"From a technical standpoint, the success of the lowly GIF is a mystery. Both as an image format and as a video/animation format, it’s vastly inferior to the alternatives." And yet, it succeeds. This is a good look at why (through the lens of a hex editor, no less).

I think it was only at the third time I watched this that I realised how nicely each of the film-scratch sketches map out the characters. It's a really good sequence (and, with a lot of the other things in the movie, surprisingly subtle).

"Board a Manhattan-bound Q or B train from DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn (or on weekends, currently due to constructions, the R train runs on this track as well) and look out the right side just before the train emerges out of the tunnel onto Manhattan Bridge." Nice.

A slightly crazy jazz-soundtracked film + animation about the exciting new world - for the 1960s - of automatic ticket barriers, from the London Transport Museum. This was on as part of a series of free films in Trafalgar Square in November, and it stuck in the memory; it's great to be able to share it.

Using the NYC subway station usage data: "I wanted to be able to scrub back and forth in time, so I started working on a ModestMaps-powered map with a time slider. After getting the data into the right shape, it was pretty quick to get something simple but interactive and visual up" This is really rather excellent - the UI has lots of neat touches (like animating on clicking the slider). It's only a shame that the chances of getting similar data out of TfL are so close to zero.

"The best motion picture released last year was WALL-E". Preach it, brother. I've been meaning to write something like that since the Wired blog post about the Dark Knight at the tail end of last year, but John Gruber has done it better than I could (while using some of hte terms I'd have picked). Wall-E is a classic, and it's been snubbed.

"the WebKit on iPhone 2.0 already supports CSS Animations (as well as CSS Transforms and CSS Transitions). The iPhone implementation has been optimized for the platform so you get fantastic performance"

The people behind Professor Layton - which I played through earlier this year and thoroughly enjoyed - are working with legendary Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli on a DS game, due out next year. Joy! Rapture! Hopes for an early English translation!

Looks like it it's purdy. I should install it later (even though I really don't use screen savers- at the moment I have a minimal home-compiled one called Blank, which is just black)