Links for Tuesday February 15^th, 2011

• Kessel Run: Fantastic art work.

• HP webOS event roundup.: The stuff that HP announced last week looks good, but the "summer" ship date is really killing my enthusiasm.

• Royalty-free MPEG video coding standard ups the ante for Google's WebM/VP8: What we really need is royalty free h.264. It looks like the MPEG group has realized this. But there most be some reason why h.264 can't retroactively be made royalty free. Until then, we'll have to deal with some confusion due to Google's WebM, which doesn't look like it is going to have legs.

• App Store Subscriptions: Michael Tsai might be on to something:

  "Apple is setting the rules so that if you want to compete with iBooks or iTunes (even if you were around first) either your app will not be as smooth as Apple’s or your prices will be higher."

  If that's what this is really about — Apple worried about competition for iBooks and iTunes, then this is totally not the right way to go about it. Apple needs to compete by building superior products, not via pricing shennanigans.

• Apple’s Big Subscription Bet: Brilliant, Brazen, Or Batsh*t Crazy?: I'm guessing that this is going to be one of those policies that Apple reverses, especially if popular apps like Hulu, Netflix, and Pandora start disappearing from the App Store.

• Life in the Analog Age — “Single Mom”: A short story about video games.

• The King of Limbs: Radiohead has a new album coming out (digitally) next weekend. Ordered.

• The king of Apple talk radio: I listen to "The Talk Show" and "Hypercritical" every week, without fail. There is lots to love at 5by5 if you're a Mac geek, or just a geek in general.