Source Filmmaker
Phil Nelson To wit: What could be the single greatest step forward for machinima… ever, is released for free as a side product because Valve wants to see what you make with it.
LouisCK Selling Tour Tickets Directly From His Website
Cutting out the middle-man and going fan direct for his next tour. He says they will be actively looking for and straight-up deactivating scalped tickets.
The scalping idea is interesting, but it seems like the potential for a big PR disaster is there. Unless they plan on investigating every suspected scalped ticket, anyway.
The Pokayoke Guide to Developing Software
What Aaron Swartz called “All the good ideas I’ve heard in one place,” and it is chock full of them. Required reading for anyone who builds software, hires people who do, or manages them. Much of the advice can be applied to just about any profession, though.
WEEP: Alate PRE-ORDER
The new album from WEEP, my favorite new band of the last several years. Can’t wait. Did I mention WEEP is fronted by Doc Hammer, co-creator of The Venture Bros? IT IS.
Under Tomorrows Sky on USTREAM
A live think tank featuring Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling, and others. Happening right now, some good background noise for your Saturday morning depravity.
Twitter Introduces Expanded Tweets
Embedded rich content on the web and official Twitter apps.
You’ve probably expanded Tweets before to play videos from YouTube or see photos from Instagram. Now, a diverse and growing group of new partners like the The Wall Street Journal, Breaking News, and TIME also deliver rich content inside Tweets containing a link to those websites.
Twitter is fast becoming an exercise on how to make money without being scumbags. Take note, Facebook.
Happy Trails, WWDC2012 Edition
Products and services that are going the way of the dodo in iOS 6, the new Macbook Pro, or likewise, based on today’s WWDC Keynote:
- Firewire (still available via a Thunderbolt adapter – hat tip to Jesper)
- Google Maps
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Optical discs
Am I missing anything? Let me know: @philnelson on Twitter.
Arduino Battery Meter
A little how-to with some example code from Anonymous Hobbyist. I’m considering adding a solar panel to my Arduino, and I really need to be able to monitor the battery (and the 9v backup).
Suspicious Developments Manifesto
After eight years as a games journalist and two as a part time developer, I have decided what I think of games: I like them. I’ve also figured out some of the reasons I like them, some of the reasons I sometimes don’t, and which of these things I really care about.
I’m far enough through making my own game, Gunpoint, to get a feel for which of these things I can actually do. But I’m still new at this. A lot of them are things I figured out during development, and Gunpoint itself doesn’t reflect them all. So this is a mission statement: a way for me to be specific and public about what I’d like to do in games, and how I plan to do it.
xip.io: wildcard DNS for everyone
A new free service from 37 Signals: xip.io is:
a magic domain name that provides wildcard DNS
for any IP address.
This is ingenious and will probably become the standard for web development. I’m nearly surprised that Coda 2 didn’t ship with something like this built-in. Bring it on, plugin developers!
EventDuino
Based on the previous link to a Node.js -> Arduino bridge, @JerrySievert pointed me to his own take: An event-driven package for Arduino/Node.js. Listening for events on the board itself is a really cool idea.
Peapod Studios
If you need design, branding, web development, or otherwise, you can’t do much better than Peapod.
Instapaper for Android
I use a fairly cheap Android phone, because I don’t want to give ATT or Verizon any of my money, and I hate cell phone contracts. Instapaper was one of the apps I use everyday that was really hampered by the lack of a native client. Looks like that’s fixed, now.
The interesting thing here is that Marco Arment, Instapaper’s founder/developer, didn’t code the Android app himself. He hired an Android development house to do it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more iOS-only apps go this way if it works out for him.
In Ad Network Nightmare, Microsoft Making ‘Do Not Track’ Default for IE 10
This is good news for consumer and privacy advocates, and bad news for Google and Facebook. The odds of either of these companies fully supporting Do Not Track are laughable, of course. This is how they make their money.
You can play with the dog all you like; just don’t grab its milkbone unless you want a fight.