"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.

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.

"Code-Point Open is a dataset that contains postcode units, each of which have a precise geographical location."

"This is a proposed draft of the Don't Be a Dick license for open source projects. The purpose of this license is to permit the broadest feasible scope for reuse and modification of creative work, restricted only by the requirement that one is not a dick about it." Much to recommend here.

"…we haven’t been able to find the right publishing partner for Quarrel.  Despite the game being finished, super polished, and everyone who plays it having great fun with it, we’ve slowly been remembering why we got out of the traditional games industry for so long and escaped to Interactive Television in the first place: this industry doesn’t value good games.  Players do, but the games industry doesn’t.  Instead it values low risk games – not even “calculated” risk games, just low risk." Such a shame; Quarrel has been looking great, and Denki know their games; it's absurd that this is the outcome facing Denki in 2010.

"No huge surprises, except maybe that I changed to dark toolbars. No multi-column reading, no fake book-page animations, and no giant newspaper graphics." Great explanation of Instapaper on the iPad from Marco. And: I'm sure it'll be great; in the past two months, I've become a total Instapaper convert.

"Magick is all about naming and control. So is journalism, and software engineering—related disciplines." yes yes yes a thousand times yes (the most wonderful sentence in James' write-up of a non-conference I didn't attend).

"After some delay I am now proud to announce that the complete Permanent Death saga is available for download. This definitive PDF version of the story, novel, machinima, whatever you want to call it, is something I am immensely proud of. I feel it eclipses both the scope and quality of anything I’ve ever produced before." It was a lovely endeavour, and still one of my favourite games – certainly of the decade, and perhaps ever.

"AquaPath is a free Cocoa-based developer tool for Mac OS X Tiger that allows you to evaluate XPath 2.0 expressions against any XML document and view the result sequence in a dynamic, intuitive tree representation." It is really good, and has already saved my bacon today.

Spotify playlists of videogame soundtracks, and links to soundtrack albums as well.

Photoshoot for Empire; actors pose in pastiches of scenes for which they are famous. But with the emphasis on looking hot. Some are weak, but Christian Bale and his fireaxe, and Jodie Foster/Anthony Hopkins, are great.

"Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software." Oooh.

"Perhaps the Shoreditch startups are more effective than their Dutch counterparts not just because they do more with less… but because they are in London. A city at a different scale than Amsterdam or for that matter the greater Amsterdam area, the Randstad as we call it around these parts. A city with a more diverse ecosystem of services and things, smaller services, more specialised services, ready to be employed by companies like BERG and RIG and Tinker, enhancing their abilities when needed."

"Grackle68k is a twitter client for early Macintoshes running System 6 through OS9."

Does what it says on the tin. Blimey. But also: awesome.

"Flogr shows your pictures from flickr in a customizable photo portfolio interface which includes a main photo page with EXIF details and flickr user comments, a customizable thumbnails page of your recent work, a slideshow component to browse through thumbnails, a tag cloud page, and an about page that shows your flickr user profile. With flogr you can control which photos are shown by specifying the flickr tag(s) to include so you can show only your best photographs if you choose." Which is something I've been looking for for a while. Glad I didn't have to write it, now.

"NameChanger is designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files."

"Fortunately, modern displays can display characters that look exactly like this without special circuitry used in the original DEC terminals and there is free software that can be used to create a usable outline font out of a PNG image." Recreating VT220 terminal fonts in software, and from thence into Truetype.

"LimeChat is an IRC client for Mac OS X written on RubyCocoa." I did not know about this. It looks nice.

"Easily show multiple, overlapping events across calendar days and rows." Which is hard, and it is nice to know someone else has done the work.

"Do you like cities? Do you like architecture? Do you like speaking at conferences?" I think this has sewn up the 2010-11 circuit.

""Who amongst us will write the Building as Contacts and Related Goodness blog post?" It's worth remembering, I think, that he [Dan Catt] already has."

"This page will maintain list of AI related libraries for the Ruby programming language." Some interesting stuff here, although it's all in varying degrees of maturity…

"What data can we wring out of the rural environment that might prove of use to it’s residents and visitors? What embedded processes should have APIs opened up to the wider community?" Lovely lovely lovely design of little bits of Ruricomp and what they might look like from the lovely lovely Paul Pod (who was in the studio a week or two ago, and a joy to work with and around). The twitterbots are especially good.

"We’ve been working with the fine folks at Flickr (thanks Aaron!) to add Noticings to their third party machine tag services. What on earth does that mean? Basically, a badge on the sidebar of your Flickr photos linking to Noticings…" Ding! Rather excited about this. Lots more to come (especially from my half of the deal) on Noticings soon, but this bit is super-exciting.

"Yes kids, back in the Dark Ages, before the Coming of the Internet, your mums and dads used to use computers like this. Before your cloud-based storage and your Dropbox accounts and your Evernote applications and your mythical GDrive – before all of that, we used floppy disks." A lovely little video. I remember this well from the Mac Pluses at school, and even at seven or eight, it drove me nuts.

"On your computer exists your hobbies, your current and/or future career, and the rest of your daily life. You don’t own a snowboard, but you do have a blog, a Twitter, an RSS reader, and a pirated copy of Photoshop. You, my friend, need an Anything Bucket."