malvasia bianca

I was quite late to the music download party, but my experiences on that front have been good; that, combined with my desire to not run out of wall space in my house, suggests that I should start buying books electronically as well. My initial hardware device for this will be an iPad, but I’m [...]

As I mentioned previously, we’ve relaunched the Vintage Game Club under new game selection rules. And I’m very pleased with how it’s gone so far: after about a week of feeling out what games people might be interested in playing, two games emerged with champions, and in both cases we’ve had enough support that the [...]

Daniel Floyd and James Portnow on Video Games and Moral Choices. Ryan from 37 Signals on applying Christopher Alexander to everyday work. Seth Godin’s April Linchpin session. A cat and an iPad. Which I find totally fascinating in a non-cat-youtube-video way. (Via @Laralyn.) I am a biotic god! (Via @truffle.) Amazing clouds. (Via @marick; also, [...]

It turns out that yesterday’s attempt at setting up caching for the blog didn’t work: my feed was broken. (Or rather, one out of the three feed formats.) Sheer luck that I discovered it so quickly—I’d e-mailed the Akismet folks about a reader whose comments were regularly getting flagged as spam, and as part of [...]

I’ve turned on caching for the blog: it gets little enough traffic that 99.9% of the time I don’t need it, but I had one incident a month or so ago where traffic overnight overwhelmed the machine a couple of days in a row, requiring a reboot both times. So, since I want the blog [...]

There’s been lots of discussion recently about the fact that certain computing platforms are less open than some people would prefer, with many people being up in arms about this fact. Once, I would have been one of those people; these days, I’m not (though seeing the reduction in openness does make me sad), and [...]

More and more, I’m getting interested in programs because of their aesthetics. (Via Daring Fireball.) NPR’s 404 page. (Via @jpallas.) I should have spent more time in Mass Effect 2 with Tali and Garrus in my party. (Via @elenielstorm.) The whole world has linked to this one, but for good reason. There’s also a Wired [...]

So many experiments to try in schools. (Via @Brinstar.) The most interesting response I saw to that Clay Shirky piece a month ago. (Via @deirdrakiai.) Why Firefox doesn’t support H.264. (Via @timbray.) Tale of Tales’ Realtime Art Manifesto. (I particularly liked the Ueda quote contained therein, “Reduce the volume, Increase the quality and density”.) (Via [...]

This year I’ll be putting down my pencil and calculator and doing my taxes on a computer for the first time; any recommendations for software I should use? Either something web-based or something that will run on a Mac is fine with me.

How to lose an argument online. I’d been thinking for a while that ‘hardcore’ was only useful as a term in a polemic I had no interest in making. Three false constraints on game design challenges. I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that I won’t be able to avoid playing Dragon Age. (But I’ll hold [...]

Gerald Weinberg is, sadly, in poor health. Never tried doing Rock Band vocals this way… (Takes 15 seconds or so to actually start.) (Via @dan_schmidt.) R.I.P., Brother Blue. (Via @scottros.) The difference between motion and action. (Via @harlan_knight.) An unforeseen design problem. (Via @shawnr.) Nice perspective on slow programming languages. Glad to see non-Miyazaki Ghibli [...]

When I started doing GTD, I kept my next action list on a paper notebook in my pocket. (Or, at work, on a pad of paper on my desk.) I did this partly out of a certain technological conservatism and partly because, at the time, I didn’t have any suitable electronic devices that were always [...]

Really, everybody should have their own domain these days. Rands on Your People. Cave photos. (Via 25 Times a Second.) A handy list of Rails security tips, and a lesson on timing attacks. Sections. Tetris meets Magic Eye. (Via Offworld.) Being a blogger. A different look at the Beatles. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Two on programming hardware, [...]

Neither my wife or I has ever had a mobile phone. This marks both of us as somewhat eccentric, and it’s not a dogmatic choice for either of us; the truth is simply that neither of us uses a phone much, so why bother paying extra to carry one around? For various reasons, though (probably [...]

I just tried to write a blog post containing some Unicode characters (I was blogging about 日本語 learning), and found that WordPress helpfully converted those characters to question marks. After digging around, I ran into this web page describing the problem (see also this thread): basically, if you created your database in a pre-2.1.3 WP, [...]

Despite our earlier plans, we are now back on cable TV again. We actually went pretty far in carrying out the plan: after getting lots of useful advice, I bought a Mac Mini and a PS3, along with various accessories, spent an hour or two rewiring things, and spent several hours over the next few [...]

I’ve been meaning for ages to write about Jim Womack’s article on Respect for People, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll mention it here. A TED talk on underwater astonishments; if the beginning doesn’t capture your fancy or you’re short on time, go to the 4:20 mark. Everything you’d [...]

Comcast is forcing us to switch over to digital TV soon; given that this will break our DVR, we’re thinking that we should just give up on this whole cable TV idea, and set up a computer as a media center instead. Conveniently, Apple has just upgraded the Mac mini, so we’re going to go [...]

This probably deserves a full blog post, but I’m not sure I’m going to get around to it, so: Brian Marick on communities of practice, communities of interest, and boundary objects. The examples just get funnier and funnier. Very interesting take on GlaDOS. I’d never heard of umami before, I’d always thought we only had [...]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan. The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going. Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here… Interesting way to think [...]