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

"Hacking is disruptive, and whether you code software, write books, or film movies, I believe bringing anything new into the world is a disruptive act. By being novel and compelling, the new is likely to replace something else and that something else isn’t being replaced without a fight." Great stuff from Rands.

"Sugar is a Javascript library that extends native objects with helpful methods. It is designed to be intuitive, unobtrusive, and let you do more with less code." Looks nice – and suitably Javascripty.

"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.

"The Fretless Fader concept involves a cross fader which can move vertically as well as horizontally, allowing an extra parameter to be controlled simultaneously with the traditional fader movement – most notably, pitch. It’s probably best demonstrated in video…" Nice chat about productising this, but seriously, the first video is marvellous – it's "Drunk Trumpet" all over again…

"Here’s my notes for the talk Streaming Massive Environments from 0 to 200 MPH presented by Chris Tector from Turn 10 Studios. He’s listed as a Software Architect there, and obviously has a deep understanding of the streaming system they used on Forza 3. This talk was nice and deep technically, and touches all parts of the spectrum." Very technical. But: if you can grok what's going on (and this is about at the limits of my simple understanding – could barely start to recreate what's described), it's very interesting about the challenge of rendering beautiful, high detail environments at a solid 60fps, mainly by pre-preparing a lot, and maximising streaming performance both from disk and from memory.

"A computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988." Looks jolly good.

Ben Heck made his own pinball table. And it's not some half-baked pinball table running off a connected PC, with off the shelf components; it's largely built from scratch, from the cabinet to the LED matrix (!). All running off a single microcontroller. He's a smart guy.

EMSL dissect a classic Tomy wind-up semi-electronic game – in this case, a version of Pong. Amazing what you could do with mechanics (even if that included "making the singleplayer game entirely unfair").

"Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley from the Street Fighter 3 series have all been confirmed as new characters in Super Street Fighter 4 by Famitsu magazine." And now it's a confirmed day one purchase for me. (Seriously, Makoto and Dudley were my two mains in SF3. This is going to be brilliant. Seichusen Godanzuki!)

"How good is that?" It is super-good, that's how good.

"Cheating is hacking for the masses. It is one of many opportunities to ‘soft programme’ our technologies and culture without heavy reliance on advanced knowledge. Cheating creates an opportunity to play with design, think about it, and tinker around. By effectively unbalancing a game, we can move behind the screen to consider games through their limits. If you put too many assets on screen with the Sonic debug mode, the system would freeze and crash. In this it taught young players an important truth about games; that they aren’t infinite systems, but rather careful gestures reliant on an economy of elements. Cheats of the kind seen in Sonic fostered a generation of gamers to be both critical and respectful of what games are. Knowing that the level is one configuration among many comes from a point of view only afforded through cheating." David Surman is writing more about games, and it is a good thing.

"Yesterday was the inaugural papercamp in London, alongside its big sister bookcamp. I presented a half bookish half paperish presentation about travel guides. What I forgot to mention or make explicit: how there are totally different stages and needs for guide books – especially pre-booking, pre-travel, during travel, during holiday. So here is, from memory, what I talked about, with a few additions:" This was jolly good, an a neat branching point between the Paper and the Books.

Lots of corrections. addenda, and general props from John Romero (who has a sweet personal domain) about the Game Developer article from 1994 linked to recently. Some interesting stuff, including commentary on the NeXTStep screengrab, some of the internal toolchain, and a few clarifications about the id/Apogee/Softdisk relationship.

"We aim to re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras in 2010. We have acquired Polaroid's old equipment, factory and seek your support." They're serious. Wow.

"A Ruby library that wraps the Viapost SOAP API, providing an easy way of sending post (you know, real letter box post) from your applications."

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.

Oh my. And I thought Astley didn't really like all the publicity from this. Clearly he's had a change of heart.

"The Fuzebox is a fully open-source, DIY 8-bit game console. It is designed specifically for people who know a little bit of programming to expand into designing and creating their own video games and demos. A full-featured core runs in the background and does all the video and audio processing so that your code stays clean and easy to understand." Ooh, that could be interesting.