Cracking episode of EmbeddedFM, speaking to Amanda Wozniak. Although the topic is nominally embedded electronics, it turns into a wonderfully shrewd discussion of self-care and career-care: how to acknowledge and recognise your desires but also the things that will lead you to burnout (be it too much work, or too _intense_ work. I found so much to think on in this, highly recommended even if it's not your usual jam.

"Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture." This is good, especially the balance not just of 'what you celebrate' but _how_. And thus the stress on using such a ritual to celebrate process, not just success or delivery.

These are very good – and clearly stated.

Web-based port of Laurie Spiegel's _Music Mouse_. Instant composition; just wonderful to fiddle with. Suddenly thinking about interfaces for this.

Using a Raspberry Pi to emulate the memory of a NES cartridge and then outputting that data through the original NES. The making-of is good too.

Impressive, fun, immediate.

A good list of ways to protect any MCU circuit – not just an Arduino.

Good crunchy post on the design of the axe-recall feature in God Of War (2018); particularly interesting on how it evolved, how players perceived variance in its implementation, and the subtleties of its sound and rumble implementation. And yes, there's screenshake. It's one of the simpler functions to grok in the game, but one of its best mechanics, I think. Looking forward to more posts.

Beautiful. Poppy Ackroyd soundtrack, too.

Yeah, that. See also 'drawing is thinking' – drawing exposes the paragraphs I left out of paragraphs I wrote. I've been writing documentation recently and boy, that properly forces you to think about how to describe the thing you're doing.

Janelle Shane – with some effort – trains neural networks to make knitting patterns. Then knitters from Ravelry make them. I love this: weird AI being taken at face value by people for art's sake.

Quite like the look of Stimulus for really simple interactions without too much cruft.

Really rather impressive port of Prince of Persia to… the BBC Micro. From the original Apple II source code which is, of course, also a 6502 chip – although not quite the same. The palette may be rough and ready, but the sound and animation is spot on. I'd dread playing this with the original micro keyboard, though.

"You are a traffic engineer. Draw freeway interchanges. Optimize for efficency and avoid traffic jams." Lovely.

Useful, this stuff is not nearly as easy as it should be in ES.

Great interview with Meng Qi, with lots of lovely stuff on being both a musician and an instrument bulider. I need to return to this.

This feels… familiar. Two things resonated a lot, though: the description of Hymns Ancient and Modern as a tradition to come from, and especially the description of 'cramming for A-levels' – my version of that was a combination of Fopp and Parrot Records at university, and the local libraries' CD sections during my teenage years.

He's a better musician then me, though, clearly.

I've read this post a few times, and it's still making me think. Lots of wisdom bound up in it, lots of things to aim for. Well done, Kellan.

"…an unfailingly kind leadership protocol seems like a solid approach for a volunteer organization. You don’t hire your team and they likely come from a diverse backgrounds, so your ability to explain and guide is key. Your ability to convey credibility and be the expert as quickly as possible is paramount because volunteers leave… randomly. This makes the final trait essential: in the face of disaster, you remain the calm and focused leader. Disaster is a strong word, but in a world where volunteers are doing work they are choosing to do rather than work they must do, unexpected situations are the norm.

…Leadership is an outfit you choose for others to see and I choose unfailingly kind." Michael Lopp on management culture as perceived through Destiny, of all things. I particularly liked 'an outfit you choose for others to see'.

A nice talk on type, with some great faces referenced in it; Brandon Grotesque is a stunner.

"Reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, get a digest with what everyone on the team got done." As a management style, I like that.

"Using the daily 0048 Shipping Forecast from BBC Radio 4, we take the average of each gale force mentioned for an area to determine that area's score. Pick a dream team of five sea areas, and your team's score will be the average of the scores of those regions, both daily and weekly." Hah, lovely.

"John Carter is the kind of movie no studio bigwig in their right mind ought ever to have greenlit: a space fantasy based on a genre – "planetary romance" – that hasn't been popular for well over half a century, populated by bizarre creatures from the mind of a writer apparently endowed with the ungrounded imagination of a small child. This is exactly why you should be checking it out. The film is out next weekend and I've posted the final trailer above. What a glorious enterprise Disney have wasted all their money on. God bless Hollywood!" I too am annoyed they lopped the suffix from the title. Otherwise, this has actually managed to spur interest in a film I'd written off.

"There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets." On knuckling down when faced with threats. (via Matt W)

"You can control time when you can see it." Things I like here: half-day resolution; tracking time as a group, rather than solo activity; the value of projects that may be numerically "over budget". Meetings as "0" is interesting; I'm not sure about that yet.

Nice tutorial for exploring AR with Processing. (Yes, I know it's AR, but I also am interested in how this works, so stop your booing in the peanut gallery).

"The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks." You cannot make this stuff up. Hexagon sounds phenomenal.

Lots of good analysis and tips in here. It's very much not a selection of things to do, more a selection of issues noticed and ways to fix them – many of which are contradictory.

"A silly version of postmodernism would suggest that contemporary scientific claims are identically as valid as those made in the dark ages, whereas really they are valid in different ways. Whereas a smart critique of rationalism (and of the Dawkinsesque pastiche of Enlightenment) is one which recognises the evolutionary nature of science, capitalism, culture, such that we cannot throw off our current mindset, culture or language, but nor are we imprisoned in it. We recognise the present as constitutive of who we are, but also as a single moment in an unfolding drama with no apparent conclusion." Cracking writing from Will – and some good stuff linked from this.