Monday Links from Off the Bench vol. CLXIX

[NickFitz]

Late today Been a busy first day at NewClientCo; I had thought I'd be able to get these posted at lunchtime, but I forgot my sandwiches and had to go scavenging instead. Still, they're here now:

• The Short Cutts - Matt Cutts is Google's Anti-SEO-spam-meister: "Since early 2009 Google's Matt Cutts has recorded a superhuman number of videos to help struggling site owners understand their site in search. While the videos are great, sometimes the guy just needs to get to the point. With that in mind we've done the hard work and watched every Matt Cutts video to pull out simple, concise versions of his answers: The Short Cutts!" Though I enjoy his videos, he does often seem to spend two minutes to give a one-sentence answer, so these to-the-point edits should be useful for anybody interested in making the most of SEO without getting blacklisted.
  
  
• How I became a password cracker - "At the beginning of a sunny Monday morning earlier this month, I had never cracked a password. By the end of the day, I had cracked 8,000." Nate Anderson demonstrates just how easy it is to crack passwords "liberated" from breached websites.
  
  
• What’s it like to be a solid rocket booster? - "From the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle DVD/BluRay by NASA/Glenn a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound. The sound is all from the camera microphones and not fake or replaced with foley artist sound." The sounds of the long plummet down, decelerating from nearly 3000mph to 300mph before the parachutes are released, are quite eery.
  
  
  
  
  
• Behind Closed Doors: The Top 10 Papal Conclaves - Things didn't always run as smoothly as they did last month: "...they all decided to follow the usual practice of voting for a total no-hoper in the first ballot to see which way the political winds were blowing. Unwittingly, however, all but one of the cardinals picked the same no-hoper. The least likely candidate of all, Cardinal Jacques Fournier was accidentally elected Pope Benedict XII."
  
  
• How to deal with bad code - "This is some humble advice on how I believe people should deal with bad code. It’s not technical advice. Actually it’s not really advice. It’s just stuff I’ve been thinking of lately." James Padolsey's thoughts are, in fact, good advice.
  
  
• The top 50 underappreciated ZX Spectrum games - Simon Brew digs through the Speccy's less well-known history: "...a lot of lookbacks at the Spectrum era tend to focus on the big highlights. What I wanted to do here is put together a personal listing of 50 titles that don't seem to get that much attention."
  
  
• RapGenius: T.S. Eliot - the Waste Land - "Rap Genius is your guide to the meaning of rap lyrics. You can listen to songs, read their lyrics, and click the lines that interest you for pop-up explanations – we have thousands of canonical rap songs explained." And now somebody's added a very detailed annotation of the modernist work many regard as the greatest poem of the 20th Century: "The hermaphrodite prophet Tiresias, the unifying voice of the poem, claims to have “been there before,” to have experienced all the awful realities of sex as a kind of martyrdom. Here he seems to watch and comment on this modern act of loveless sex (which implicitly parallels the rape of Philomela alluded to earlier) with stoic detachment."
  
  
• The Death of Stenography - "Stenography is dying out; so are stenographers. When I mention that I’m working on the history of shorthand, people tell me that their mother knew shorthand, or their grandmother, or their husband’s first wife. Google ‘stenography’ and you’ll find obituaries from small-town newspapers." Leah Price looks at shorthand, which was once a popular hobby as well as a tool of the trade for journalists and record keepers.
  
  
• How to Spend 47 Hours on a Train and Not Go Crazy - "With a quiet, pneumatic exhalation, the Sunset Limited left the station; it was 90 minutes into its journey, with 45 hours and 5 minutes to go." Nathaniel Rich takes the old-fashioned route from New Orleans to Los Angeles, meeting many people along the way.
  
  
• The Atlantic Ghost Fleet - "Although I enjoy almost every type of exploration, be that tunnels, buildings or cranes, my favourite would have to be ships. By their nature, ships as a destination tend to be hard to come by, warships even more so... So this brings us to today’s opportunity, the French Navy’s Atlantic ghost fleet, a collection of vessels ranging in size from patrol boats to cruisers. Located near the Brest naval yard in France, these decommissioned ships are stored here due to the protection the bay offers." Members of SilentUK, an urban exploration collective, sneak aboard French warships awaiting scrapping, including some former museum ships with replica weaponry:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!