"Flogr shows your pictures from flickr in a customizable photo portfolio interface which includes a main photo page with EXIF details and flickr user comments, a customizable thumbnails page of your recent work, a slideshow component to browse through thumbnails, a tag cloud page, and an about page that shows your flickr user profile. With flogr you can control which photos are shown by specifying the flickr tag(s) to include so you can show only your best photographs if you choose." Which is something I've been looking for for a while. Glad I didn't have to write it, now.

"NameChanger is designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files."

"Fortunately, modern displays can display characters that look exactly like this without special circuitry used in the original DEC terminals and there is free software that can be used to create a usable outline font out of a PNG image." Recreating VT220 terminal fonts in software, and from thence into Truetype.

"LimeChat is an IRC client for Mac OS X written on RubyCocoa." I did not know about this. It looks nice.

"Easily show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows." Which is hard, and it is nice to know someone else has done the work.

"Do you like cities? Do you like architecture? Do you like speaking at conferences?" I think this has sewn up the 2010-11 circuit.

""Who amongst us will write the Building as Contacts and Related Goodness blog post?" It's worth remembering, I think, that he [Dan Catt] already has."

"Egmont Press and Penguin Publishing will launch a range of children's books onto the Nintendo DS in a licensing deal with entertainment software company Electronic Arts (EA). It is the first time that children's books have been developed specifically for the Nintendo DS platform in the UK." Ooh, that's kind of awesome.

"Gemcutter is the next generation of gem hosting for the Ruby community. Instantly publish your gems and install them. Use the API to interact and find out more information about available gems. Become a contributor and enhance the site with your own changes." Apparently this is the next big thing, post-github not serving gems. Let's chase this trend for a bit.

"…it’s been a week and we’ve decided to not bring back the gem builder. It was a fun experiment but Jeweler and Gemcutter combined make it ridiculously simple to publish a gem. The gem builder use case (fork a project, make a change, publish a gem, install it) is now easier than ever using these tools." Which is all very nice, but a bit of a PITA for anyone who'd been depending on this. Still: gems.github.com will serve for another year.

"In Nokogiri  's are converted to whitespace, but they are not a normal space and aren't removed with the standard String#strip and friends." Needless to say, this is somewhat annoying. Thanks for fixing it, internet!

Jones has the keys to the helicarrier: "in summary: Schulze is spending the week in zero-g combat training, Tom is playing with an orangutan genome that he got from some guy in Zurich and I’m building a laser-harp."

Really rather good, from what I've read so far, especially for prototyping.

Really excellent presentation on the basics of SPARQL – lots of good examples, lots of hands-on stuff, and clear. Worth going back to.

"Designed by London architect Julian Hakes, the Mojito shoe is made of carbon fiber—to give it strength and spring—and laminated with rubber on the bottom and leather—from furniture manufacturers in High Wycombe, England—on top." Gorgeous.

"Here is a needlework sampler I’ve made based on the tradition of needlework samplers and the processes used by producers to create contemporary musical compositions."

"Players stand in front of a green screen while the game films them and creates a music video background while they sing. Their performance is then emailed to them or burnt onto a DVD players can take home." Awesome. Unfortunately, the project has been canned. Still, it's worth watching the slightly cringey videos of the developers playing it, because it's a nifty bit of code.

"It all boils down to a Ruby script that runs on OS X only and uses OS X’s really awesome typography and subpixel antialiased font rendering. Why not tap into this to make those headline graphics? With Rubycocoa you can easily whip up a small app that draws some text, and save it into a PNG file." Um, blimey.

Icebergs and Shorelines; I love the Icebergs series particularly. What a rich page for a gallery.

"3. Take Notice: Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you." All very good advice – and, frankly, what I knew already – but this one felt particularly appropriate, given Noticings.

This is a pretty good guide – made sense, got me up and running fast, and nice and clearly written.

"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." Simon makes a strong point about Scribblenauts.

"Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender."

"Briefs is a framework for packaging concept screens & control schemes that run live on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This allows you to experience the feel of your concept without the expense of development." Ooh.

