Lovely article on Dudley Moore's jazz playing; I'd always enjoyed what I'd heard of it, but this gives a broader overview. That take on 'My Blue Heaven' is just great.

Really impressive: audiomux/midimux let you send audio and MIDI to and from iOS devices over a lightning cable. Which eliminates all manner of cable tangles, for starters.

Sunrizer – basically, a tiny JP8000 clone.

Multi-touch instrument thing.

"DM1 is an advanced vintage Drum Machine. It turns your iPad into a fun and creative beat making machine."

Curious scale-based texture performance instrument.

"This script installs a patched version of ruby 1.9.3-p125 with patches to make ruby-debug work again (#47) and boot-time performance improvements (#66 and #68), and runtime performance improvements (#83 and #84). It also includes the new backported GC from ruby-trunk." Speed boosts for Ruby 1.9.3.

If you have MacPorts installed, OpenSSL runs into issues when you install rubies through RVM. This helps.

Installing Redis on Linode.

"RequestBin lets you create a URL that will collect requests made to it, then let you inspect them in a human-friendly way. Use RequestBin to see what your HTTP client is sending or to look at webhook requests." Which is very useful.

"It's sort of a no-brainer. And a fascinating way to think about creating a sustainable source of income to allow, even in part, artists to produce works are genuinely expensive in time and cost to create. It should also prove to artists, and anyone who frets over the illusion of print rights, that they've got nothing to worry about. This stuff is an entirely other material and colour made of light, it turns out, doesn't just magically translate to colour made of pigment the way that, say, a word-processing document does. And if anyone is really going to lose sleep over the people who are already predisposed to print things out on their shitty homes printers my only advice is to give up now. Let them and understand that there are more interesting problems to solve and if projects like 20×200 are any indication there's a whole world of people who want to help with not only their moral support but their wallets." Aaron on the Hockney show, subscription app art, and drawing on iPads.

"This gem is a C binding to the excellent YAJL JSON parsing and generation library." Ooh, JSON stream-parsing.

Lovely behind-the-scenes on how the Guardian iPod app slowly evolved.

"I've long held that all media transit from being "functional" to "art" when they are no longer economically viable. It is that transition which dampers the cost and the consequence of failure and makes the space necessary for people to experiment and play. Think of lithography which was born of purely utilitarian needs and sherparded the arrival of the mass-produced image only to become capital-O objects as soon as the offset press was invented." I love Aaron.

"Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, this one actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages. A script analyses the InDesign files from the printed paper and uses various parameters (page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, image size etc) to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app.

It’s not quite the “Robot Mark Porter” that Schulze and Jones imagined in the workshops, but it’s as close as we’re likely to see in my lifetime. Of course robots do not make good subs or designers, so at this stage some humans intervene to refine, improve and add character, particularly to the article pages. Then the InDesign data goes into a digital sausage machine to emerge at the other end as HTML." Niiiiice.

Lovely trailer from BBC America for Law & Order UK. Sadly, it illustrates roughly what the British trying to make American-style procedural drama looks like. Lots of slamming things down. And tea. (Although: they don't know what "knackers" means, clearly.)

"The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a "big iPhone" than a "small laptop". The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated." On the assumptions built into devices, and what understanding them requires.

"Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They’re paper map diffs, if you like." Awesome. And, as Tom said, it's a beautiful book.

"Here at the Cow Clicker ranch, we've learned an important lesson about cow clicking: people don't just want one chance to click a cow every six hours. They want as many opportunities as possible to click a cow every six hours." And then Ian launches the API. And Connect. And everything else. And wins again.

Images captured via Google Streetview cameras; some are incredible, others, beautiful.

"It’s different things at different times, a serious research tool, or a communication device, but it’s a toy, I can play with it and find things I didn’t know existed." Tom Phillips has made a version of A Humument for the iPad, and I am very excited about this new.

"Halcyon is named for the mythological bird of ancient Greece, said to charm the winds and seas into a calm during the Winter Solstice. It is a spacial action puzzle game and interactive stringed instrument designed specifically for the iPad." Lovely.

"In his book of aphorisms, One Way Street, published in 1928, Walter Benjamin has a remarkable premonition. ‘The typewriter’ he says, ‘will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.’" I really like the notion of "commanding fingers", and understanding the movie from hands to fingers.

"I suppose the point I was driving to that I let myself get derailed from is that all these trends in western cinema developed over time. It moved in eras of film, from the silent film, to the beginning of the talkies, to the pulp westerns, to their revival with Stagecoach and the classical period of westerns, to the revisionist and spaghetti westerns to the brooding psychological westerns of today. What RDR fails to pick up on is that these are all products not only of the time they were set, but the time they were made." This is a good post on one of my problems with the (generally very good) Red Dead Redemption: rather than trying to be *a* Western, it tries to ape *all* Westerns, and thus is all over the place tonally. Better examples in the full body – worth a read.

"Thinking about what defines a particular game medium, one doesn’t always consider elements like the player’s physical posture, and where they sit relative to their fellow players. But the experience of playing a digital game with a friend on the iPad proves quite different than that of sitting side-by-side on a couch with Xbox controllers in hand, or sitting alone with a mic strapped to your head. Your sense of posture and presence is part of the game’s medium, as much as the material of the game’s manufacture. Playing Small World gave me a frisson of novel confusion, marrying the player-interactivity of a board game with the board-interactivity of a computer game. I felt the seam that joined them, but it felt right. This was something new, comfortable, and fun." Jason McIntosh on how tablet gaming is similar to the "cocktail" cabinets of old.

Today's Guardian, from Phil, which is brilliant, for all the reasons explained in his post about it.

"Although the finished site looks nothing like a newspaper I think it has more in common with newspapers’ best features than most news websites do. The sense of browsing quickly through stories and reading the ones that catch your eye, feels similar." Phil is smart. This is good.