I was going to list Ingrid’s favourites but then I realized that she loves almost all of them. Some days she plays one, then another day another app gets more time, and after a few days she comes back to the first one again.

Toca Tea Party

There’s Birthday Party and Tea Party, where you start by setting a table, choosing plates and cakes, and then proceed to eat the cakes and drink the tea and lemonade. These have great multi-touch support and work very well for several players. I believe that kids are supposed to invite their stuffed animals to the tea party but Ingrid usually plays with me instead.

Then there’s Toca Store, which is sort of similar but more clearly meant to be played together. One person takes the role of shopkeeper, the other is the customer. The shopkeeper chooses which items to sell, sets their prices, rings up the items on the till. The customer picks items to buy, counts up the coins, puts the stuff in their bag.

Of course you could play those things without an app, with actual physical items – and we have. But the app is 5 seconds away whereas setting up a tea party with real toy plates and cups takes time, so Ingrid is infinitely more likely to use the app than the real thing.

A bit similar is Toca Robot, where you build a robot by picking body parts for it. The graphics are well made and fun to look at: the robots can have arms with propeller attachments and a body like a fridge. When the robot is done you can fly it through a simple maze to pick up gold stars. Updates to the app have brought new varieties of each body part, as well as new mazes, so Ingrid keeps returning to this app.

Toca Robot

Toca Hair Salon and Toca Kitchen are two of a kind – you get some materials and can perform some actions on them. Cut, blow dry, comb, wash, colour hair; chop, fry, boil, mince food. I’ve found these somewhat disappointing – they sound like more fun than they actually are. In Toca Kitchen the choices are too limited, and they’ve skimped on the graphics: the results look dull. Frying things just makes them brownish, for example, so frying an egg doesn’t actually result in anything that resembles a fried egg. In Hair Salon the hair is difficult to control and the results are all too similar to each other, except for the colour and accessories, so what sounds creative boils down to a painting app.

Paint My Wings is actually a painting app where you paint the wings of a butterfly. The wings are mirrored, so whatever you paint on one wing also turns up on the other. There are other nice touches such as the butterflies talking to you (“that tickles!”) and using berry juice for the painting, making this a bit more interesting than just a plain drawing app.

Less open-ended is Toca Doctor which consists of a bunch of puzzles and mini-games. Ingrid liked these to begin with but they’re too simple for her now.

• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design – The currently popular Pictures Under Glass technology is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It denies our hands what they do best: touching things, sensing their tactile response. Claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.
• Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life – One soldier swapped for over 1,000 prisoners, most of them convicted terrorists. How and why did Israel end up in a place where they would agree to this deal?
• In ‘Game of Thrones,’ a Language to Make the World Feel Real | NY Times – Hollywood is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations. (Estonian grammar gets mentioned in passing.)

• Fostering Healthy Attachment – How we, as a society, have raised our children with the expectation that they become totally self-reliant and autonomous rather than with the hope that they have the capacity to form close, loving, intimate relationships with others.
• NY Times: From Scroll to Screen – In the classical world, books came in the shape of scrolls. Then came the modern form of books, the codex – stacks of leaves bound together. With e-books we are going back in the direction of scrolls, losing the power of random access reading.
• Economist: The flight from marriage – Asians are marrying later, and less, than in the past. This has profound implications for women, traditional family life and Asian politics.
• Viewers vs. Doers: The Rise of Spectatoritis | The Art of Manliness – “80,000 people gathered to watch 22 men run around, throw a ball, and smash into each other. The appeal is not difficult to see—there’s something truly compelling about watching the most talented athletes in the world perform. But when you take a step back, it’s really quite odd, isn’t it? Two groups of men–the doers and the viewers—and one group is far, far larger than the other.”
• Cartooning vs. Technology: How Steve Jobs Ruined Comics – Representing something in a super-simplified style when the object itself is already super-simplified becomes increasingly difficult. How do you draw someone talking on the phone, when the phone can’t be seen because it is smaller than the person’s hand?

