Penny-Arcade

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Daft Punk onomatopoeia

Marco Arment on his invaluable Instapaper app:

What Instapaper does, in both the website and the iPhone app, is a small, solid foundation under a massive collection of hacks and just-barely-working features to do things that you’re not supposed to be able to do. That’s why they need to be hacks.

Instapaper is so simple but so great, magically stripping out all guff on a web article to allow you to focus on the content, not the shouty ads. I’m surprised site developers haven’t come up with blocking strategies - Instapaper in combo with Reeder means I rarely read or even see content with the ad wrappers.

New album released June 14 - reserve your copy now!

In which the Internet eats itself.

I love what people do with collected crowdsourced music data - another good reason to track your listening habits with last.fm.

The Echonest & Play.me deliver the music:

Over the years, we’ve seen many different ways for people to discovery new music come and go. When I was growing up, the radio DJ was the primary way people people discovered new music. The DJ was the tastemaker for the generation. For the next generation, I think music apps will be one of the primary ways people discover new music.

All good except for those dreaded words: “US Only”. Like Spotify and other promising music discovery apps. We need a global music provider to step up.

Massively looks back at Ultima Online:

UO got one thing right: it felt like a persistent world where one could simply exist. No other MMO has ever been able to get that feel right, though Star Wars Galaxies came close. These days, I don’t feel like I’m an active participant in my MMO’s world; in Ultima Online, I felt that I had a real place in it.

That seems to be a common thread talking to ex UOers - you could just ‘be', without participating in endgame or designer mandated gameplay.

Kotaku on Brink character customisation:

Everything from race to body type to clothing, from the videos I’ve seen and the interviews I’ve read, it seems as though there are an absurd number of options for players… except being a female.

I always choose a female avatar first in games, though it’s a bit of a struggle with Dwarves.

Very nice: on-the-go cycling directions (though US only for now):

Since launching biking directions on desktop Google Maps, we’ve wanted to get you biking directions, lanes, and trails on your phone too. Just in time for National Bike Month, select the bike icon when getting directions to get an optimal bicycling route in the U.S. If you’re in the mood for a more scenic ride, you’ll also see the Bicycling layer on the map which shows dedicated bike-only trails (dark green), roads with bike lanes (light green), or roads that are good for biking but lack a dedicated lane (dashed green).