So here are a few Things That Made Me Happy this morning – some of them need a bit of your time, but are worth while. Two of them made me cry – not ashamed to admit.

• Caine’s Arcade is a video of a kid building his own cardboard arcade in his dad’s car parts shop. Dedication at its best
• Alive Inside tells the story of people in a nursing home who stopped reacting at all to the outside world and getting back into it by getting iPods to listen to music from their past
• Bret Victor – inventing on principle is a talk showing how the future of development, design and animation tools could look like and why you need a principle to guide you when inventing. The Live Scratchpad and the editor of the game Frogatto are demos how to implement some of these ideas
• Daniel Sternlicht’s portfolio is a fully playable 2D adventure game
• Wollstonecraft is a Kickstarter project to release a pro-math, pro-science, pro-history and pro-literature adventure novel featuring Ada Lovelace
• Travel posters for lazy people make your life look so much more glamourous
• The Hackday Manifesto sets some sensible ground-rules for hack days
• The Weapon of mass instruction is an art tank that gives out books

As a special “Things that made me happy this morning” here is a kick-ass interactive (well linked) video of singing hedgehogs:

• These singing Christmas hedgehogs are the bomb!
• Evan Doherty an 8 year old skateboarder
• I want the fully operational Tron light cycle for Christmas
• I work for the internet is a campaign to show your face to complain about SOPA
• After calling out Masukomi for sweeping, discouraging statements on Twitter, he wrote a nice post explaining his reasons
• After showing off a folding cube done in CSS3 transitions and 3D transformations, Cameron Adams upped the ante with his Dodecahedron (needs Webkit/Aurora)
• A good tutorial on Vector Math Basics
• YouTube now have a schools channel

Things that made me happy this morning (much like this wombat)

• The current landscape of social media
• Why not offer some grammar tests as a CAPTCHA (yes it will weed out all the YouTube commenters)
• These Tetris cushions might be a scam – if you arrange them the right way they vanish and you got to buy new ones
• The evolution of the Hipster explained
• Google and Mozilla are working on Web Intents, a simpler way for apps to communicate with services and each other (detailed blog post)
• Linux Outlaws recorded a podcast on open web and Mozilla with me
• Yahoo finally updated their web media player
• Be the first of your friends to like this post is clever
• CSS transitions without using :hover explains a few other pseudos
• Prickly Fluff alert – check out this gallery of baby hedgehogs on Facebook
• P2PU is hiring – if you want to help people learn about the web, check these job offers
• jQuery Fracs makes it easy to find out what is currently visible in a page

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Verbally is an iPad app to communicate for those who can’t speak
• Use the Source is a job board without agencies
• The New York Times has a beautiful interactive form to see how many families are like yours in DHTML
• Lea Verou has a CSS only Tic Tac Toe game
• Receipt racer is a game played with a PS3 controller and a Thermo printer
• Dad Life shows how cool suburban dads are
• Steve Faulkner did some in-depth testing of block level elements inside links and screen readers
• Killing closed technologies one at a time: PDF.js and MadJS (MP3 decoder) – go go go!
• Nyan Cat in CSS uses CSS3 for animations and JS for the audio loop
• Typing “gay” into Google makes a rainbow appear on the search button (Screenshot) – I can never see Yahoo doing that
• Mike Shaver talks about a three dimensional platform
• A searchable Spreadsheet with all the TED talks should keep you busy for a while

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Did you also think that the awesome that is X-Men: First Class had a lot of gay undertones? This is totally on purpose as revealed in a comment of the screen write on the very good X-Men: First Class, Gay Rights, and the Intelligence Community article (detail about the comment). Cool.
• Steering a wheel chair with a tongue stud – how cool is that?
• T-Mobile let people play Angry Birds in real life – it happened in Barcelona and had a cool band, too
• YouTube now features HD preview images and the option to turn off the watermark – just add a ?modestbranding=1 parameter to the URL
• This is why interactive Doodles at Google rock: the playable (and now also internationally recordable) guitar doodle in action with a guy singing “Hey Jude”
• Paul Annett has a great piece on accessibility from a UX point of view with Accessibility – you’re doing it wrong.
• Tom Selleck could have been Indiana Jones but it was too hard to remove leaves and spider webs from that moustache
• The end credits of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban showed some very close to each other feet in a secluded corner. Filth, I say!