• Visitors can check out the Forum FAQ by clicking this link. You have to register before you can post: click the REGISTER link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. View our Forum Privacy Policy.
  • Want to receive the latest contracting news and advice straight to your inbox? Sign up to the ContractorUK newsletter here. Every sign up will also be entered into a draw to WIN £100 Amazon vouchers!

Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. CCCXLVIII

Collapse
X
  •  
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Monday Links from the Bank Holiday Deckchair vol. CCCXLVIII

    Now you're back from Skegness, you'll be wanting something to read
    • Found: A Century-Old Train At The Bottom of Lake Superior - After the ships buried beneath cities and farms, we now get this: ”Some wreck hunters recently discovered a locomotive at the bottom of Lake Superior that sank over a century ago.”

    • Global Positioning Shift - "Australia, it turns out, is not quite where maps think it is. Thanks to plate tectonics, the island nation is moving north by 1.5 centimeters a year, which means that the entire country is now nearly five feet further north than existing cartography suggests it should be." And it turns out that could be a problem for self-driving vehicles, which won’t be where they think they are.

    • The 14 synthesizers that shaped modern music - ”These days it’s easy enough to boot up your cracked copy of Ableton Live or Logic and open any number of VST synthesizers, giving you access to decades of technological innovation. It is however important to know how these sounds took hold in the first place, and why they were so successful… The following list contains a few of the key instruments that helped shape electronic music, from the obvious (the unmistakable Roland TB-303) to the obscure (the humble Alpha Juno 2).”

    • I Survived ‘Trump’ Magazine—Barely - Carey Purcell on working for the Republican presidential candidate: ”Bills went unpaid. They turned off the electricity. Our paychecks started bouncing. I got cancer and they canceled my health coverage. Here’s what it was like to work for Donald Trump’s failed magazine.”

    • Rise of the Nazi-Grave Robbers - The market for military memorabilia means grave robbing is profitable in Latvia: ”Approximately 350,000 Nazis were cut off here from the rest of the German line in the autumn of 1944, in what became known as the Courland Pocket. In the months that followed, about 100,000 of them were killed.”

    • McMansions 101 - Excellent blog devoted to wretchedly bad American house architecture: ”If you love to hate the ugly houses that became ubiquitous before (and after) the bubble burst you've come to the right place.”

    • 7 Ways That People Died Trying To Become Immortal - "Would you risk your life if you thought it might mean extending it? Would you die now if you thought you could be revived at some point in the future? Here are cases of people who went to extremes for immortality or their very own fountains of youth — and killed themselves in the process."

    • These Mysterious Symbols Have Been in 19 Video Games and No One Knows Why - Patrick Klepek on a rash of strange symbols: ”As it became clear that a larger metagame was taking shape, fans congregated at places like Game Detectives, a subreddit that's become famous for decoding such puzzles… The most recent one was found in You Have to Win the Game, a retro platformer released back in 2012. The sigil was presumably added through a patch at some point, but no one's quite sure, really.”

    • I arrived at my friend's party. A few hours later she died, exactly as planned. - Kestrel Pantera attends a friend’s leaving party: ”On June 9, 2016, the End of Life Options Act, a law that allows terminally ill adults to take an aid-in-dying medication, went into effect in California. Three weeks later I got an email from Betsy, an artist at the end of a three-year battle with ALS… She wrote that she was "preparing her departure," which she called "yet another great adventure." She’d met with doctors, filed paperwork, and picked the date when she could self-administer the drug.”

    • El Sueno Americano - Tom Kiefer photographs personal possessions confiscated from illegal Mexican immigrants captured at the US border before they are sent back.



    Happy invoicing!

    #2
    The GPS shift one is quite scary.....

    Comment


      #3
      Had a read of the mysterious symbols link and it's posed more questions than it answered. If there were a bigger story here that spans different developers and games how do they work out the plot? Surely some idiot would have spilled the beans or is it just for the nerds who would keep the secret to their graves?

      And some of the games... I had a look at Kingdom of Loathing and... well... It's not exactly mainstream is it, let alone someone being bothered enough to look in to the mystery of a sigil. Again, is the domain of nerds that I just don't understand?

      https://www.kingdomofloathing.com/st...p?id=whatiskol
      'CUK forum personality of 2011 - Winner - Yes really!!!!

      Comment


        #4
        The synths reminded me of the first student band I was in - our keyboard players had a DX7, Juno 106, Minimoog and a Korg M1
        …Maybe we ain’t that young anymore

        Comment

        Working...
        X