• XKCD> CIA – Web site security, as seen by computer experts and laymen.
• Why Cleaned Wastewater Stays Dirty In Our Minds – “It is quite difficult to get the cognitive sewage out of the water, even after the real sewage is gone.”
• Cockpit crisis – In five years, over 50 commercial airplanes crashed in loss-of-control accidents. What’s going on?
• The “overlearning the game” problem – “overlearning the game to a point where you exploit the rules to achieve goals that are far removed, or even opposed, to the original intent of the game, is systemic in human society and permeates almost all aspects of our lives”

• Once Greece goes… – An interesting essay about the Greek economic crisis and what it could lead to.
• The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist's View – Ray Kurzweil expects nanobots to cruise around in our brains in 2020. David Linden explains why he thinks it is implausible.
• The Secret Ingredient In Your Orange Juice – Have you ever wondered why every glass of Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice tastes the same, no matter where in the world you buy it or what time of year you’re drinking it in? Turns out that “100% orange juice” doesn’t mean what you would think it does. The flavour in orange juice comes from “flavour packs”, chemicals added to the juice to compensate for taste lost in processing and storage.

• Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure – A game made by a 5-year-old girl, with ponycorns, rainbows, dinosaurs and an evil lemon.
• When states are sinking: I am a rock, I am an island | The Economist – How submerged islands could keep their statehood
• I det effektiva samhället lever robotdrömmen | SvD – En recension av vad som låter om en mycket intressant bok, om "teknologins omförhandling av fundamentala, i grunden icke-teknologiska, begrepp. Intelligens och minne ges som två exempel på företeelser som redan har genomgått en transformation under datorteknikens inflytande; Turkle förutspår att tillit, gemenskap och omsorg står på tur."

I’ve been thinking for a while that I need a better way to store my bookmarks of pretty stuff – decorating ideas, craft project ideas, or just things that are beautiful. I don’t want to blog all of them; I don’t want to save local copies of images that I then cannot trace back to their source; I don’t want to save them in delicious. This visual collection of bookmarks is exactly the right solution.

I tried a few random Wikipedia articles (a random link from the Wikipedia front page, cucumber and Georgia) and it worked in all cases. The tendency became obvious after just a few hops: we skirted linguistics, science, then information, and via quantity on to philosophy.

From philosophy it’s six hops back around to science and you can go another round. The full loop is Science > Knowledge > Fact > Information > Sequence > Mathematics > Quantity > Property_(philosophy) > Modern_philosophy > Philosophy > Existence > Sense > Organism > Biology > Natural_science > Science. So you could equally well argue that all Wikipedia queries have their root in Existence, or in Knowledge, or in Information. Whatever you think is the most fundamental of all – take your pick.

Now some developer has actually made a tool for you to try this on your own: xkcd wikipedia steps to philosophy.

• Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Report – NYTimes.com – In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by the bacteria in the guts of people.
• The 24-Hour Movie and Digital Technology – NYTimes.com – You used to watch movies in a cinema, together with other people, while it was running. Now you watch them on your own in the darkness of your home, when you want them. How does this affect our movie-watching experience? How did the cinema affect us?
• Så vandaliserade kommunen en skola – DN.SE – Mycket bra artikelserie om den svenska skolans förfall. Läs även övriga artiklar i serien – länkar finns på sidan.
• Lexadecimal – colour codes with meaning
• The “One Team” defined as a gift economy – One way to define a team (of developers, for example) is that it's a group of people who have strong enough social ties to each other to do favours to each other, for no particular reason.

