"Let's Go Find El Dorado is a physics-based remake of Oregon Trail which plays a bit like Excite Bike." Seriously, do you need to know any more to click the link?

Comprehensive notes on Ben's talk from Ruby Manor – looks really, really good, and lots of things I should probably know. This is the kind of hacking I'm a big fan of.

"Passing the salt will never be the same. We all knew it was inevitable. Passing the salt by hand just isn’t efficient enough in a world of bullet trains and pizza delivery and broadband. Luckily the condiments have come to life! They will waddle wherever you tell them to, so the next time someone wants the pepper, wind up the key, and pepper they shall have! Mercilessly marching towards them like the terminator, more of a threat to dull tastes than the human race." Not sure they're £20-good, but I do like this condiment set made of small robots.

"Here’s a complication of some common and useful time & date calculations and equations. Some, though very simple, are often misunderstood, leading to inefficient or incorrect implementations. There are many ways to solve such problems. I’ll present my favorites." These are, indeed, useful, and I've been using a few of them recently.

A good list of tips – lots of compiled stuff needs to be recompiled to x64, and this will be confusing. I am not upgrading quite yet.

"Accept that everything you say will be forgotten and ignored but write as if you and your words are immortal. Don’t just describe but justify – make sure the reader knows WHY the record exists whether the reasons are righteous or rascally. And always remember you’re not here to give consumer advice or help with people’s filing. You’re here to set people’s heads on fire."

"In business, words are like fashion. You try a word on because important people around you are saying it and getting results, but you may not actually know what it means." Rands helps you discover what the words actually mean. As usual, he is right.

A game about protest, conflict, and shades of gray. Worth playing through to the 'end'; certainly made me think, and unlike any game I've played in a while. Not sure how this passed me bay.

"It may be a little hidden but Git actually comes with auto completion, you just have to set it up." I did not know that. Useful!

"The program seeks to accommodate up to 15 students who are considered "at-risk for dropping out or poor performance in core classes", focusing on themes such as literacy and writing, mathematics, 21st-Century technology skills, leadership, and more. The site argues that students who are considered "at-risk" usually haven't reached that point because they lack the capacity to learn, but because school no longer holds any relevance to them or it bores them…" …and so it uses WoW to provide them with relevant usage-examples of the subjects they need to get better at. Not entirely convinced, but interesting that they're using a wiki to collate lesson ideas/plans.

"In the case of European Air War, what management wanted was a very cool game to sell that customers would love. What the lead programmer did was present it to them so that they could see, clearly, that this was exactly what they had on their hands already. They, too, were having trouble digging through all those details and seeing the big picture." Lovely story about the importance of presentation on any kind of project.

"Being a light-hearted look at the world of story and writing in games." Written by Richard Cobbett, it's quite a lot of fun. And he's played Realms of the Haunting, too. Awesome.

"With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company." Phil is right; it's a wonderful, bonkers piece of improv-email theatre.

"Record gives you unlimited audio tracks, world class effects and mixing gear, and a whole new take on music recording." Lovely: seamless Reason integration, virtual Line6 Pods, and a DAW-ish bit of software that works the way my brain does. Excited!

"In this article, let us review 15 practical examples of Linux find command that will be very useful to both newbies and experts." I've never really understood find, so these are very helpful.

God, Nethack is far, far, far too complicated. This only reminds me why I hated it so much (compared to Rogue, or even Larn).

"So, is it possible to mix segments and querystring?" Sort of, maybe, seems to be the answer.

"The original Keynote Kung-fu article describes how to set up and use Keynote for the first time, but once you’ve done a couple of presentations, you’re going to want more." Rands drops some Keynote science, and I learn at least one new thing.

Even if it's got a long way to go, there's so much promise and potential here – and it's interesting to see how refined some of the puzzle ideas are. And: mind-bending in the way the best puzzle games are.

"I'm looking forward to working with new, clever people and getting my hands dirty again. I'm charged with leading the Open Library into fresh, fun territory; to enlist many hands to make "a page on the web for every book ever published" a great resource. I'm thrilled to be working with Brewster Kahle and his crack team in an important time for books on the web." What a perfect hire. Can't wait to see what George brings to it.

This is epic and brilliant and has so many jumping-off points I need to read it again, and again, and again.

"Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it's as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I'm reminded of Truman Capote's infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.""

Pop band from Bristol, made good singles, got a deal, rather than touring recorded an album, album got shelved by label that had wanted them to tour, band broke up, album now sees light of day from SVC, for three quid. Phew!

"When the glasses are in the tray, the eye chart appears in focus. When the glasses are removed, it appears blurry. Concept by Fiona Carswell for an eyeglass tray using thermochromatic ink and a pressure sensor."

A technique page from a working photographer with quite a few useful tips and technique articles linked off it.

Lots of great stuff in this talk from Mike Kuniavsiky from this year's ETech. I like this explanation of (the confusingly-titled) "avatar", and some of his points on service design are excellent. Lots of meat in here; make sure you get the PDF.

"KNiiTTiiNG uses the Nintendo Wii to knit. KNiiTTiiNG was created by an artist and an engineer turned behavioral scientist." Says coming soon; presumably some kind of homebrew – Wii or Wii controllers, I ask? – but worth a link for the delicious pun in the title.

"Scans of sandwiches for education and delight." Yes.

Some interesting links here, but I swear: could people please find something OTHER than *that* Daigo Umehara video to link to when they talk about fighting games? There's this massively rich space to be explored, and it goes beyond 15-hit parries.

How to get proper HD out of iMovie 09, which is something it makes surprisingly difficult.

"I copy-and-pasted the text of my unread articles from Instapaper into a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu.com, and ordered a single book. Naturally I thought about scripting all of this but Instapaper doesn’t provide an API to retrieve articles, and I didn’t really want to bother with authentication headers and screen scraping and all of that hackery. I just wanted the book." Emmett makes an analogue version of Instapaper for himself.

"One of the great things about working at a company with both interaction and industrial designers is that when collaboratively designing a device, you have better control over where bits of its functionality are located: in the hardware or the software. At Kicker, we call the activity of figuring out where a feature “lives” Functional Cartography."

A story, between two people, told through email. Not looking like email; actually, originally, told over email. Now, it can only be read in order – but once, it would have been delivered. Can't imagine how striking it might have been.

"Watching classics like The Apartment and Manhattan made me wonder at the romances we’d write about some cities, and Slumdog Millionaire bizarrely seemed like a continuation of that: a romance of the maximum-city." Yes; my favourite thing in that film was the growth of the city around Jamal, Bombay becoming Mumbai, and the skyscrapers growing.

"The thing that caught my eye about the Unbook was the idea of accepting a book as a version: an evolving beast that spits out periodic iterations of itself before crawling away to mutate some more."

"See, the RAF reckons research has shown them that the best drone pilot candidates are those who are experienced video game players, rather than experienced pilots. Sounds crazy at first, but when you think about it, pilots are experienced at actually flying. But flying something remotely via a 2D monitor? That's a gamer's area of expertise."