"I think for a while journalism thought it couldn’t afford the difficult bits, the investigations, the new technology skills, the legal teams, the time for the more complicated problems. We could only secure our survival with automatically generated dancing hamsters and robot-written press releases.

Now when we look at the mighty new networks of our age, I hope we all realise, Us and Them, that these are the very things we can’t afford not to do."

P6: DIY, virtual-analog polysynth; €200 with case in a kit. Looks really nice – sounds good, too, and has a warmth to it.

"Modli warned his listeners to be ready with their cassette recorders, then waited to see the response after he played the screeching and wailing tape into the ether. Soon he began receiving excited calls from his audience, who said they'd been able to load the program – a routine called 'Paginator' – onto their computers. But not everyone was impressed, notably the station heads. "They thought it was a scandalous event!" says Modli. "I had a big problem explaining to them that it was a revolution in radio and they should be proud."" Lovely piece of reporting, with some great tidbits, about Yugoslavia's own little z80 kit-computer from the early 80s.

"I’ve attached a 16-step sequencer to the original Auduino lo-fi synth and have added 8 LEDs and 5 buttons to the original design, and thus the Groovesizer is born." Fun.

"As I understand it, B says, the cliche “writer’s block” actually describes the inability to write anything at all. If you have a problem with a plot, she says, you’re not blocked, you are in fact writing; because the maddeningly slow solution of difficult problems in the context of specific pieces of work is part of the process of writing. In B’s opinion, you aren’t blocked in the cliche sense unless you’ve written nothing for several years and can be played by Mickey Rourke." Yes, that.

"The OWL is an open source, open hardware, reprogrammable effects pedal designed for musicians, coders, and hackers." Ie: a DSP stompbox with an ARM Cortex in it; you reprogram it by writing C++ and uploading new patches over USB.

"We are currently developing a new synth DIY kit. No – it's not another mono synth but a full fledged digital drum machine with integrated step sequencer." ooh.

"A day of support at Mutable Instruments’ is more commonly populated with “If you see a 100kHz square wave at this node, it means the integrator charges itself very fast, probably through the op-amp compensation cap only, not the external cap – check for a bad solder joint on C9” rather than “Have you checked that the power cord is plugged?” (though it happens). Furthermore, once kits get built, ideas of mods and firmware hacks crop up – all requiring expert guidance. All in all, the “support” role at Mutable Instruments is more like “product engineering – the lost levels” – and that’s why, following the introduction of a product – support can be done by no other than the designer of the instruments themselves…" Still, MI's products are getting increasingly lovely. I've always been tempted by a Shruthi, and the Anushri looks lovely.

"Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components." Looks nice; also, lovely splash site.

"Give us dimensions, and we'll generate a PDF you can use to cut a notched box on a laser-cutter." Ooh, nifty.

"The hackable, digital synth": cheap, build-your-own virtual analogue. Interesting.

"I've been working on a sketch wherein some data is downloaded from an HTTP server and is then processed on the Arduino (printed, as it happens, but I don't think that's important). In my original sketches, I was occasionally seeing transfers fail midway through." James is running into issues that might be relevant to me.

"The Shruthi-1 is a hybrid digital/analog monosynth. Its hardware design is deceptively simple, but the sonic range is wide: sometimes grungily digital like a PPG-Wave, fat and funky like a SH-101, videogame-y like a Commodore 64, weird and warm like an ESQ-1 ; but more often than not, truly original." Looks nice, not expensive at all.

"Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works, but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to try and make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that good artists should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception." Oh, this.

Looks like I'm going to have to go get me an Ordning Timer soon, to go with the intervalometer.

"Maybe if I do a good enough job, they'll let me come home." Jesus, this is not far from making me tear up. I really need to do something about my sympathy-for-small-robots thing.

If you're anything like me, you probably never go near the "Indie Games" tab on Live marketplace. Which is a shame: there's some great stuff amongst all the chaff there. This post points to some good stuff from last year; Leave Home is cracking, as is "I maed a gam3…" (don't be put off by the title).

"Abstract shooter with dynamic difficulty and metaphorical explosions. Fixed length game session. Score points. Increase difficulty. Split shots. Leave Home…" 240MSP, for your Xbox 360, and it's out now. That's, like £1.50 or something. It's bloody marvellous; great soundtrack, tough difficulty, lovely use of the analogue trigger, super-pretty in high-def. No excuse not to buy it, really.

"You send an old sweater to my mom. She unravels it… and knits you a scarf." This is brilliant.