Internet friend Ariana Osborne on the magic of the present. If you're annoyed with your lack of jetpack, I suggest this as a dose of perspective.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the 'rat race' — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."

"The morning question, what good shall I do today?" "Evening question, What good have I done today?"

This is where you live. Go and look.

Interesting piece on the design of objects, and the effect it can have on perceptions of their use.

My brain is a bit fried right now, and even though I'm mainlining coffee, I'm not in a state to really retain serious information. So I'm marking this as one to come back to, as it looks interesting.

I cut my teeth building systems for a local newspaper company – one, in fact, that I had delivered as a teenager, for pocket money. It's very easy to dismiss local papers as lacking in real news content, and full instead of trivial local rubbish, but the reality is that they provide local-community level news that really is important to the daily lives of many people. There is a very real need to find alternative infrastructure to distribute this information, ideally in a non-digital form.

I think I could have fun with some of this shit. Need to go LED shopping soon.

The rest of this guy's work is good, too, but this is just fucking gorgeous.

Charles Stross in conversation with Paul Krugman. Well worth a listen. Particularly the bit about what ladies who lunch will be eating in fifteen-twenty years time, which made me laugh like a drain.

A day in the overheard life of London.

Why do I not own one of these? Someone see to it at once!

I vaguely recall this from GCSE Latin. It is a rather more ace thing now that I'm not looking at it in a stuffy classroom.

Go. Look at this. Stunning, bleak, depressing photojournalism on poverty in America.

Is you have any interest in data visualisation at all, you need to take a look at these. Really interesting way to present information of this kind – it allows interesting abberations to be identified really quickly and conveniently. What else might be suitable to present this way, other than the pop charts?