"Xbox Live Friends is a tool for keeping a vigilant eye on what all of your friends are doing." It's much improved from previous versions, too. Enjoying this quite a lot.

These feel about right. Or, at least, about right if you agree with Rams as both a designer and a provider of commandments. He's hard to argue with, for sure.

Defend Moscow are a friend's new band, and their single "Manifesto" is out very, very soon; big, eighties-influenced pop, with slightly filthy bass and that classic boy/girl harmony thing going on. Hoping for good things for this, so into the links it goes!

Almost Atari 2600-era platforming, but with a couple of (big) twists. Compulsive, and cross-platform, it's almost definitely worth an hour of your day.

"…or the past and future of practical city magic". Jones drops the presentation bomb and it's really very very good; it doesn't feel "weird" as he suggests at all; instead, it's all one great big joined-up mishmash of coherent thought and a dash of wonder.

It's a Roguelike, running on a Meggy Jr – the microcontroller-powered console with an 8×8 LED display. Looking good so far!

"F.lux fixes this: it makes your computer's lighting adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better." Perhaps not right for things that need to be color-managed… but might be good for everything else. And healthier.

"It's just 4 names, on a t-shirt. Buy it now because you know whats coming and by then, it'll be too late. Good luck." Want, so bad. And the kerning's not a million miles out.

"MagiCal is a FREE menu-based clock and calendar. It features a huge range of configuration options for how the time and date are displayed, and can operate either in conjunction with, or as a replacement for the built in system menu clock." Quite pretty, and makes a nice companion for FuzzyClock.

"The microprinter is an experiment in physical activity streams and notification, using a repurposed receipt printer connected to the web. I use it for things like reminders, notifications, and my day at-a-glance, but anything that can be injected from the web and suits text only, short format messaging, will work." Tom writes up his printer in more detail.

"We’ve recently switched a number of projects to ThinkingSphinx here at Hashrocket. These projects were originally using SOLR or UltraSphinx. Today, we’ll explore the differences between UltraSphinx and ThinkingSphinx and why we chose to switch." Detailed explanation of the advantages of ThinkingSphinx over UltraSphinx or other alternatives.

"Last night I laser-etched the top of my Eee PC with the complete level maps of Super Mario Land ( on the Game Boy)." Just beautiful. (Thanks, Offworld!)

"Compared to a standard web (un)conference where everyone knows their space, expertise and opinions, here lots (most?) of us were exploring stuff outside of our day job and business-as-usual. It was passionate and interesting and I felt completely out of my depth, which was was great. So in 2009, less of the comfort zone stuff please, and more like this." I can get behind that.

"Morph was sometimes supposed to copy Hart's own artistic work, but not perfectly. In this way nervous children were reassured that even their endearing hero Morph could get it wrong, which made them determined to pick up their pens and pencils and other objects and do better… He believed that most of the things he did could be done only [on television]: "I hope that by example, and by humour, children will start to make pictures for themselves. Show them, don't tell them!"" I was terrible at art, and most forms of drawing, but I could watch his hands work all day.

The New Frontiersman is on Flickr. The paperverse is collapsing. (Although: "taken on August 10, 2008" breaks the illusion a little).

Leslie roughly captures a few thoughts I've had and some reasonably opinions. In a nutshell: the social value of tagging is broad, fuzzy, and a second-order effect. As a loose, freeform taxonomy for personal use, they're superb, and delicious captures that excellently. I tag for me; if it's useful for you, that's a nice side effect.

"The point here, is that the flickr team did not wake up one morning and think: “You know, if we captured THIS kind of data, we could create this mashup; so let’s create an application.” Instead, they re-used data they were already capturing, and brought out something very interesting indeed. By creating tools which match their data (and could be used with other data of the same kinds), flickr is able to expose layers of value from the rich-pickings of their own data-cloud. The good stuff is where the data are." Yes, it is.

"Some people love this kind of aggregation. Good for them. I, however, am human and my eyes glaze over when trying to comprehend a chronological stream of equally-weighted events, a format only robots could love. This is rubbish… There must be better ways of showing such “here’s what I’m up to” information." Phil talks about some problems he's been trying to solve with dashboard displays.

