"Images are made in Photoshop and Illustrator. Video is edited in Final Cut Pro. Buildings are rendered in Autodesk. Books are written in Scrivener. And so on. To paraphrase McLuhan “the hardware / software is the message” because while you can imitate as many different styles as you like in your digital arena of choice, ultimately they all end up interrelated by the architecture of the technology itself."

"My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred."

"Dyson's account of how the Von Neumann machine was conceived and built is a beautiful example of technological storytelling." "Having finished it, I emailed George Dyson to explore some of the ideas in it that had intrigued me. Here is an edited transcript of our online conversation." John Naughton interview on the eve of the release of Turing's Cathedral.

"This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data." "Losing data is not the same as forgetting. It happens all at once, not gradually or imperceptibly, so it feels less like an unburdening than like a mugging."

On calculators in school: [[ [Truss] had an example of a question set for 11-year-olds in which a calculator was allowed: "These are some prices in a flower shop. Tulips: £1.20 for a bunch; roses: 40p each; daffodils, 55p for a bunch. How many roses can you buy for exactly £2?" ]] Lest you think she's a luddite: [[ "I was a mainstay of my school computer club, and I was happy to spend time programming in BASIC." ]]

A great piece from John Naughton in the Observer, hanging off the back of the Eric Schmidt lecture at Edinburgh but (rightly) critiquing too much British computing education as being about learning Word, not learning programming, and highlighting Arduino and the forthcoming Raspberry Pi £15 Linux computer.

"By breaking the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, von Neumann unleashed the power of the stored-program computer, and our universe would never be the same." George Dyson's short article for Edge may act as a sketch for his forthcoming book of the same name.

"All the episode really shows is that bloggers often get a bad rap for good reasons." Why the mention of Android in the FCC's net neutrality submission isn't as stupid as it looks at first glance.

"Big banks need IT reform almost as badly as regulatory change" says the Economist, in an article about legacy mainframes and how they fail to allow well-tailored products for customers.

"The V&A has been collecting computer-generated art and design since the 1960s. More recently, the Museum acquired two significant collections of computer-generated art and design, and together these form the basis of the UK's emerging national collection of Computer Art." Worth finding if you're there to visit Decode.

"Peter Landin ... was a complex character: a political radical, a gay-rights campaigner and an outstanding academic computer scientist." "Towards the end of his life, Peter became convinced that computing had been a bad idea, giving support to profit-taking corporate interests and a surveillance state, and that he had wasted his energies in promoting it."

"'You believe that there are dangers if we fool ourselves into believing the AI myth?' 'It is likely to accelerate our progress towards a dystopian world in which wars, policing and care of the vulnerable are carried out by technological artefacts that have no possibility of empathy, compassion or understanding.'"

"Steven Frank’s essay on the current state of the desktop UI reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces." Interesting.

Subtitled "meet the Bafta-winning father of the videogames industry", this is an interesting look back at a career that only has its bookends in the subject at hand. No less worth reading for that, mind you.

Syncing isn't good enough, but MacBooks are now (storage in particular). Also, hurrah for US keyboards (something I definitely agree with.)

Richard Dawkins: "Isn't programming useful? In the right hands, yes. But my projects ... could all be done better (and were) by professionals. It was a classic addiction: prolonged frustration, occasionally rewarded by a briefly glowing fix of achievement."

"Michael Dell has said his firm can regain its spot as the world's number one PC maker by switching its focus to consumers" Er, right. Good luck with that. Interesting behind the scenes sidebar blog post from Rory Cellan-Jones too.

John Dvorak in spectacular missing-the-point form. He even admits that he's an old fool who shouldn't be writing about computing any more (well, that's my interpretation anyway).

"Hermann Hauser and Steve Furber, who worked at Acorn, will be joined by former BBC staff John Radcliffe and David Allen" "The Science Museum plans an exhibition about the BBC Micro and its legacy in 2009"

An alternative storage engine for MySQL. Useful for big BLOBs?

This somehow doesn't look detailed enough for me to figure out how to do what I want with it. Oh well, maybe if I print it out...

Worryingly light on detail. Grr.