Good notes on running a course online that's accessibile to as many as possible, by Alex McLean. (Useful notes for a future idea, anyhow.)

"Easily remove the background from your photos to create masks, cutouts, or clipping paths, all done instantly online with ClippingMagic.com" Blimey, that's some dark voodoo.

Aral's script converts any online statement into CSV for FreeAgent; I don't use FreeAgent, but I have a feeling I could modify this into something useful. (In other news: why is all UK online banking so bad?)

Christian Nutt interviews Jesse Schell Lots of really interesting stuff in here – to be returned to, I think.

Nice list of restuarants and pubs. One of my favourite things about The Trip is turning out to be the food.

And, with their 119th update, Valve helpfully included the list of all their previous patches, as well. Just look at the amount that's changed – and how swiftly. A proper, living game (unlike the stillborn 360 version). Can't wait to play it on the Mac; it's almost like a different game to the one I played at the beginning.

"Ben Gimpert is a friend of the Open Library. He and I got together over lunch a few months ago to talk about big data, statistical natural language processing, and extracting meaning from Open Library programmatically. His efforts are beginning to bear some really interesting fruit, and while we work out how we might be able to present it online, we thought you might be interested to hear what he’s been up to." Answer: good things. Ben is awesome, and this work sounds great. (I can't quote a suitable passage, so George's intro will have to do).

A few short tips on find; one of the bash tools I use least, and should probably use more.

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this: “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"

"…the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist." Fantastic, dense, Wired article on DNF from Clive Thompson

"For 16 days I lived with it strapped to me as I climbed through the valleys of central Nepal up to Annapurna Base Camp at 4,200 meters." Wonderful review of the GF1, framed as a travelogue, with real photographs. I'd be quite happy if all camera reviews looked like this.

"Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action." Mark Lynas on the reality of China's actions at Copenhagen. Worrying.

"Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form." Yes. This is a good one.

"In [Nude] she was always sorry for the clumsy pins, and the uneven parting in her hair. But Edward Weston regretted the shadow on her right arm, which spoiled the symmetry of her body curving like an architectural form or a tree, or like a curling wave on the coast, lines as lovely as any in Nature. To her lasting astonishment, he had glorified her." I love Economist obituaries, and this one – of Charis Wilson – is no exception. Lovely.

"All the characters fom Home Alone, the project starts on the 22nd." 22 Twitterbots, performing Home Alone, in realtime, starting Dec 22nd. Awesome. Bonkers, but awesome (and takes the concept I used in Twit 4 Dead to a new level).

"The whisky social network". Ooh. Has potential, at least.

"I did a set of four walks in Austria; two long ones, two short ones. I did some "daystreaming" where using bits of technology I was updating my location, status and pictures as I walked." Ambient information gathering, whilst taking in the outdoors, and all for charity. Lovely.

And it just worked first time. Awesome!

"The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries." Eco on lists.

"Today, the UK government's Department For Transport unveils a new browser-based MMOG, created by New York-based developer Area/Code. Designed for early teenagers to learn principles of traffic safety, it's probably the largest 'serious games' project ever to be created for the UK. Code Of Everand is the result of over two years of work with the Department For Transport by Area/Code principals and designers Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, not only because of its size and ambition, but also because of the complexities of developing it for a government body… We spoke to Lantz, Slavin and Simon Williams, who led the project at Carat, the Department For Transport's media agency, about what Code Of Everand is, how they pulled it off, and why they think it could prove that games can be a powerful platform for learning." Edge interview.

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Eggleston. So much care and attention in the work and the way he describes it; so many lovely illustrations. The "color scripts" alone are great, but really, it's all worth your time.

Hmn. Visualisation of tweets about the word "FIFA" (do the maths there) and all games played of FIFA 10 – so you can see both which teams are doing well, and which countries have good FIFA gamers in them. There's little bits of stats-fluff, but it doesn't go nearly deep enough. It's lovely EA are doing this… but it could be, you know, useful, rather than just shiny? Bungie's statistics crown is still a long way off.

"You'll need several thousand gold to launch the business, and then keep it up for many weeks before you make a steady good profit every week. And you'll need to log on every day and spend several hours per week just to keep your glyph business up and running. In the end, getting rich in World of Warcraft works exactly like getting rich in the real world: You need a venture capital to start up a business, hard work, and perseverance. And this is exactly why getting rich with inscription works so reliably in World of Warcraft: It is hard work, there isn't all that much you can actually do with an income of thousands of gold per week, and thus the large majority of players simply can't be bothered doing it."