Hello

Yesterday’s Cuusoo news (rejecting the Firefly Serenity set) caused a few responses. I love it when you reply, by the way. Lots of people were just as confused as me, but Thom Beckett (aka @minifig, Thom is a man who knows a lot about LEGO) shared an interesting take on it:
“Pirates, Indiana Jones, LoTR are all quite violent, whereas Firefly has a main character who is a prostitute (and a rather proud one at that) and deals with other sexual themes that aren’t really covered as much in the other films. I’m not saying I agree with the decision, but I’d say Firefly is a show aimed squarely at adults that some children might enjoy, whereas Pirates, Indiana Jones and LoTR are films aimed primarily at kids that some adults also like.”
Thanks Thom.

Yesterday’s link to the Solitaire win simulator went to a dead link. Sorry about that. I’ll try again here:
“Click to win”
http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/
(Very satisfying, even the second time around. Thanks to Dirk for both letting me know about the broken link, and providing this one that works)

Do you use Pivotal Tracker for Agile product management? Paul Downey (aka @psd) has made a bookmarklet to generate lovely printable cards from Pivotal. It’s really rather nice. I’ve started using it, and made a (really tiny but very satisfying) contribution to the code today. I’m looking forward to playing with it a lot more.
http://github.com/psd/pivotal-cards

Chris Cleave interviewed about his new book, ‘Gold’
“Life is good, and humans are mostly kind to each other”
http://nextshoot.com/video/chris-cleave-author-interview
(Chris is one of my favourite authors)

Lana Del Duck is a bit mean, but quite funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c-CvPgyO6s
(via @knolleary. Thanks, Nick. And remember, people of the Internet, just don’t do duckface. It makes you look silly.)

Metanota
‘The almost perfect Mac app for managing your “cloud” notes’
(Hooks in to Simplenote back end. I may try this for a while as an alternative to nvALT. It’s brutally clean, though I think there are some Notational features that I’ll miss. I’ll see how it goes. Anyone else already using this?)
http://www.metanota.com/

Brand Republic: ‘Nike marketing boss attacks ‘old’ approach to social-media’
“Too many businesses are thinking ‘I need to sell inventory’, rather than ‘How can I add value to a smartphone, or a new device?”
http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1130751/

'The first ever demonstration of autonomous bird-like robot perching on a human hand'
http://engineering.illinois.edu/news/2012/04/27/first-ever-demonstration-autonomous-bird-robot-perching-a-human-hand
(via Helen Keen and Wes West. Thanks, both)

Yours sincerely
Roo

Roo Reynolds
@rooreynolds
http://tinyletter.com/rooreynolds