"But I think to succeed eReaders need to meet the needs, not just of the direct user, but of those around them, the friends and family who may not welcome their loved one’s absorption in this exciting new media. They are the “next largest context” within which the new device must win acceptance… The first question [with a digital device] is no longer “what are you reading?” It’s “what are you doing?” – a question that somehow already carries a hint of reproach."

Beautiful: capturing graffiti with an ultra-basic setup (torch sellotaped to pen and webcam), and then translating that into vector geometry that can be stored as an XML dialect. I like how simple and open it is, and the fact that Graffiti Markup Language is designed to be used in the field (even if it can't be yet).

"In one sense, Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! is a truly exotic bit of esoterica — a game on the Columbia riots, printed back in 1969 in the pages of the Columbia Daily Spectator, and designed by James F. Dunnigan, one of the finest and most prolific designers of board wargames… In Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! you play either as Columbia University's administration, or as the radicals who have seized control of Fayerweather Hall. You are attempting to influence the opinions of various stakeholders in the university — students of different sorts, the alumni, and so on. Random event cards influence play. Ultimately, the side that gains the greatest sympathy on the part of university stakeholders wins."

"Zoom in on that spot there." Blade Runner has a lot to answer for; notably, this.

"We would then take the data generated from these walks and plot them into a computer representation of the area and generate visualisations from that. Building an audiogeography superimposed on the physical landscape with the sound levels as experienced by somebody who would walk through the area." Some nice work from Alper and Kars.

Brad Sucks has converted his own material to Rock Band tracks in Rock Band Studio, and will soon be selling them straight to your 360. Harmonix really are bringing something to the game here – amateur/unsigned musicians can now use Rock Band to sell music (with appropriate notecharts, obviously), in the same way they started to use MySpace as promotion a few years ago. Awesome.

"Earlier this week, 1.5 million people filled the streets of Berlin, Germany to watch a several-day performance by France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company titled "The Berlin Reunion". Part of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reunion show featured two massive marionettes, the Big Giant, a deep-sea diver, and his niece, the Little Giantess. The storyline of the performance has the two separated by a wall, thrown up by "land and sea monsters". The Big Giant has just returned from a long and difficult – but successful – expedition to destroy the wall, and now the two are walking the streets of Berlin, seeking each other after many years apart. I'll let the photos below tell the rest of the story." Royal de Luxe are the same group who did "The Sultan's Elephant". Thought: it's all a bit Bioshock, isn't it?

The future of image processing and 3D graphics is awesome, bonkers, sort-of relevant and full of bunnies. Worth a watch.

"Players stand in front of a green screen while the game films them and creates a music video background while they sing. Their performance is then emailed to them or burnt onto a DVD players can take home." Awesome. Unfortunately, the project has been canned. Still, it's worth watching the slightly cringey videos of the developers playing it, because it's a nifty bit of code.

"It all boils down to a Ruby script that runs on OS X only and uses OS X’s really awesome typography and subpixel antialiased font rendering. Why not tap into this to make those headline graphics? With Rubycocoa you can easily whip up a small app that draws some text, and save it into a PNG file." Um, blimey.

Icebergs and Shorelines; I love the Icebergs series particularly. What a rich page for a gallery.

"3. Take Notice: Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you." All very good advice – and, frankly, what I knew already – but this one felt particularly appropriate, given Noticings.

This is a pretty good guide – made sense, got me up and running fast, and nice and clearly written.

"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope: the game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach." Simon makes a strong point about Scribblenauts.

I am not an expert in these matters, but that is rather lovely.

That performance of Billie Jean. But with a Giant White Glove. Brilliant.

"On May 4th, 2007, we asked internet users to help isolate Michael Jackson's white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. 72 hours later 125,000 gloves had been located. wgt_data_v1.txt (listed below) is the culmination of data collected. It is released here for all to download and use as an input into any digital system. Just as the data was gathered collectively it is our hope that it will be visualized collectively." This is amazing. And what it leads to is even better.

Thoughtbot discover their RFID door-lock system has an API. A short bash at some code later, and they now have theme songs when they enter the office.

"From 30th June to 25th August, I'll be following a route across Scotland from the south western tip of Mull to the outskirts of Edinburgh, as charted in Chapters 14–27 of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’." I remember talking to Tim about this at BookCamp; it's great to see it in-the-world.

"Peter Newman's Skystation is a circular sculpture inspired by the form of Le Corbusier's LC4 chaise longue which encourages the user to lie down and contemplate the vast expanse of space above and beyond." I rather like that. Doesn't look comfortable, but I agree with the sentiment.

"After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites." Hur hur hur.

"Video game designer Robin Hunicke, noticeable at any gaming event for having the reddest hair of anyone in attendance, is trading her big-company background for ThatGameCompany, a sign that the small studio behind Flow and Flower is growing its ranks." Oh. That *is* interesting.

Someone will come.

"The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation announced today that The LEGO Group is now the exclusive licensed manufacturer of Frank Lloyd Wright Collection® LEGO Architecture sets." Hmn. Not sure what the market for these is, beyond curios; they're not particularly high-resolution, for starters.

