. A lot easier. They don't have to be only easy. They can provide Elite Super Awesome levels for the enjoyment of those who love to be challenged." Eesh, I don't know. I think there needs to be easier games – hell, games are getting easier all the time – but a super-hardcore game like Psyvariar does _not_ need a built-in easy mode. Its purpose is to be hard. Not convinced by this article at all, unfortunately.
-
"Because stupidity is such an unthinkably terrible thing in our culture, the students will then spend hours constructing arguments that explain why they are intelligent yet are having difficulties. The moment you start down this path, you have lost your focus."
-
"Innovation seems to mean doing something so significantly different that you alienate the userbase that should be familiar with your product. More applaudable, in my mind, are those games that smuggle in small amounts of unique and exciting gameplay that enhances the experience without fundamentally redefining it… Warhammer Online is a game that abounds with this kind of innovation. From elements that are purely new and thought provoking, to small gameplay tweaks that subtly push new perspectives on tired MMO cliches, there is a lot of good stuff to be found in the game." Brandon Reihnart takes a look at WAR.
-
4chan /b/ thread on the American economic deficit, which explains things quite well, and has stick-man-anon illustrations to boot.