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Monday Links from the Sheriff's Lair vol. CCLXXXIX

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    Monday Links from the Sheriff's Lair vol. CCLXXXIX

    I would have been back on the bench today if not for that pesky extension
    • A Long Walk's End - The story of James T. Hammes, alleged embezzler and suspected murderer, who was arrested in May having found an unusual way to evade the law: ”James T. Hammes went hiking. On the Appalachian Trail. For six years.”

    • The Fakers - "With offices in ​a handsome skyscraper overlooking Chicago’s Millennium Park, the financial research firm says its ​executives have degrees from an impressive array of Ivy League universities. It boasts of a strong reputation that’s helped land big name subscribers in the nearly 20 years the company’s been in business… In reality, though, it’s probably not a great place to look for a job, or even a stock tip, for one simple reason: Altman Research doesn’t actually exist.” The American services that will help you create fake references to explain career gaps, to the extent of registering fake companies and manning phones to answer calls about you

    • 14 Awesome Abandoned Websites (That Are Still Online) - From the Heaven’s Gate cult, who all committed suicide, to the Home Page Construction Set, these 1990s sites somehow remain online, unchanged: ”It wasn’t too long ago that people proudly used AOL email addresses, Angelfire web pages and MySpace accounts… [these sites] may not have been updated in almost two decades, but nevertheless remain online, lurking in the shadowy corners of the World Wide Web, nostalgic reminders of how fast technology moves.”

    • Nokia Tune History - "Evolution of the Nokia Tune. From the early first buzzer tone from 1999 to the latest 2013 version." HT to TheFaQQer for this one, which is part of a large collection of ringtones posted to SoundCloud by the Microsoft/Nokia Design Team. Warning: this bugger autoplayed at me, which took me by surprise somewhat

    • VHS generation loss - "What happens if you make a copy of a copy of a copy (and so on) of a VHS tape? This experiment shows how the quality degrades with every generation." All the way to the 23rd generation:


    • Computer program fixes old code faster than expert engineers - "Last year, MIT computer scientists and Adobe engineers came together to try to solve a major problem that many companies face: bit-rot… Enter Helium, a CSAIL system that revamps and fine-tunes code without ever needing the original source, in a matter of hours or even minutes.” COBOL maintenance developers: be afraid…

    • Escher’s impossible stairs inspired by high school stairwell - "The impossible stairs that can be climbed and descended moving in the same direction, famously drawn by the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, did not just stem from his imagination… Micky Piller, curator of the The Hague Escher Museum recently discovered that architectural elements from Escher’s ‘impossible worlds’, like the prints Other World (1947) and Relativity (1953), contained many features of the stairwell of Escher’s old secondary school.”

    • Every Grateful Dead Song Annotated in Hypertext: Web Project Reveals the Deep Literary Foundations of the Dead’s Lyrics - The Dead may have played their final gig last week, but their work lives on: ”True students of the band can study the many literary references and allusions in their songwriting with The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, an online project begun in 1995 by UC Santa Cruz Research Associate David Dodd… The extensive hypertext version of the project includes editorial footnotes explaining each song’s references, with sources. Also included in these glosses are “notes from readers,” who weigh in with their own speculations and scholarly addenda.”

    • The Mob's IT Department - Interesting details in this story of two Belgians who got sucked into helping drug smugglers with technology: ”Small USB drives had been inserted into the company’s computers. They were programmed to intercept the nine-digit PINs that controlled access to DP World’s shipping containers… Whoever has the codes can pull into the terminal, enter the PIN into a keypad, wait as robot-controlled loaders put the container on their truck, and drive off—sometimes minutes ahead of the cargo’s legitimate owner.”

    • Explore the TWA Terminal, a Pristine Time Capsule From 1962 - Extensive photo and video gallery of architect Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center at JFK airport, currently unused and deserted: ”Those stone staircases were made for the sweep of a long gown, not the bump of wheelie suitcases. Even without the photographers, moving across the white slopes feels like a film trick, one in which you (the star!) are still and the scenery flows around you.”



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    Love the abandoned websites article
    "I can put any old tat in my sig, put quotes around it and attribute to someone of whom I've heard, to make it sound true."
    - Voltaire/Benjamin Franklin/Anne Frank...

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      #3
      Originally posted by cojak View Post
      Love the abandoned websites article
      I vaguely remember The Simulator, where you get up, make breakfast, and other strikingly mundane activities - I think I saw it around 1997, when things like that seemed to offer endless possibilities

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