I imagine you'll see this link a lot over the next day or two – Penny Red on yesterday's riots at Millbank Tower. Superb writing, in support of an important cause.

You could apply these set of rules to any form of critique/review not just design, and you'd probably come out doing pretty well.

Lots in here, but here's the key thing: "This re-engineering suggests that paywalls don’t and can’t rescue current organizational forms. They offer instead yet another transformed alternative to it."

Not blogging this as an anti-Facebook thing, just as some interesting information about non-standard ways people use social networking software in a privacy intensive manner.

It's one way of looking at MMOs (and related industries), I guess. I'm aware that Warcrack has a GPD higher than some countries, and that there was a point (I haven't checked, it may still be true) where the virtual currency in Eve online was worth more that the currency of Iceland, where the game is based, but they're both entirely virtual, and I'm not 100% convinced that we're going to get the ability to rapid deploy and re-use these things in a full physical-world context (that a full EaaS would need) any time in the next five years.

Lined via Eliis and BERG both, this is an idea I'm having trouble putting down. It may not actually be that useful for me, in as much as while I do use notebooks (I took delivery of my own back of lovely new Fieldnotes books myself the other day), my use tends to be sporadic, but the flipside of that is that if I could train myself to use them more, or at least better, I might find them more useful.

I think I may want this at home in the near future.

There's something really interesting about the sound of this remix by Pogo – the era the samples are from really shines through, creating something that's weirdly timeless, while still being being modern-sounding.

The 7th Guest is coming to iOS! If you do not understand why that is exciting, then I pity you…

Strongly considering doing this – I loathe the way I'm often forced to restart my browser because some flash ad or another has choked it.

Absolutely brilliant excerpt from a new book on the history of ghosts in England. Will have to order a copy.

One hopes this link will do through rounds as far and wide, and with as much prominence as previous links on the matter of Stephen Fry and human sexuality. It won't, of course. "Man says something sensible" is not news. If only we could stop "Man says something silly" being treated like it's news, too.

Jess Nevins, known to this parish as the author of The Encyclopaedia of Fantastic Victoriana (a reference tome no serious library is complete without), has started a series on the history of the pulps at io9. I will be reading with great interest.

Strongly suspect this is Foundation X from the other day. The other likely candidate for a secretive organisation with a lot of cash that is known to be looking to make a one large, highly-targeted acquisition is, of course, Apple.

I uh, don't quite know what to make of this. It sounds like conspiracy theory meets internet fraud scam on a national level. But if it's legit, and anyone from Foundation X is reading this and would like to fund me to the tune of say, 4 or 5 million quid with no strings attached, then I'm certainly willing to enter into discussions about how I would usefully use the money…

Tim Berners-Lee explains the context through which he came to computers, and makes the case that while people aren't ever going to come to thme that way again, there are still some vitally important things that we should be teaching our children about computers.

If you write, whether it's comics or not, I imagine that by the time you have read this article, you will understand why you need Scrivener in your life. It is hands down the best writing app I have ever encountered, and what's better is that it's surprisingly intuitive to use. Antony's article may have you thinking "god, that sounds like a lot of options, how confusing", but what I love about it is that they're not intrusive, and you can come to them as you need them. Try it just as a word processor, and you'll find that over time, you'll pick up more and more of it's features, just because they're there and easy to understand, until you wonder how you managed to write without it. Just the ability to hold my research notes in a meaningful structure alongside my actual writing, and view both at the same time is invaluable to me, never mind the bits of process tracking it enables me to do…

I didn't know that one could do this. It's pointless tech stuff to most of you, but I'll find it very useful.

Yes, it's a lampshade made of what you think it's made of, at least if the author of the book is to be believed. Objects like this are widely regarded as urban legends, and I don't know if I 100% believe that this one is real, although I also don't know how much of that is just that I don't *want* to believe it. Still, just reading the article, it's not hard to understand the sort of fascinated repulsion an object like this might produce, if it is real. Interesting mis of reactions as to what should be done with it, as well.

This made me laugh. Lads, if you are confused as to whether a compliment you are paying a lady is going to be taken as flattery, or if you're going to cross the line into creepy, her is a simple test that will save you more than 90% of the time: imagine yourself in jail, and imagine how you would feel if your hypothetical cellmate said exactly the same thing to you. Now do you see?

An absolute gem of a little horror comic. Serious, go read.

Nice post on the evolution of genre, and why some genres flourish, some mutate, and some die at different times.

I think the most surprising thing about this story is this quote: "A policy which fuels resentment and antagonism amongst minority communities without achieving a single terrorist conviction serves only to help our enemies and increase the terrorism threat." And the reason it's surprising it that it's coming from a Conservative MP. (Although I it is David Davis, who I confess to a grudging admiration for on the subject of civil liberties.)

Yes. More of this sort of thing, please.

Here's one of the governments cuts that won't make headline news, that won't get any of the usual arts bodies fighting against it, because it's not music or theatre or public art or any of the other stuff luvvies and lefties get up in arms about. And honestly, it probably won't change most' people's lives, but realistically also won't save any serious money. It's a cut for the sake of making a cut, an idealogical statement. And that statement is, broadly "fuck writers".

Budgie has managed to write 150 ultra-short stories in 150 days. If you think that consistently writing 200 words a day isn't a remarkable feat, then I suggest that you try it. Every day, for almost half a year, you sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, and force yourself to have a good idea. No excuse for illness, no excuses for just "being busy with other things". 150 days, having a new idea every day, and executing that idea to a high standard, without fail. Yeah. My hat's off to you, squire. 200 days next year, year?

Here's a plugin you can install and use that will protect you from Firesheep on a lot of sites that support it. Not all, by any means, so don't go assuming you're secure, just because you're running it, but it should keep you safe on many popular sites.

3 Conservative MPs, one of the them a cabinet member, have repeatedly smeared and harassed a journalist who had the temerity to question some of the lies they told in public. (I should perhaps say that I don't believe that Labour MPs are automatically above this kind of behaviour, either, merely that I haven't read anything about it lately. That doesn't make it acceptable that the Conservatives do it.)

Some good, thoughtful writing on the current crop of magazines-for-ipad, and the failings in the software used to produce and consume them.

If only I used a laptop on public wifi I'd set this up…

This has become a reasonably hot issue in the last week or so, as I hope my post earlier made clear. If you’re a Mac user, there’s some stuff in here that’ll help…

Should probably run this at home – I just had a quick check on my work machine, and discovered I could free up 4GB of space, and I suspect that number will be higher at home…

Really interesting article on African SF writing – why there hasn't been much of it historically, and why it's something to really look forward to.