The good

You can't tell people anything: On the difficulty of really conveying something to someone without hands-on experience. I've experienced this from the teacher's side recently when trying to explain Kubernetes concepts to someone who only has experience administering individual, mutable machines. I think I've also recently experienced it from the student's perspective trying to absorb some of the object capability literature. Trying to get some hands-on experience there to avoid that!

Dungeon Scrawl: Looks to be a quick'n'easy way to put together nice-looking dungeon maps for D&D campaigns. I haven't DM'd anything yet, but I plan to at some point.

A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda Calculus: A paper I read recently on a security model based on object capabilities. It's the best introduction to the field I've read so far; highly recommended if you're at all interested in access control, Scheme, etc. (Thanks cwebber for the pointer!)

The ugly

New bill to ban encryption without backdoors: The crypto wars return. Again. Invoking three of the four horsemen of the infocalypse literally by name.