"If you had to make a snap judgment about a Londoner, how would you do it? Start with the newspaper he or she is reading." More handy hints are within this New York Times magazine article, such as "Frequent apology is one of an arsenal of clever tricks Londoners employ to obscure their true feelings and remain opaque to outsiders and possibly even to themselves."

'How did a 153-year-old magazine — one that first published the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and gave voice to the abolitionist and transcendentalist movements — reinvent itself for the 21st century?' A profitable magazine, partly due to ignoring the split between online and print ads.

"I couldn’t email, blog, tweet or quote from the [New Yorker iPad] app, to say nothing of linking away to other sources — for magazine apps like these, the world outside is just a rumor to be denied." It's good to see influential people continue to say stuff like this. (See also http://notes.husk.org/tagged/ipad for previous witterings on this topic.)

"I was also aware that dumping them en masse into Flickr wasn’t going to be an interesting way of conveying what I was up to all summer. So I published a magazine instead." This is something I need to do.

A particularly good Bus of the Month in this, er, edition of Smoke, along with reviews of Young's riverside pubs. But... is it the last issue?

Khoi Vinh on Mag+'s first incarnation: "To look at the app even for a moment is to recognize immediately that the images are privileged over nearly everything else. What little interactivity there is on offer is minimal at best." I'd respond that not everything on the iPad (or iPhone, or even a computer) has to fall into what sounds worryingly like the old CD-ROM model of 'interactivity'. I quite like reading books without having them making noise, for example.

I've trimmed the headline a bit (the ABC figure is actually 48,275), but so much for the Wired deathwatch that was predicted. On the other hand, the comments point out a lot of the figure is from freebies and subscriptions. Hm.

"The independent worldwide magazine of the crane industry. Come to us for the best writing about mobile cranes, tower cranes, lifting equipment and more."

An interesting article by Peter Kirwan on the unmentioned waste (about 40% of magazines, 20% of newspapers) that the structures of industry seem to show up. It's odd that the "editor who allowed himself to be lured back" isn't named when the experiment mentioned is on their blog, though. (Once I'd have said who it was; I must be getting mellow.)

Laurie Taylor on food and class. A good read (and hopefully a signifier of a good Something Understood tonight).

"Dunlop's Speedaway applications research has covered a proposed link between commuter train terminals north and south of the Thames. Photomontages, right and opposite, show the Speedaway crossing the new London Bridge."

"Helium is the lifeblood of large particle accelerators. As the world’s supply dwindles, the particle physics community must take steps to preserve this precious commodity or learn to live without it." The problem is that it escapes into space as soon as it's released from the underground mines (typically for oil and gas) where it's found.

"Sometimes you can become ideologically correct by simply standing still. For years I've thoroughly disliked everything about cars. I don't want to drive or be driven in cars. I don't want to talk about the relative merits of different cars." Laurie Taylor is going after my own heart there.

An article from September 1968 about the two planned trainsets for high speed rail from Washington to Boston. Acela still pays the price for the failure to lay new track forty years ago. Choice quote: "A single rail track [has] been shown to have the same hourly passenger capacity as 24 lanes of expressway auto traffic."

Bus of the month goes to Bexleyheath and more besides! It's the latest issue of everyone's favourite irregular-published London fanzine.

Treating the Guardian's Weekend magazine with the reverence it deserves. (I like Gentleman Cat.)

Bobbie Johnson on Wired UK 2.0 (I'm probably not the first to make that joke, am I?) I took out a subscription, sight unseen, because I'm curious as to how it'll shake out (and it was priced, like US subs, cheaply enough to write it off if it doesn't work out). This makes me somewhat hopeful.

200 covers for the 200th issue of Edge. A real mix, including some of the terrible tropes that infect the games industry, but also some lovely ones.

"WOPR - fictional 20th Century military computer, disliked noughts and crosses" That's a bit reductive, but I suppose it counts as a win for the pop reference fans. The article's really about board games.

It's that time of year again: Smoke issue 13! This time, the magical mystery 521 and its Strand wormhole, and looking for Nine Elms (before the Americans colonise it). And much more, no doubt.

"Turn your favorite feeds into a personal magazine" Produces a PDF, but somewhat escapes the one-look-fits-all paradigm of feed reading applications.

An interesting comment piece on a neglected new work of fiction, book publishing, and its response to changes in the market around it.

It's that time again.

"MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we'll take care of the rest" Nice idea, but of course it's US only for now (at least, as far as buying a magazine goes).

Maybe I'll read this later.

An interesting counterpoint to Dan Hill's much-linked piece on Monocle, pointing out how badly their advertorial can go wrong.

EPIServer, eh? Lots of interesting nuggets in this, and that's just on a skimreading. I'm surprised the decision to paywall just gets a sidenote, though.

"Chris Rapley, the newly appointed director of London's Science Museum, talks to Robert Butler about Sherlock Holmes, climate change, and shifting the museum's focus from the past to the future"

Tea vs PG Tips: 'she takes a bag of tea from the cupboard above the stove, drops it in a cup, fills a kettle with water, boils the water, pours it over the teabag and lets it steep for a few minutes. She calls this "making a cup of tea"'

Excerpts from the upcoming issue #11 of the London magazine/fanzine/thing.

Modernist designers featured in Playboy resurface on Design Without Reach.

Subtitled "The war on light pollution", this is a glorious overview of the problems it causes and what we're all missing due to the human-generated glow in our skies. Well worth a read.

Whiteboards are taking over everywhere else, but blackboards cling on in academia. Here's a US particle physics magazine on the subject.

online science mag rom the inkycircus folks

Unsurprisingly, no sequels.

What it says on the tin

On Phyllis Pearsall, born 100 years ago on Monday

found while looking for more on Southern Belle, a steam train simulator, but I was also reminded of Spy vs Spy, which looks like a DS game prototype, frankly. Please? Someone?

Why doesn't the (much bigger) computer industry take on media, rather than the other way around?