I’ve burnt through most of my SIGGRAPH tidbits. Now to start running through a few worthwhile articles, resources, and sites I’ve found the past months:

• Colors and words article – a must-read. Teaser: “So he raised his daughter while being careful to never describe the color of the sky to her, and then one day asked her what color she saw when she looked up.”
• IKEA has been using V-Ray for much of its catalog for years. Favorite quote: “But the real turning point for us was when, in 2009, they called us and said, ‘You have to stop using CG. I’ve got 200 product images and they’re just terrible. You guys need to practise [sic] more.’ So we looked at all the images they said weren’t good enough and the two or three they said were great, and the ones they didn’t like were photography and the good ones were all CG!”
• Cambridge, Mass. (which I live next to) as a 3D map in your browser. Background info here. WebGL is great.
• Slightly spooky 3D program, done in CSS (that’s right – no WebGL here). Other fun experiments by the author here.
• Languages: I hadn’t heard of a few of these C++ tools. The Swift language, which I’ve heard nice things about, is going to be open-sourced by Apple (surprising, for Apple). Michael Gleicher mentioned liking the free book Javascript in 10 Minutes.
• Tools: For home use only, Glary Utilities is a bunch of free utilities – two minutes to clean off various types of sludge from your PC. Everything is a simple super-fast file and folder name searcher for Windows. I’ve added these to the bottom section of the portal page.
• Ray tracing using armor stands in Minecraft. Things just keep getting weirder.