Open-source e-reader hardware. I particularly love the back of the circuitboard – reminded me of George and Adrian's work on the Museum In A Box pcb.

Lovely writeup of a chonker of a matte painting – the final pullback in Die Hard 2. Love hearing about the very end of the pre-digital matte era.

"pid.codes is a registry of USB PID codes for open source hardware projects." Nice.

Great article on the pleasures of open source hardware – especially for people entirely happy to see their ideas flourish, grow, and improve in ways that might not have been able to imagine. Tom's hardware is great fun to both play and tinker with.

"As I understand it, B says, the cliche “writer’s block” actually describes the inability to write anything at all. If you have a problem with a plot, she says, you’re not blocked, you are in fact writing; because the maddeningly slow solution of difficult problems in the context of specific pieces of work is part of the process of writing. In B’s opinion, you aren’t blocked in the cliche sense unless you’ve written nothing for several years and can be played by Mickey Rourke." Yes, that.

"The OWL is an open source, open hardware, reprogrammable effects pedal designed for musicians, coders, and hackers." Ie: a DSP stompbox with an ARM Cortex in it; you reprogram it by writing C++ and uploading new patches over USB.

"There’s still a smell of bullshit to almost every videogame story I read, even as it’s advanced to a very high level being in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. To me it derives from this politeness about the thing that’s experienced. In literary criticism there are really cutting deconstructions of things that are inadequate—Nabokov talking about what a fraud and charlatan Faulkner was—but there’s this really intelligent, but painfully milquetoast, quality to the way we appreciate games. It’s a reflection of how partially engaged we are with each one. We consider games primarily as ideas, rather than actual evolving relationships that we’ve had over time." Yeah, that. I enjoyed this discussion: I'm pretty sure you don't have to finish games to review them. Then again: I also think writing about games six months after they came out is way more interesting than trying to hammer through something to fit into a review cycle.

Oooh, the Shruthi got an upgrade: not just white PCBs, but an interesting new filter board. Seriously tempted by one of these.

"Design, host and share your own custom maps." Interesting – tile hosting, tile creation.

"Sony's statement suggests that it was actually storing sensitive information in plain text format, which defies belief. The only other explanation is that hackers only got access to the hashes and may have compromised a small minority of passwords by running this data through something like a dictionary look-up. However, from the tone of Sony's apology this does not appear to be the case." Good god; they're certainly transmitted as plaintext to PSN – according to the IRC log referenced in this article – so the incompetence required to store them as plaintext is already evident. Appalling.

"At a time when the artworld has become a bloated thing like a celebrity based branch of the stock exchange, it is very satisfying to make a real and seriously thoughtful transaction." Tom Phillips' Word Cross is now in a parish church in Kent. Great.

Tom on writing the Noticings Uploader – and making the code open-source.

"Outside of the novel setting, the individual multiplayer games have nothing substantial to offer a person other than progression. This is pretty ordinary stuff.<br />
<br />
There are so many things to do in the actual game that you'd want to do with other people: you'd want to play horsehoes, or Poker, or Blackjack. Even those would be diversions, though. You'd want to drive cattle, or steal them; you want to cut a slice of that country out and see what you could make of it – or get yours riding rough over the smaller towns. As it stands, you're given desperately limited access to a sterile, stricken place without heart or memory." (RDR is great, no question of that, but I think Tycho's right about the missed opportunities of Free Roam. More on this in a proper blog post, coming soon).

"Now, the cordial racist shopkeeper and I have a relationship. Every five days I return to Armadillo; he warmly greets me, and I kill him. I've even found ways to avoid tedium. Sometimes a single shot to the head does the trick; other times I lasso and hogtie him before letting him have it. If I've had an especially bad day on the range, I let him tell me about the Jews before plugging him multiple times in the piehole, courtesy of my Dead Eye slo-mo skill. Occasionally I even shoot up the store. I guess you could say I'm a loyal customer." And still the myth of Rockstar's "open-world" is punctured by rendering players impotent against things they – rather than their character – have a problem with.

"Do you see this? It's the world's tiniest open-source violin." Yes.

"This information describes how Free Range operates, both as a business and as a culture.<br />
<br />
We're open-sourcing our business, from the site to the contracts to the philosopy. Value does not come from these things, but from putting these ideas into practice. These ideas are not assets – we, the people, are.<br />
<br />
Fork this." Free Range have put their manifesto and operating principles onto Github.

"The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one. Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it." James, as ever, is very, very sharp. This is good.

Open source DAW for Linux and OSX.

"I keep coming back to EoPS (I am re-reading it as I write this) because it’s short, it’s easy reading, it’s funny, and much of its advice is timeless.  In a way, you could say its age is even a plus-point, because it makes it obvious which of the rules are of their time and which are fundamental." Sounds great.