"i have made an "electronic" 8bit calculator (not "mechanical" calculator) with the Beta LBP demo.it do decimal/binary conversions and it can do Add and Sub… computation take clearly less that a half second. this calculator use: – 610 magnetic switches – 500 Wires – 430 pistons – 70 emitters and others stuff…" Amazing – especially the pan-out to the whole contraption.

"The big dilemma is that needs are different. I’m normally on Mobile Google Maps when I’m frantically trying to find a place, often the hotel I’ve booked. I’m lost, I want to sleep – I’m not exploring the possibility space, and I don’t want to wade through marketing garbage. Note that this doesn’t make sense for these kinds of advertisers either: I’ve booked already, and I don’t want alternatives." Once again, the problems of the mobile context (rather than the mobile technology) rear their heads.

"On April 1, 1977 the British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page “special report” about San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles described the geography and culture of this obscure nation." Wonderful

Oh gosh, the Rock Band 2 community site is lovely. Lovely URLs, lovely public-facing site with no wall, lovely. (Thanks, Brandon).

"The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order – jugglers and prostitutes for example – and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." Wow. I did not know that.

"When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?" Amazing.

"The technology will probably improve, but in lieu of the promised emergent web AI, we need to build more small tools, more games to bootstrap datasets, and more simple ways of encouraging people to play their part in the semantic web without ever having to explain what it is." tt++.

Fantastic presentation from Giles Bowkett, which is about generative music, art, shipping, Ruby, and building things for yourself.

"Paine does have a descendent, a place where his values prosper and are validated millions of times a day: the Internet. There, his ideas about communications, media ethics, the universal connections between people, the free flow of honest opinion are all relevant again, visible every time one modem shakes hands with another." Fantastic article

"At its core, what should this product be best at? When users think of this product, what is the central feature(s) that should spring to mind? Everything else is distraction, clutter, cruft."

"I think this vision of artistic expression as a form of collaboration is a truer description of the nature of game design than of any other medium, because video games are inherently interactive." Pliskin on Steve Gaynor, and the gap between the screen and the gamepad.

Portal-inspired homebrew game for the DS. Looks rather sweet, although not keen on collect-em-up mechanics.

Now the NDA is gone, this looks like a good starting point. Honest.

"Content is an expensive, messy business and fraught with quality risk. Network resources like minutes and texts are an attractive commodity and one where the wholesale price is falling all the time." Interesting analysis of Blyk.

"Ladies and gentleman, Hello World 2.0 uses no fewer than 7 messages queues, three command line applications (which can be executed on physically separate machines), and two Inversion of Control frameworks (but I’m fixing that tomorrow)." Huddle look at moving towards message queues.

Web Inspector gets an overhaul; it's looking pretty nice, now.

"The Pencil Project's unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use." Hmn.

"Here is a video which gives some insight into how Little Big Planet ( and Media Molecule! ) evolved from next to nothing into what it is today!" MediaMolecule put the LBP repository into codeswarm, and then published the video. Lovely.

"Rososo shows you which bookmarks have updated, and hides the rest. It is a good alternative to newsreaders, which, like your email inbox, tend to accumulate obligation and guilt." Not sure about only showing sites, rather than content, but I like the idea of peaceful software a lot.

"The Geoblogomatic is little machine that turns blogs into maps. It's in beta" "If you have a blog about places, or things in places, the Geoblogomatic can make a map of your blog posts." Awesome. Another fun thing from Tom.

"This is the funny thing: appreciation of Mega Man music is a microcosm for the kind of snobbery you see in indie-music-loving white people. It's also a microcosm for the popularity of the series as a whole." Definitely exhaustive, and quite sweet. (Also: Michael's blog's tagline is pretty much spot on).

"…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.)

Kars releases the source for his travel-time map of the Netherlands. Nice to see the artefact-as-code, as well as the artefact-as-design.

"Apple’s current practice of rejecting certain applications at the final hurdle – submission to the App Store – is disastrous for investor confidence. Developers are investing time and resources in the App Store marketplace and, if developers aren’t confident, they won’t invest in it." Fraser Speirs hits the nail on the head over the problems with the current App Store model.

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."

"After all, what is science? It's a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master. Lineage and World of Warcraft aren't "real" world, of course, but they are consistent — the behavior of the environment and the creatures in it are governed by hidden and generally unchanging rules, encoded by the game designers. In the process of learning a game, gamers try to deduce those rules. This leads them, without them even realizing it, to the scientific method."

Jason Kottke republishes the supposed rules that Chuck Jones and other Road Runner animators stuck to whilst making their cartoons. Perhaps a little apocraphyl, but I like the idea of rules for things that aren't games.

"Merb’s routing shiznits needs some serious documentation love. Whilst I have a shot at getting some proper docpatches together here’s an overview of how to use routing in Merb 0.5." Thank god for that – was finding Merb's docs a little patchy in places.

Cannot believe I only just discovered this: it's a sleeping bag with arms and legs. Incredible.

"…it’s my feeling that experiences can’t really be designed. You can only provide the resources for people to have an experience; then it’s the people (users) themselves who create the experience." Dan Saffer hits the nail on the head at his new studio's blog. Can't wait to see what comes out of Kicker.

"This leads into something else that felt very clear after the conference; the need to look outside of what we already know. If, as Matt Jones, posited, execution is more important than ideas, we’re going to need an understanding that is based on people who are not us, and that understanding is going to have to incorporate all the richness of what they know, how they model their worlds, and how they model their interactions with the world around them." Looking forward to more from Alex on dConstruct

"The Box is an ambitious and unique year-long project for BBC News to tell the story of international trade and globalisation by tracking a standard shipping container around the world." Awesome. What's better is that it's a working container, which means it's not significantly contributing in a negative way to environmental damage any more than other containers. Could be interesting.

