"this portion of moby.com, 'film music', is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short… the music is free as long as it's being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short. if you want to use it in a commercial film or short then you can apply for an easy license, with any money that's generated being given to the humane society." Moby is smart when it comes to licensing his music. I think this is a really good move, and not something you'd expect from a major recording artist.

"For one, there's an undercurrent of a siege mentality in journalism right now, with newsrooms cutting staff and print operations frozen stiff in the headlights of the internet. The focus on narrative and story gives a softer edge and an escape valve, though – this group is not primarily a tech-driven community, but they catch on to new developments quickly and bend them into the service of storytelling." Interesting round-up from Mike, particularly with respect to the NYT's election coverage.

“You know what a sign of love is, in this family? It’s if you come home and the elevator is on the ground floor,” says Linda. “Because that means whoever came home before you walked up twelve flights of stairs.” Fantastic article about Jay Maisel's house.

"People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it… you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?

Wonderful.

"There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people… Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."

"Recently I had been wondering what the complete list of HTTP status code symbols was in Rails. Searching through Rails didn't yield any results for a symbol like :unprocessable_entity… Rails defines the symbol to status code mapping dynamically from the status message. The symbol used is an underscored version of the status message with no spaces." Quick list of clear textual shorthand for returning HTTP status.

"Let’s no longer think in terms of selling them a game. Let’s instead think of selling them an experience." A nice article on the changing shape of game design, particularly when it comes to narrative and participatory hooks.

"Every year on or around the same day … at the same time of day and from the same position a photograph is taken at each of the twenty locations on this map which is based on a circle of half a mile radius drawn around the place where the project was devised. It is hoped that this process will be carried on into the future and beyond the deviser's death for as long as the possibility of continuing and the will to undertake the task persist." Tom Phillips project, as mentioned in Reading the Everyday.

"Boxer is a DOS game emulator for OS X, built around the powerful DOSBox. Boxer aims to make it easy and painless to play your DOS games."

"Microsoft may very well not be broken. The world needs reliable bureaucracies that mollify the needs of corporations and individuals in the center of the market. But if it is broken, advertising isn't going to fix it."

"Some people believe that there's no correlation between quality and sales, and thus think that the way to make money is to make things that are easily marketable (read: licenses). Game developers themselves usually argue that sales above a certain level require a game to be sufficient quality. I decided to see which of these perspectives was correct for the Playstation 2 era." Datanalysismachinego!

"Of course, to get the most points, your band needs a bassist. And nobody wants to play bass. So if you want to lead a full band, you're going to have to play bass yourself. And this is like life!" Lovely article from Torpex' Jamie Fristrom.

A strong article from Joe on some guidelines, based on experience, for writing RSpec user stories.

Getting around the issues with Rails' authenticity tokens and trying to perform Ajax requests in jQuery.

"I think this is very important. If we limit ourselves to only designing the present then the ‘future’ will just happen to us, and the one we get will be driven by technology and economics. We need to develop ways of speculating that are grounded in fact yet engage the imagination and allow us to debate different possible futures before they happen." Interesting interview with Dunne over at the Adobe site.

Fingerboarding game for the iPod; really delightful, and clearly a fun thing to do with your fingers. Also: it makes sense to play this with the device on a flat surface, which is unusual for the iPod games released to date.

"The winner is Tim Graham who took manual personal data collection to another level. From email spam, to beverage consumption, to aches and pains, Tim embraced the spirit of self-surveillance. He even made his personal data available in the forums." Dataviz overload!

"What are the weird, seemingly unimportant data that can join up the areas we already know, and how do we know where to look for it? In order to be truly useful eyes on the street, we need to be able to take the scenic route, or shortcuts, or any other route that will be fun or illuminating for us and the people we speak to."

"Being able to go back and fix your mistakes is not the same as being forgiven for them. Maybe that’s what all those storybooks were trying to tell us." Lovely.

"If you’re an adult who’s at a place in life where you need to pretend you’re interested in people whom you are not actually interested in, then “fake following” should be more than adequate for your needs. But, if you’re here to actually read things and to enjoy the thoughts, photos, and opinions of actual people who have good and bad streaks, it wouldn’t hurt to have an easy way to hit “snooze” for a while." Merlin Mann is very sensible.

"It seems to me that Tim and the nameless characters of the epilogue represent archetypes of some kind. They don’t stand in for every man and woman, certainly, but they’re emblematic of a certain kind of dysfunctional relationship, one where “I’ll protect you” turns into “I’ll control you.”" A smart, sharp reading of Braid, that understands its gameiness.

"The mouse is a continuous pointing device; the finger is discontinuous. That’s a profound difference that I wish I were able to clearly understand and explain." PPK on how MobileSafari responds to Javascript's mouse actions.

"I think, in these fleshed out circumstances, an RPG could be the most remarkable place for getting to grips with matters like abortion and euthanasia. I think _because_ they’re the sorts of subjects it’s completely pointless to talk about in the pub, because it inevitably descends into people entrenching themselves in their currently held position and then hurling stones at the other side, that the RPG would be a space in which the emphasis of thought and consideration would be squarely on you." John Walker on the problem with BioWare's attitude to morality, and some potential solutions.

"Opentape is a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web. Upload songs (via web or FTP), reorder, rename, customize the style, and share what you like on other sites with an embeddable player."

"I've heard that Japanese developers, who have traditionally held American game development in low esteem, have a great deal of respect for Bungie, and you can understand why. Bungie has done for shooters what Nintendo did for platformers: they've turned the visceral joys control and motion into the centerpiece of the game."

"Thomas Finchum, an American diver competing in Beijing, describes the view from the 10-meter platform at the Water Cube." Incredible, interactive panorama from the top board in the Water Cube.

"Greebles are the parts that "look cool, but don't actually do anything". There's an entire discipline here composed of special effects artists and asset designers working to hide the plywood spaceships and simple game world polygons beneath an encrusted surface texture." And this is the trick to make the little bits look like part of a whole. Lovely talk from Mike at UXWeek.

"One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates… It's one of the few new social features I've seen that makes being online buddies with someone manageable and doesn't just make being social a game or competition."

"Dark! All-encompassing, eternal darkness! Human eyes cannot penetrate the stygian blackness of this unholy confection!" Lovely.

"iPhon.fr posts (via Gizmodo) screenshots of what claim to be the upcoming Nike+ running application for iPhone." Pretty, and with a greater emphasis on The Graph. Want.