You can buy this stuff on ebay very cheaply too, and it's compatible with the real bricks. I can't really tell much of a difference in quality. The idea of Lego is too good to be monopolised - I wonder if anyone has tried 3d printing lego parts?

I am really looking forward to when those "fake" Android phones & tablets start to perform better (and cheaper) than the official stuff. The smart thing about Google's Android strategy is that they benefit from that kind of Wild East tech cowboyism. It's like if Windows 95 had have been Free Software instead of pirated globally.

With the impending proliferation of tablets and touchscreens my plan is to make a sketching app which runs on all kinds of tablet/touch friendly devices and browsers, online and offline, and will sync your sketches to whatever device you are using, wherever you are using it.

At the moment it's running on those Apple portable devices, since that's what I have access to thanks to my contract work for RjDj, and I'm quite glad that I have found a way to make Free Software which runs on those devices legally through the web app method. I hope to port it to at least Firefox, Android, and Chrome OS as well.

The core library, sketchthing.js, is device agnostic and should run on anything which supports HTML5, such as Firefox and Webkit. What the library does is take an arbitrary HTML element as an input, and then replace it's innerHTML with a canvas of the same size which can be sketched upon.

Have fun.

• I finally found some time and motivation to work a little bit on it. I made some icons to replace the ugly text buttons and had to write an image based radio-button class to support that. Here's a half-size screenshot of the new icons:

• I've decided to release the source code to the game under a GPL license. Some of the library code which I've used in other projects will be released under an LGPL license. You can find bzr repositories of both codebases here.

• I am looking for contributors to help me bring the game to completion along the lines of my massively-multiplayer-user-created-content-platformer vision. If you're interested in joining the effort, email me and I'll put you on the dev mailing list we have going. Feel free to check out the code, look at the TODO list and start hacking. Patches welcome!

I really need to do a lot more work on the website, like integrating a forum, blog feeds, and authentication. Next thing in the TODO list is a save button for saving the level you are working on. Should be pretty easy so I'm going to use it to try and stay engaged with the codebase.

cc65 has C and runtime library support for many of the old 6502 machines, including

• The Commodore VIC20, C16/C116, C64, C128, C116, Plus/4, 510 (aka P500), the 600/700 family and newer PET machines (not 2001).

• The Apple ][ and successors.

• The Atari 8 bit machines.

• GEOS for the C64 and C128.

• The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

• The Supervision console.

• The Oric Atmos.

• The Lynx Console.

This is the compiler that I used to create aSid, a program which turns your commodore64 into a synthesizer.

The zipfile under the image above contains a Pure Data patch which procedurally generates a virtually infinite number of acid and breakbeat loops. I've found that it's quite a lot of fun to play with!

Start by loading the patch called 0_START.pd and then turn up the volume and the cutoff. After that hit the big red button a few times until you hear something you like.

I was making it into an RjDj scene, but I am not really sure if I'll ever get around to finishing it.

Here's another AsteroidsTNG prototype. This asteroid field goes on until MAXFLOAT before looping (I think) and it contains up to 2^32 unique asteroids. I had to remove the collision detection, so you can fly through asteroids, but don't let that stop you from exploring! Oh wow, I just tested this on Internet Explorer and it runs hellishly slow. Sorry IE user, whoever you are. :(

(click on the image to play)

I think if I was ever to turn this into a proper game, I would call it Dyson, after the physicist Freeman Dyson who came up with the concept of the Dyson tree, which I would hope to work into the game. A short time ago I had the great fortune of briefly meeting Freeman Dyson's daughter and tech luminary, Esther Dyson, source of the following great piece of advice:

"Fail cheap. Fail fast. Fail often. Always make new mistakes." -Esther Dyson

I am a huge fan of this philosophy, especially when it comes to rapidly prototyping software and games.

This game was written inside the jsGameSoup framework.

Writing games for javascript and the canvas tag feels a bit like being an eight year old again, trying to squeeze every last cpu cycle out of my parents' Apple //e. Good times!

Whenever the player goes into a public place such as a shopping centre or park, they become "in-play". They can also enter the "in-play" state by requesting a quarry at any time and the server will assign a geographically proximous quarry for them to hunt. A player will often be quarry and hunter at the same time.

In order for the player to claim a frag, they must locate their designated quarry in the public space and aim their mobile's camera at the other player. On the screen the quarry's unique icon will appear over the other player. Once the hunter snapshots the icon and player together, they claim the frag. The quarry can defeat this by doing the same to the hunter first. The snapshot must contain an icon with a clearly visible person beneath it to be a valid frag.

If a player is in a public place and they become a quarry, they will be notified by a normal mobile notification (sound, vibration, sms, etc.). If the hunter is within a certain distance, the quarry will be notified with a different "danger" sound.

A website tracks frags by player, area, etc. Frag verifications are crowd-sourced on the site or by email, sms, etc. Random users will be asked to verify the frags of other players.

Enjoy!

It would be nice if a few more people hear it, so if you like it I would really appreciate it if you blog/tweet or whatever about it.

This album was composed with a type of old school software called a tracker early this decade, which was and still is often used to make video game music.

Thanks for listening.