"A magnificent, huge orca-like beast, swimming calmly through the vast ocean beneath my smoke-belching craft. She was a beauty. And she instantly became my Moby Dick. “I’m coming back for you”, I thought. Big Shirl is a reason to reach level 80. I have no doubt the grind will get to me before too long, or that the thought of repeatedly running the same dungeons or battlegrounds come level 80 will turn me off all over again… In these early days though, before everyone in it knows everything, it’s an explorer’s paradise. That’s why I play MMOs." A nice, thoughtful article from a first look at WotLK from Alec Meer

"Wow. Ever get the feeling you've been thrown for a loop? I did just that, when I worked out that GSW commenter and erudite game blogger, PixelVixen707, appears to be not just a smart game blogger, but a fictitious front for some kind of damn weird ARG/online story." Down the rabbit hole we go, again.

"SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people… This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer. I love the pivot."

"At the start it seemed reasonable to think that Mirror's Edge could stand entirely on the merits of its brilliant core concept, and not need to include extraneous and negligibly attractive features to appeal to as many people as possible. But, no, this is the video game business." This is the stuff that's scaring me most about Mirror's Edge.

"…in recent years, [the stage has] moved away from those practices. Today, we better understand the importance of offering kids the very best we can do. They are no different from the rest of us. They respond positively to quality, and they quickly grow bored and restless with mediocrity… We might consider a similar approach to video games. If we want our kids – heck, if we want all of us – to enjoy quality games, we must pay attention to and promote those games that deliver quality."

From Duncan Harris; postcards from post-apocalyptic DC.

Course notes from Stanford's Cocoa programming course.

Some really beautiful in-house design from Criterion here.

"We’re just topping it off with the last few drops of smooth liquid goo, but the Mac version of World of Goo is running beautifully, and should be out this week!" Very excited.

"Japan-o-glitch + Interactive Flash graphics = D.V.D. (x OMG)." Wow.

"An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.

"Yes people use the Internet to do bad thing, and quite possibly Twitter is one of those services that bad people use. But they also plan bad things in coffee house but for the last 300 odd years we’ve realised that trying to legislate against coffee houses is a bad thing for society." I recently finished Markman Ellis' book on coffee houses, and so Tom's post had a special kind of relevance.

A neat summary of what's available out there; I use Blueprint for prototyping, but it's interesting to see what else is available – particularly the more stripped-down frameworks.

"A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." Awesome.

"Flaming Lips vocalist-guitarist Wayne Coyne brought with him what he dubbed the 'Guitar Hero guitar,' an Epiphone double-neck with the lower, six-string neck replaced by a five-button variant and wired to an oscillator. '[It's] because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar…'" Awesome.

"Every year on or around the same day … at the same time of day and from the same position a photograph is taken at each of the twenty locations on this map which is based on a circle of half a mile radius drawn around the place where the project was devised. It is hoped that this process will be carried on into the future and beyond the deviser's death for as long as the possibility of continuing and the will to undertake the task persist." Tom Phillips project, as mentioned in Reading the Everyday.

"Boxer is a DOS game emulator for OS X, built around the powerful DOSBox. Boxer aims to make it easy and painless to play your DOS games."

"Microsoft may very well not be broken. The world needs reliable bureaucracies that mollify the needs of corporations and individuals in the center of the market. But if it is broken, advertising isn't going to fix it."

"Some people believe that there's no correlation between quality and sales, and thus think that the way to make money is to make things that are easily marketable (read: licenses). Game developers themselves usually argue that sales above a certain level require a game to be sufficient quality. I decided to see which of these perspectives was correct for the Playstation 2 era." Datanalysismachinego!

"Of course, to get the most points, your band needs a bassist. And nobody wants to play bass. So if you want to lead a full band, you're going to have to play bass yourself. And this is like life!" Lovely article from Torpex' Jamie Fristrom.

"After replacing the old plist, you can use your Hori stick with MacMAME!" Fantastic. Six-button fighter action agogo.

"A version of the match-three game is set to launch next Thursday within the World of Warcraft MMO (massively multiplayer online), letting players kill time with puzzles during raids and long stints farming rare items." Oh god no. Don't cross the time-sink streams!

"Well-designed games make us forget the technical impediments to the enjoyment of art, and this is more than half the battle."

Yes.

"KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts." Awesome. Really, really awesome. I might well end up registering this.

Jos Buivenga's font foundry, with many free faces (usually in a few weights – other weights are paid-for). Some beautiful stuff in here.

Beautiful, free, sans-serif font. Gorgeous – especially at 900-weight.

"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.

"Bandcamp isn’t Yet Another Place to Put Your Music. We power a site that’s yours. So instead of our logo plastered between banner ads for Sexy Singles Chat, your fans see your design, your music, your name, your URL. You retain all ownership rights, and we just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff." Via Waxy; looks really excellent, and some wonderful stat-gathering tools for bandowners.