James is keeping weeknotes on designing a product based around an EFM32 microcontroller – I enjoyed this first installment; it's nice to see how other people think about projects.

Good stuff on prototyping and development – especially around the _pace_ of prototyping.

"Where you see gadget, I see process. Moreover, where you see prose, I see poetry: for the UK will continue to have no manufacturing all the while it has lost its collective sense of the poetry of production. The ignominious application of production line metaphors to (the actually very creative) industrial life has helped alienate people from the process of making: whereas Lean Manufacturing instead helps to reconnect workers with the project as a whole, by seeing waste as a thing that erodes value, and that corrodes the relationship between customer and producer by making it unnecessarily fragile and contingent." There's lots to recommend in this piece. I'm not sure I agree about software, even ignoring my vested interested and perspective, but there's so much else of value in here. I think this paragraph spoke most to me, though.

"When a product is connected to the network it has two brains. A little local one that can perform cheap calculation, and a big one in the network that can do potentially anything at all: massive facial recognition, searching all of Amazon, advanced artificial neural networks, whatever." It's great that Matt's writing so much again – but "little brain, big brain" is a great explanation of the concept.

"If you can demonstrate that McDonald’s only introduces the sandwich when pork prices are lower than usual, then you’re but a couple logical steps from concluding that McDonald’s is essentially exploiting a market imbalance between what normal food producers are willing to pay for hog meat at certain times of the year, and what Americans are willing to pay for it once it is processed, molded into illogically anatomical shapes, and slathered in HFCS-rich BBQ sauce." The McRib as arbitrage of pork prices.

"…one point I wanted to make, to all those agencies that have decided that making products is the future. That's a laudable and intelligent aim, but it took five years for BERG to go from here to here. And they're really good. They had to be focused and ambitious, working really hard. This isn't stuff you can just chuck out the back of a creative technology department  Just a thought." Yeah, there is that.

"Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper." Little Printer sees the light of day. So, so excited to finally see it in the world; can't wait to see it in other homes. (And: beautiful work on the design – industrial, brand, web, the whole package).

"“coding” is not the only concrete skill required “to work at the crossover of creative and technology”. Especially if you want to make an actual thing that lives outside of a screen." I'll gladly concede Josh's point. This is very much worth reading; if anything, the only reason I focused on code was the original W+K focus on that, likely because that's the technology they're interested in. Good points all, though.

"These are clearly black market frankenproducts – made from a combination of surplus mobile phone components and car alarm key rings. I wonder how much they actually cost to manufacture. I wonder if the bits are stolen." Ben Bashford on the magic of Shanzai. And, of course, when a video camera is eight pounds, it's no longer precious, and you start doing weird things with it: Youtube is full of examples.

"Curveship is an interactive fiction system that provides a world model (of characters, objects, locations, and things that happen) while also modeling the narrative discourse, so that the narration and description of the simulated world can change. Curveship can tell events out of order, using flashback and other techniques, and can tell the story from the standpoint of particular characters and their perceptions and understandings." This looks both bonkers and brilliant.

"Data combined with narrative creates personality. It can be used to construct a larger and richer history around a subject.

The world is already divided in to two camps: People who are going to watch the Super Ball and those who aren't. This is an opportunity to delight the former and reach the latter, by providing a larger and more playful cast of characters to describe the events during the game." Nice!

"That's why guys like Tarn Adams or Vic Davis are a thousand times more interesting. They're making games, not DLC or marketing or anything else. A game, to them, isn't the launching pad. It's the rocket."

Transmit 4 is looking really good; Transmit Disk, especially.

Blimey. Spotify want to own social music – linking out to Facebook and creating a more public Spotify profile – but, more to the point, they also want to own music playing, by making your own library available inside the Spotify app… and even offering wireless sync of your own music.

"In a sense, it is. However, Ashley Davis, a blogger over at Destructoid, put a post up last week specifically on the Pac-Man ghosts and why they got the names that they did. In short, though it might seem like Blinky, Pinky, Inky and the Clyde-Sue-Tim hivemind hover around dot-filled mazes in the exact same way, they don’t. In fact, the way they move is explained by their nicknames." This is brilliant.

"BREADBOX64 is a twitter client for the C64/128 which allows you to tweet from a real C64 and show your friends timeline." Now that's a classy look.

"There was a point a few years ago whenever somebody called a meeting that I had to attend, then whoever called the meeting had to pay me a dollar. And I got a lot of dollars that way. It did make them think twice about calling the meeting, even though it was only a dollar." Will Wright has a good point.

"What we didn't predict was how cheap storage (and other computer-ish) improvements would change the market. That's called the "X Market"—it's all about how the product you're introducing changes the marketplace you're selling into rather than how much of the existing market you'll be able to capture Had it not been for the X Market, hard drives would be specialty items today… Many consumers feel cramped with 100 GB of storage. Home entertainment systems are available with over 10 TB of storage. A consequence of super-cheap storage, at the same time that it's what makes said storage a viable product."

Italians getting into rental, rather than ownership. Products become services.

"The unforgiving streets of public television are no place for weakness: either you fight, or you die. Join the courageous young brawler Large Avian as he embarks on a rampage of revenge against the animatronic gang that killed his family and defiled his nest. Watch as our hero trashes Oswald the Grump, spells out certain doom for the Cracker Beast, and puts their calculating, blood-sucking leader down for the count. New episode every Sunday!" Want this so badly.

Huge, and a bit baggy, but nontheless interesting account of a trip to the SBO Qualifiers in the US; if anything, makes me sad that there's no way we'll ever see an arcade scene like this in the UK ever again.

"Some time ago, Simon Schama wrote an article for the Guardian on the perfect bolognese sauce. Like any other enthusiastic cook, I've been finely honing my sauce for years and finally had it nailed down to what I considered to be Very Good. However, I saw the article as an opportunity to challenge myself, rip it up and start again and above all, get one over Schama. So here's my recipe:" Epicly epic bolognese recipe. Should try this some time.

A rough guide to building your own ExceptionNotifier for CodeIgniter. Might come in handy.