"No city in the world has so rapidly developed as Berlin. Twenty years ago it was of comparative unimportance, and not particularly interesting in any way." Tourist advice, a century on.

If I were any closer to Berlin than I am, I would be making an effort to visit the city just for this. As it is, this is somewhere between a recommendation and a lamentation. Ah well.

"How does one write about a neighborhood that is not a neighbourhood? A neighbourhood still so much under construction one cannot even use that well-worn phrase “not so much a neighbourhood as a state of mind” (“not of an age but for all time”?) to describe it?" A wonderful little piece on the area of Berlin around the central station.

"Indiemapper is kind of like an Adobe Illustrator for maps online. Load your data, pick the features of focus, and then map it."

A thoughtful, nicely-illustrated post on the design (in general terms) of ebooks, primarily for the two dominant iPad reader applications. Well worth a read (in particular, I liked the aggregate / heatmap idea; once I was thinking of doing something similar for delicious, and may yet).

The first example of diegetic 3d titles? (See also: Fringe, Heroes, and apparently, Moon).

A pure Perl script to manipulate EC2 and S3. Saves having to install all that Java nonsense.

"on the iPhone there is this nifty object called UIWebView. Otherwise known as WebKit. Otherwise known as an embedded browser in your iPhone app." "First: the downsides... it's slow.... it's slow." "Now I realise that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw but I thought it was such a big one it was worth mentioning twice."

"Boris Johnson confirmed that his vision for a new Transport for London would not include the Thames Gateway Bridge, Cross River Tram, Croydon tramlink expansion, Oxford Street tram, East London or Greenwich waterfront transits or the Dagenham Rock DLR extension." Not that you should expect anything different from a Tory.

Why did I not know this was on? "Marking the centenary of the founding of the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE), this exhibition celebrates the importance of engineering in creating some of the most iconic buildings of the past 100 years."

To look at, especially if I ever get around to doing things with the likes of Starling.

No more scraping GMail, and AuthSub too, so no more flinging around username/password pairs either. Now hopefully everyone else will have to follow suit. Can you add contacts, though? (Edit) Yes, the blog post says "create".

"Identity and sharing can make everyone warm and fuzzy, but also came face to face with sobering consequences that kept me up at night with a bottle of tequila."

Looks like a nice Dopplr API addon, when it launches. Looks like he's taking note of feature requests too.

I spent a bit of the weekend playing about with JavaScript, and jQuery was the nicest of the libraries I was dealing with (and there were a few). Simon Willison's written a nice introduction to it.

"will transform MySQL into a scalable media server capable of streaming pictures, films, MP3 files and other binary and text objects directly in and out of the database."

Two CD set due out soon. For ages I've had a tape- and then MP3s- of the glorious '94 performance, from the BBC, but I've never had the live version of Are We Here?. Great news.

"Both Flickr and Twitter make it somewhat difficult to move through giant lists [while] the databases quietly running these services are wildly denormalized and indexed like crazy, making it possible to generate these lists" Have to read this properly.

Who needs Twitter when you can glance at pictures of your buddies?

I wish people wouldn't conflate the iPod with ID3- should Apple rewrite metadata standards? I expect there are people out there who wish that people wouldn't do the same with "MP3 player", too, for different reasons.

Shot in burst mode. Interesting idea. Can't watch it properly now but what I've seen looks worthwhile.