"But what if you make personalisation easier? Consider a game that brings your real world into your game world, all on its own. It could to grab data from the internet about the real world and the gamers that live in it, and weave it into the game experience, for an effect that is both surprising and personally meaningful. You would see yourself in a game without having to put yourself there. It’s not user-generated content: it’s user-generated, machine-mediated content – UGMMC, or as I like to say it, “Ugh-Meck.”" I am super-happy at how well Chris's writing for Edge Online is turning out.

"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.

"Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender."

"Briefs is a framework for packaging concept screens & control schemes that run live on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This allows you to experience the feel of your concept without the expense of development." Ooh.

"rush is a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax. Grep through files, find and kill processes, copy files – everything you do in the shell, now in Ruby." Equal parts "ooh" and "hunh?", I think.

"…we roped in Nate McFeters, another local, and put together a security talk for indie Mac developers with no budget for security. What does a security talk for Mac developers look like? As it turns out, it’s very much like the talk we think every indie developer, Mac or not, should see, and it’s very much unlike the talk the rest of the security industry is giving." Good stuff: simple, clear, well-thought out, and very hard to argue with.

"Lose/Lose is a simple vertical-scrolling shoot'em up with a twist — each alien appearing on your screen represents a random file on your computer. Thus, each time you kill an alien, the game will delete that sprite's associated file. If the aliens manage to destroy your ship, the Lose/Lose application is deleted." Way to make a point, but, you know, *blimey*.

"So much city thinking seems mad keen for a return to city states; autonomous islands, connected to each other through finance and fibre but not to land that surrounds them. It's a little bit collapsist; let's wrap the city around us while we still can. But maybe we could think about network technologies as a way to reintegrate rural and urban rather than accelerate the dominance of one over the other. Perhaps all this brilliant city thinking could lift its eyes a little and look beyond the city walls – I'd love to see what we'd come up with then."

"Stacey is an easier way to create a portfolio site. No database setup or installation files, simply drop the application on a server and it runs. Your content is managed by creating folders and editing text files. No login screens, no ‘cms’." Elegant – perhaps even more so than some of the stripped-down Ruby static-site management tools I've seen.

'"We have a real culture of thrift," [Kotick] said. "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games." And then, to ensure there was no confusion in his message, he added that he has tried to instill "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the economic downturn into the corporate culture at Activision. "We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression," he said.' Bobby Kotick. What a guy. What a CEO. What a leader.

"Designed by Oliver Rokison a teacher at St Paul's School. This project connects to the Tower Bridge twitter account and mimics the movements of the real tower bridge." Fun.

"Larva Labs proposes an intelligent home screen that creates a meaningful hierarchy out of a user’s information. Designed for an Android-based handset, our home screen is intended to appeal to Blackberry owners and people struggling with information overload." An interesting experiment; I like being able to vary the level of personalisation on the fly, but am not sure the screen is nearly dense enough for people with "information overload" – it only handles a couple of items in each category without drilling down. The Blackberry's appeal in part is due to its hyper-dense list of information.

"There is a tension between the Royal Mail as a profit-making business and the Royal Mail as a public service. For most of the Royal Mail management – who rarely, if ever, come across the public – it is the first. To the delivery officer – to me, and people like me, the postmen who bring the mail to your door – it is more than likely the second." Excellent diary in the LRB from a Royal Mail postman, which at least helps explain a lot of the problems inside the postal system, as opposed to just the ones I experience outside it.

"FuckYeahSubways is a tumblelog." And it does exactly what it says on the tin: pictures of subways and metro systems, inside and out, from around the world. Really good.

"Ah – The Big Meg, where at any moment on the mile-high Zipstrips you might be flattened by a rogue Boinger, set-upon by a Futsie and thrown down onto the skedways far below, offered an illicit bag of umpty-candy or stookie-glands and find yourself instantly at the mercy of the Judges. If you grew up on 2000AD like me, then your mind is probably now filled with a vivid picture of the biggest, toughest, weirdest future city there's ever been." Jones on future cities, collating and refining thoughts into a lovely piece of structure and rhetoric. Also, the sentence "wrapping himself in Tokyo to form a massive concrete battlesuit".

"I’m not arrogant enough to believe these terms will catch on but I might start to use them just for shits and giggles. But perhaps the next time you hear someone mention that X title is linear or non-linear, before jumping down their throat ask yourself “What kind of linear are they actually talking about”."

Joe Moran (of Reading the Everday) has a blog. I did not know this. Subscribed!