"ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations. ImageOptim combines various optimisation tools: AdvPNG from AdvanceCOMP, OptiPNG, PngCrush, JpegOptim, jpegtran from libjpeg, Gifsicle and optionally PNGOUT. It's excellent for publishing images on the web (easily shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop) and also useful for making Mac and iPhone applications smaller." Ooh, looks excellent.

"Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications." Wow – snappy, well-made, and very impressive.

"Slammer gives you any grid you want, anywhere you want: Typographic Grids, Golden Sections, Fibonacci series or Rule of Thirds. Thats not all, Slammer also has Rulers, Crosshairs, Magnifier, Measurements & Screenshots. Slammer is a must have for any designer."

Bleak, stylistically lovely, flash game about the drudgery of existence. Not cheery, but some beautiful touches. And I loved the cow.

"Welcome to the home of the Generic Syntax Highlighter – GeSHi. GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system, but has been generalised to this project." As seen on the Panic blog: very impressive, in particular, the clickable documentation of Objective-C keywords.

"Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online." Ooh, that's useful.

"I’m unfamiliar with a lot of the songs we do, and though I get to know them pretty well during the testing process, I rarely have a chance to get sick of them thanks to our relentless schedule. So when faced with a year of testing 45 very familiar songs for The Beatles: Rock Band, it seemed inevitable that I’d end up a Stones guy when the project was through. Then, last night at the company release party, I hung out in front of an Xbox with some thirty coworkers and sang along to Beatles songs for over four hours at the top of my lungs. When I woke up this morning, I actually yawned blood." Well done, Dan.

"All yeahs in a baby are always the same height." Crazy markup preprocessor of the day, with suitably entertaining documentation.

"It seems to me that Transgaming have done more to hurt the Mac gaming world than anyone else. The idea that you can turn your product into a Mac game OVERNIGHT, without employing ANYONE WHO SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT THE PLATFORM is an absurd thing to peddle."

"Tig provides a simple command-line yet visual interface to Git." An explanation of what Tig does, and why you might find it useful.

"Tig is a git repository browser that additionally can act as a pager for output from various git commands."

Marvellous – case study of all the packaging concepts for the bonkers House Of The Dead: Overkill. Lots of gnarly, grindhouse-inspired graphic design going on here, and many things that are as good as the final version.

Haynes Manual for the Apollo 1 LM and CSM. Awesome.

It looks like a GBA Micro; in fact, it's a portable multi-platform emulator, it's $100, and there's almost nothing you can do on it that isn't highly illegal. But if the hardware's manufactured well, it's a lot less faff than modding a PSP these days…

Ooh, nice – online favicon generator and editor. Might be useful one day.

Castronova's paper on whether the Law of Demand, as it works in the real world, also works in the virtual.

Ryan North makes a little poem dedicated to the COALESCE function in MySQL. He's right: it's super useful.

"Local devs, running local services, but how to share with everyone in the room?" Answer: rebuild all your tools to work across Bonjour. Slightly bonkers but very cool.

"When we assembled a focus group of Xbox Live players, they immediately asked for one feature we hadn’t even considered – in-depth tracking of the groin area, for post-kill celebrations. We were proud to help them find a new revolutionary way to teabag – and believe me, these ain’t no waggle controls." Hardcasual goes for the soft targets, as usual. Ahehe.

Seriously, Harmonix' character design is just amazing, and this movie – just the _intro_ movie to Beatles Rockband – is making me care more about that band than anything in my life has. Harmonix are gods.

Yes, it's advertising, but that's really, really, really clever. Nicely done.

"The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’" Lots of good quotations, including this, and also on fires.

I've linked to a single photo, because it makes me think: what it must be, to be taking photographs for Science, millions of miles away via radiowaves, and to have them not only be useful, but to turn out as beautiful as this one. How wonderful to know that the universe is as beautiful as the world, and that even in the name of research, we can take such beautiful pictures.

"With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way." Oh. Now that looks interesting.

"See, you're doing that zany goofball routine, but Xander and Wash never made sex slaves, so it kind of doesn't work." Seriously, this is the most accurate summary of Dollhouse you can imagine. If I'd been playing the drinking game, my liver would be dead by now.

Jolly good – easy to configure and get going, nice templating, and fast, because it's based on a databased index. Also, it looks like it's very actively maintained. Now added to this blog!

"Are all these industries in such terminal decline that they’re grasping around for any revenue stream or way out? Or is this the converged future, where business and culture are one and the same? Not only can’t I tell whether things are real or marketing vehicles any more, I can’t even determine what’s being marketed." Chris has a point.

Which is the sensible way to do things, and this feels about right.

The title says it all. Proper good, especially the sheer volume of A Lot Of Guys With Drums, and the way the brass replace some of the keyboard and bass parts.

"One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any." A wonderful quotation in the midst of this dense, fascinating article.

"Unlike other screenshot services, we are able to process a large number of capturing jobs in parallel and in realtime, making it the fastest service that we know of." Ooh. That could be useful.

"This article provides a simple positive model for preventing XSS using output escaping/encoding properly. While there are a huge number of XSS attack vectors, following a few simple rules can completely defend against this serious attack." Pretty comprehensive, and some clear guidelines if, like me, you're unsure where to start when protecting against XSS.

"Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The programming environment runs on the Xbox, allowing rapid design iteration using only a game controller for input." Which is interesting. I know it's only a research project, but it'd be lovely to play with some time.