Software engineer Shamus Young documents how he created a generative city. This is the sort of project I have to think about at my master’s, I wonder if you can do it in Flash (of course you can, so let me rephrase it: I wonder if I can do it in Flash). Anyway, Shamus predicted he’d spend thirty hours in this, so with my knowledge of software engineering I predict I’d take… twenty times as much? Not taking into account things always end up taking twice as much time, no matter how lenient, the original prediction, this means I’ve better be more modest in my goals… A procedurally generated house?

I had a couple of Capsela kits when I was a kid (which explains a lot, I know), so this is the kind of things that tickles the geekiest and most obessive part of me:

Siftables, developed at the MIT Media Lab, are little bricks with little monochrome screens and a little wifi you can put together to literally build applications. How sci-fi! I wonder how many years until you can buy these at Toys’R’Us.

On the other hand you can buy the littleBits easy electronic kits right now, but it’s like comparing a MITS Altair against a ZX Spectrum. I’ll pass the Altair and wait for the Speccy.