• Is Sugar Toxic? – NYTimes.com – Sugar might be behind not just the obesity and diabetes epidemic but also many common cancers.
• Legal disclaimers: Spare us the e-mail yada-yada | The Economist – Automatic e-mail footers are not just annoying. They are legally useless.
• Flat-Folding Steel Grocery Bag – Does what it says on the tin. Bag. Whatever.
• SpaceX's Falcon Heavy could make for cheap moon missions – Each Falcon Heavy launch is so cheap, and Hollywood movies so expensive, that you could almost run a mission to the moon on money from the media rights. Well, not quite, but they should certainly make a double-digit percentage contribution to the budget.
• Så vandaliserade kommunen en skola – DN.SE – Mycket bra artikelserie om den svenska skolans förfall. Läs även övriga artiklar i serien – länkar finns på sidan.

• what a programmer does for a living – If you're still wondering what I do at work
• Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie –
• The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See – Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.
• Americans smile all the time as if they are plugged in – Why do Russians smile so little (and Americans so much?)
• Pick a number from 1 to 10…for SCIENCE! –

• Danny Hillis: Understanding cancer through proteomics | Video on TED.com –
• Winning the War But Losing Our Soul | threatpost – The IT security industry has finally gotten the attention of law makers, Pentagon generals and policy makers, but is now in mortal danger of losing its soul. In its desire to combat the threat of cyberwar, they are becoming indistinguishable from the hackers they fight.
• Cryonics and Technological Inevitability | CHRONOSPHERE – Why did the Romans not invent hot air balloons? Why do we not have nuclear batteries?
• Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie –
• The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See – Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.

• Military communications: Liquid radio | The Economist – America's navy is developing an antenna made of seawater.
• In Sweden, a Small Rebellion Against Traditional Names – NYTimes.com – Unhappy with their boring, too-common -son names, Swedes pick new ones. Some go the other way: one couple wanted to change their name to Mohammedsson.

• London Names – Smith, Smith, Smith, Patel, Patel, Patel, Begum, Jones.
• How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks – Tunisian Internet censors were in the process of stealing an entire country's worth of passwords. Facebook reacted.

• Economist: Wrong Numbers – Global league tables are interesting, but not always reliable. Few people pay attention to margins of error. Combined indices in particular can be very sensitive to small changes in underlying data.
• Earn Trust By Never Doing Anything For Your Children – As parents, we often find that it’s easier to do a task ourselves than to spend time teaching the children how to do it. After all, they’ll learn when they’re older, right?
• Paracetamol hade inte godkänts i dag – Paracetamol is dangerous even when not overdosed (which can lead to a nasty death) – its hormone-disrupting effect is three times stronger than that of phtalates which everyone is worrying about. (In Swedish.)

• NY Times: Without the Blood Sausage, it Just Wouldn't Be Christmas – Estonian-Americans gather to make traditional blood sausage for Christmas Eve at the New York Estonian House.
• The 'cult of less' | The Guardian – Is the decluttering trend simply an exercise in obsession?
• NY Times: A Quiet Revolt Against the Rules on SIDS – For more than a decade, doctors have advocated putting babies to bed on their backs as a precaution against SIDS.
  Increasingly, new parents are finding that the benefits of having babies sleep soundly – more likely when they sleep on their stomachs – outweigh the comparatively tiny risk of SIDS.
• Translate Signs and Menus Instantly Using Word Lens' Crazy-Amazing iPhone App – Word Lens uses augmented reality to translate things in front of you. Incredibly cool!

• 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted – Gaming has changed. It used to be that once they sold us a $50 game, they didn't particularly care how long we played. The big thing was making sure we liked it enough to buy the next one. But the industry is moving toward subscription-based games like MMO's that need the subject to keep playing–and paying–until the sun goes supernova.
• Kallare än på 100 år – DN.se – Record temperatures expected in Stockholm later this week – colder than in a hundred years.
• Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy: "To destroy this invisible government" –
• Psychopathy: Socially challenging | The Economist – Psychopathy seems to be caused by specific mental deficiencies.
• Obesity, malnutrition and gestation | The Economist – What a woman eats during pregnancy affects the child's metabolism.
• Animal obesity: The fat cat cometh | The Economist – It is not just humans that are getting fatter – animals living with or around humans are, too.