"So we decided to treat Availabot as a world probe: it was decided that we would take Availabot through to the position of being factory ready, and in the process learn as much as possible about the processes of manufacture, and how to develop these kind of complex products with so many moving parts." And, best news of all: Availabot will be coming to market. Excellent.

"…this leads up to a discussion of two things: the OAuth protocol which aims, amongst other laudable goals, to help safeguard users’ passwords, and the distinctly unnerving trend which Jeremy Keith has christened the password anti-pattern, which really doesn’t." A clear, articulate explanation of the issues around authentication.

In 2000, a group of seventh-graders were asked to draw what they thought scientists looked like and describe their pictures. Then, after visting Fermilab, they were asked to repeat the exercise. Some of the quotations are genuinely excellent, cf "Some people think that (scientists) are just some genius nerds in white coats, but they are actually people who are trying to live up to their dreams and learn more." Aren't we all?

"At GDC 2006 Sony’s Lead Programmer – Tim Moss had talk titled “God of War: How the Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another”. I read it, remembered mainly that it was interesting they had used Maya as main tool and kinda forgot about it. Only recently I’ve found out that recording from this session has been made available (for free) as well. You can download it here. Combined together they’re really interesting and I recommend everyone to spend few minutes and listen to it while reading slides." Some interesting stuff – God of War pre-scripts a lot of things that other people might want to do in real time, and as such, makes some stuff simpler, and makes controlling the players' experience easier.

A detailed look at various techniques for greebling Lego models.

"To me, these bizarre sequences represent adaptations of classical Brechtian stagecraft to video games. The way we interact with a game is different than the way we interact with a staged fiction, and by manipulating the tools specific to game-interaction– the interface and the mission-delivery system– Kojima delivers that sense of alienating weirdness that's the hallmark of the Verfremdungseffekt." I like Pliskin's commentary here – the absurdity of Arsenal Gear was great, and much preferable to the boss-rush that followed it.

"The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging 1, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design." Anne Galloway's PhD thesis, now online.

A remake of "You Have To Burn The Rope", in the style of an Intellivision game. They've changed an important play mechanic and given the game an entertaining twist ending. Fun.

"I've just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more." Some fantastic maps-and-pins from Phil and Sam.

"The series "A New Taxonomy of Gamers" wrapped up last Friday. For your convenience, here are the links to all 11 parts in one convenient post." Oh, this looks good.

Heard some of this last night; a superb BBC documentary about Brian Wilson and some of his production techniques that shaped the Beach Boys' albums. Some great interviews, and lovely musical deconstruction of harmony and voicing. Obviously, as a "listen again" programme, it's only around for six days – so get listening!

"Hired as visual artist in the summer of 2006, my challenge was not only to clearly present Braid's mechanics and behaviors, but to help tell a story that was anything but literal: part anecdote, part artifice, part philosophy. This article explains the process of developing visuals for a nearly-complete game with a highly idiosyncratic identity, the challenges encountered, and some of the nuts-and-bolts of our methods and tools." David Hellman on his work on the art of Braid.

Man, SIGGRAPH papers have the best titles. This is a lot of seriously hardcore, cutting edge, graphic-programming nous. Also: "jiggly fluids".

"The negative side of this, as your experience illustrates, is that Braid just lacks any immediate sense of fun. It does not set out to entertain you, and with the exception of some pretty aesthetic moments it makes you earn the pleasure you take from it. (Portal, which makes for a good point of comparison, wants the player to like it and desires to be understood in a way that Braid does not.)" I think Pliskin is spot on, here

"An interesting article at Rock, Paper, Shotgun tackles BioWare's tackling of issues tackling modern society, tackling one of my Mass Effect plots in the process. I responded in the comments, and after looking at how much I yammered on, I figured it was worth posting here as a look inside how these things get into the game, and why some things that seem dumb get done." Patrick Weekes follows up the RPS post criticising his own plot elements with some frank self-criticism, and some interesting explanations; a reminder of how hard creating any kind of meaningful choice can be.

Yes.

A blog from Tom, Flora, and no doubt shortly et al, about life in Hackney.

Now this *is* interesting: a comments thread in which Michael Abbott's readers put questions to Iain Lobb, one of the designers behind Meta4orce… and he answers them candidly and informatively. Interesting stuff about the limitations of building games around TV shows for public service broadcasters.

"I thought it was a parking ticket, and was annoyed. But up close, I saw it was just an empty envelope someone put there…" I'll let you click through for the punchline. Delightful, nontheless.

Great selection of posts on how brands need to behave (and how they sometimes fail to do so) from Grant McCracken.

Narrative-driven flash game from BBC Switch. Combines animated cut-scenes with minigames representing key plot aspects; as such, it's very linear. Script by Peter Milligan, though! It looks expensive; I'd be interested to know how successful it's been. As it stands, it's a little bit Freakangels-lite, a little bit Torchwood. And yes, I know how that sounds.

A nice article about context, contracts, and a few other things related to game AI design. If you're interested in the field at all, it's a nice read.

"I believe that the “auteur” school of game development is not only outmoded, but dangerous to the vitality of the medium. Instead, we must pursue deeply collaborative work styles and seek out diverse teammates if indie game development is ever to reach new heights and thrive beyond its current audience." I need to come to a better understanding about auteurship in this field; I'm not entirely convinced by this article.

Some of the cast of Mad Men do a shoot for Playboy – in period style. Wonderful.

"…Nintendo understands that while play does involve competition, territoriality and rehearsal for war, it also involves silliness, laughter and fun." Oh, god, can I just marry Stephen Fry now? Oh, there's a queue. Never mind.