"rush is a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax. Grep through files, find and kill processes, copy files – everything you do in the shell, now in Ruby." Equal parts "ooh" and "hunh?", I think.

"…we roped in Nate McFeters, another local, and put together a security talk for indie Mac developers with no budget for security. What does a security talk for Mac developers look like? As it turns out, it’s very much like the talk we think every indie developer, Mac or not, should see, and it’s very much unlike the talk the rest of the security industry is giving." Good stuff: simple, clear, well-thought out, and very hard to argue with.

"Michael Abrash's classic Graphics Programming Black Book is a compilation of Michael's previous writings on assembly language and graphics programming (including from his "Graphics Programming" column in Dr. Dobb's Journal). Much of the focus of this book is on profiling and code testing, as well as performance optimization. It also explores much of the technology behind the Doom and Quake 3-D games, and 3-D graphics problems such as texture mapping, hidden surface removal, and the like." My old URL for this no longer works, but fortunately, this one does.

"The commercial worked on Lucas but a few years later, the computer graphics group at ILM was sold by Lucas to Steve Jobs for $5 million and became Pixar. Loren Carpenter is still at Pixar today; he's the company's Chief Scientist." Marvellous.

"slideViewer (a jQuery image slider built on a single unordered list)". Which looks nifty.

"Flicking over to the old graphics — and I, for one, found it almost impossible not to do so on every screen — shows you the game as you originally experienced it, and it looks completely different. Suddenly you remember the old imagery too. Conceptual memory gives way to visual memory, in a clear illustration of how the mind functions on different levels. It’s an odd experience, first thinking you recognise something, then discovering that the original was in fact quite different, but that you now remember that too, as additional detail. In one way it’s a contradiction, and in another it’s sharper focus." Emmett on the Monkey Island remake, and the ability to dynamically swap between old and new interfaces.

"So to come full circle with the sense of dissatisfaction with open world games: I think the way we experience them, by comparison with linear games, says something about how our gaming imagination functions. We seem to understand that when linear games point us in a certain direction, that’s the way to go. When an open world game appears, its very structure suggests something about how we should behave, or want to behave, and predisposes us to judge on the basis of how it entices us to go somewhere that the game itself hasn’t suggested, and on how it then deals with that action." Jim on open-world gaming.

"While creepily capitalist in its language, the scholarship within it is sound – echoing theories that Jacobs, Alexander others presented decades ago. What’s more – it contains a lot of the same arguments for iterative design that you see in traditional game design tomes. (For a special treat – try replacing the phrases like “destination” and “retail” with “MMO” and “boxed-game”)"

"Appfrica Labs is an investment company and software development firm that facilitates and incubates technology entrepreneurs in East Africa. We do this by offering a physical space with a solid internet connection, servers, software and computers that allows entrepreneurs a place to develop their ideas in a constructive environment with industry professionals as mentors, outside of school. Entrepreneur projects are refined and prepped to help them secure funding and launch sustainable, profitable businesses." I met Jon who runs Appfrica at TEDGlobal last week; it's a great idea and, by the sounds of things, doing very well.

I am not an expert in these matters, but that is rather lovely.

That performance of Billie Jean. But with a Giant White Glove. Brilliant.

"On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively." This is amazing. And what it leads to is even better.

Thoughtbot discover their RFID door-lock system has an API. A short bash at some code later, and they now have theme songs when they enter the office.

"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.

"Peter Newman's Skystation is a circular sculpture inspired by the form of Le Corbusier's LC4 chaise longue which encourages the user to lie down and contemplate the vast expanse of space above and beyond." I rather like that. Doesn't look comfortable, but I agree with the sentiment.

"After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites." Hur hur hur.

"The next time you see an application you like, think very long and hard about all the user-oriented details that went into making it a pleasure to use, before decrying how you could trivially reimplement the entire damn thing in a weekend. Nine times out of ten, when you think an application was ridiculously easy to implement, you’re completely missing the user side of the story." Yes. Similarly: what you don't see is the decision-making, everything that was thrown away.