"Professional photographic & art printing with great value? theprintspace delivers. At the printspace we understand what professional quality means, and we also offer 48 hour turnaround time & guaranteed satisfaction." As recommended to me by Jon.

"I gave a presentation on Treetop last night at lrug – seemed to go down well. There aren’t many examples of treetop grammars I’ve seen, so it might be useful if you find the main site’s documentation a bit impeneterable." Roland drops some Treetop science, and it looks very useful. Good stuff!

"But the sixty-something gamers of 2020 are not the same as the sixty-somethings you know today. They're you, only twenty years older. By then, you'll have a forty year history of gaming; you won't take kindly to being patronised, or given in-game tasks calibrated for today's sixty-somethings. The codgergamers of 2030 will be comfortable with the narrative flow of games. They're much more likely to be bored by trite plotting and cliched dialog than todays gamers. They're going to need less twitchy user interfaces — ones compatible with aging reflexes and presbyopic eyes — but better plot, character, and narrative development. And they're going to be playing on these exotic gizmos descended from the iPhone and its clones: gadgets that don't so much provide access to the internet as smear the internet all over the meatspace world around their owners." Lots of great stuff in this Stross Keynote.

Mapping where people are leaving and arriving based on nothing more than what they said on Twitter. Pretty, and perhaps the beginnings of something quite useful.

"Shepard gets in his warm space suit and Mako vehicle and takes on the blizzard. I go outside and walk to work in the rain. That comparatively insignificant section of the game stands out more clearly than any other, which doesn't mean anything to anyone else other than me. I never loved Mass Effect, but I may remember that for the rest of my life." Duncan Fyfe on memories. He speaks truth.

"With this unique book, programmers, administrators, and others who handle data can learn by example from the best data practitioners in the history of the field. Modeled after O'Reilly's highly-acclaimed book, Beautiful Code, Beautiful Data lets readers look over the shoulders of prominent data designers, managers, and handlers for a glimpse into some of the most interesting projects involving data. In an engaging narrative format, the authors think aloud as they explain their work, highlighting the simple and elegant solutions to problems they encountered along the way." Oh. This could be lovely.

This is both good and bad in places; I'm not totally convinced by the "What would players rather shoot — a wall, or a Nazi?" argument, but I'm very interested (as per my previous writing on Far Cry 2) in notions of non-player characters as protagonist; the player as lens through which story emerges, rather than hero of said story. Stuff to think on, for sure, but I'm still working out how to respond to this; I'm not sure it fulfils its goal of discussing "how writers and designers can collaborate smoothly and successfully"; it just shows me some examples.

"We are defined by what we build. It’s not just the engineering ambition that designed these structures, nor the 20 people who died building the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s that we believe we can and decide to act." This is good.

Chemically, this makes sense, but I'd never thought this might be possible.

"Today, I made a little application using the Spore API." Specifically, rendering the skeletons of creatures in Processing. Nice.

"LSL is a 2-D arena shooter featuring a robot that falls in love with several lovely female robots each with her own unique abilities and atmosphere… The longer our heroes stay together, the more their relationship will evolve, making them stronger; but this increases the difficulty of the game, too. When they "break up," the enemies are cleared, but so is the score multiplier. Throughout the game, the robot recalls memories of a love before…" This sounds – and looks – delightful.

"For use on days with uninteresting skies." I should like one of those very much.

"Majini have gone through a small part of London, leaving behind a trail of remnant body parts from their victims. Find the bodies on the morning of Thursday March 12th and win a vacation to Africa." Um. Really not sure this is the best kind of live event, chaps.

Seriously, the UI customisation that some players go through amazes me. And yet: the level of customisation possible also amazes me. There's some good stuff in here not just on customising your UI, but also making it look functional and useful; UI design is still possible in the sea of plugins.

"Just because a line is functional doesn’t mean it can’t be clever, funny, insightful, or dramatic. The real art of videogame writing is being aware of the context: understanding how, when and where the line is going to be used, and how to compensate for the times you have no control over when the line is played." A nice piece on writing for games, and brevity (or a lack of it).

Touché.

"Japanese PSN member RRR30000 has managed to recreate classic shoot-em up gameplay within the game, using a spaceship sticker and massive amounts of free time." Just. Incredible. The enemies-on-sticks have a vast amount of charm, too. I don't think I can escape buying the PS3 this demands, sadly.

"The original page, which sadly has since then disappered from the face of the earth, was all about this hidden "demon face" in one of Aphex Twin's tracks, #2 (the long formula) on "Windowlicker". This face was supposed to be viewable with a spectrograph program, so I decided to try it myself." Some fun – and somewhat impressive – decoding of hidden imagery on IDM cds. The Venetian Snares cats are particiuarly great.

Well, as long as they ban every other imported phrase. Stupid as this is, I think the comment that it's "the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing" is a bit of an absurd, and somewhat insensitive, overstatement.

"Dante's Inferno, the poem, explores the Christian afterlife, as Dante traipses through nine circles of Hell to get to Purgatory and eventually Heaven. EA will apparently interpret this as fighting supernatural baddies." Oh bloody hell.