"Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake." Loads of good stuff in this Sterling essay, but this is the leaper-out for me: the reminder - as I fervently behave - about truly understanding the things you work in. And in this case: the reminder that all the old metaphors of computation are rarely true. Computers are not intelligent; they do not see or hear. But nor are they stupid, blind, or deaf. They are just other.

"But this would be a sad and pitiful rant indeed if I focused solely on the age of the protocol... No, my reasons for disparaging FTP are more substantive." A good reference to point at the next time I lose my rag at having to use insecure FTP.

"A short while into the process of making these videos, Alan Kay said, “The main question here is not is this technology probable but is this the way we want to use technology?” One effect of the video was engendering a discussion (both inside Apple and outside) about what computers should be like." On video not needing to be realistic to be useful.

Critical, critical, to the world we live in today.

"The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a "big iPhone" than a "small laptop". The iPad isn't something you pass around. It's not really designed to be a "resource" that many people take advantage of. It's designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated." On the assumptions built into devices, and what understanding them requires.

"The unix-jun72 project has scanned in a printout of 1st Edition UNIX from June 1972, and restored it to an incomplete but running system. Userland binaries and a C compiler have been recovered from other surviving DECtapes." Blimey, etcetera.

Just beautiful: an implementation of a Turing Machine, as described by Turing; not only is it ingenious - reading characters written on tape with pen via OCR - but it's also a beautiful piece of hardware; it feels as elegant as the point it is illustrating.

"As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service."

"Building a working computer from Nand gates alone is a thrilling intellectual exercise. It demonstrates the supreme power of recursive ascent, and teaches the students that building computer systems is -- more than anything else -- a triumph of human reasoning." Ooh, that could be good, when I have an hour spare. (Another Google TechTalk).

"What data can we wring out of the rural environment that might prove of use to it’s residents and visitors? What embedded processes should have APIs opened up to the wider community?" Lovely lovely lovely design of little bits of Ruricomp and what they might look like from the lovely lovely Paul Pod (who was in the studio a week or two ago, and a joy to work with and around). The twitterbots are especially good.

That is quite some paper engineering going on there.

"Archiving my very 1st teenage steps with the Atari 800XL in the form of a folder full of code, sketches & references" Toxi's been archiving his early coding notes and experiments and, you know, it's making me feel a little inadequate. Some beautiful hand-drawn pixel typefaces and graphics here

"I think there's a lesson here: doing something in hardware isn't automatically cool, particularly for kids. It's harder to make things happen, so we veteran geeks get a thrill from it. We think that because it's physical, real, and a Robot, kids will automatically be excited. But for kids who are learning, and who don't appreciate the significance of the challenge, it's just hard and unrewarding."

"After she left, the school began to switch away from Acorn computers to Windows PCs, and computing at school became less and less about actually wrangling the machines for their own sake: programming went away, to be replaced by word processing and the other kinds of useful activities which I'm sure helped a lot of pupils gain the kind of computer literacy they needed for the real world, but it wasn't the kind of computer literacy I needed. I needed the more abstract, joyful, engagement with computers that Sister Celsus provided, and which could only have been provided at the end of the 80s." A lovely post for Ada Lovelace Day from Matt.

Lots of great stuff in this talk from Mike Kuniavsiky from this year's ETech. I like this explanation of (the confusingly-titled) "avatar", and some of his points on service design are excellent. Lots of meat in here; make sure you get the PDF.

"It is a commonplace that if it weren’t for computers we couldn’t fly to the moon, or even keep an accurate record of the national debt. On the question of how it does what it does, however, the computer has always remained essentially mysterious—unfathomable to all but a small handful of initiates. An officer of one major computer concern guessed recently that not more than 2% of his employees really know how it works." 2% seems awfully high these days. Detailed, technical article from Life in 1967.

Microsoft no longer offer Windows 3.x licenses (and obviously haven't offered support for the product for a while). Program Manager, File Manager, come in; your time is up.

"An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.

"There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people... Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."

"...then, after destroying his nano-network, as an admonition to the audience, extended [Arthur C Clarke's metaphor]: 'Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage.'" Excellent summary of what sounds like a wonderful GDC Austin keynote from Bruce Sterling.

Simple, straightforward, pretty much correct.

"This is a write-up of my diploma project in interaction design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The project is entitled ‘Adventures in Urban Computing’ and this weblog post contains a brief project description and a pdf of the diploma report." Well worth a read, and beautifully presented. I need to chew over this more.

"It's 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future. (Scenes From An IBM Slide Presentation)" Such typefaces; such hair.

"The bottom line is, there are laws on the books in the EU that stand in direct conflict with the needs of Google's architecture, and no amount of hand waving will make that fact go away." Smart artcile about the legal issues of cloud computing.

"Funnel is a toolkit to sketch your idea physically, and consists of software libraries and hardware. By using Funnel, the user can handle sensors and/or actuators with various programming languages such as ActionScript 3, Processing, and Ruby."

"Mommy, why is there a Server in the House?" A lovely book to explain the "stay-at-home server" to kids, snapped by the gang at Gizmodo. Well, it made me laugh

"...the discipline is entirely about cheapness. The glory goes to parsimony, to the algorithms that invest the fewest CPU cycles for the greatest return... What scientists saved programmers squander." Paul Ford is a man after my own heart.

"The issue is, shall we now together proceed to create a universe of unbelievable facility and magnitude from the universe skeleton that lies before us, with the universe wrenches and universe screwdrivers that fall so easily into our hands?" Great line.

"I actually went and looked up on the Web a list of NP-hard problems, and they sure as hell sound like our games." Raph Koster hitting lots of nerves with me. Lots, and lots, of nerves.

Pointers tripped me up when I was 13 and trying to learn C. Flummoxed, I tell you - and put off programming for a while. Now, though, I appreciate Joel's point (even if I'm a lousy coder and not worthy of the title "programmer"). I think it's the fact I k

Mechanical logic gates executed in lego. beautiful.