Just got time to post these before they drag me off to have my Zimmer frame bolted to my hands 
Happy invoicing!
- Project Iceworm: America’s Nuclear Base Under the Greenland Ice Cap - "In the spring of 1959, a group of 200 US Army soldiers and engineers set off across the Greenland ice cap on a highly secretive mission. Their task was to research the feasibility of constructing an underground nuclear base in the extreme north of Greenland." Remarkable story from Giles Milton of a Cold War project so secret that the USA didn't even inform the Danish government, who nominally ruled Greenland at the time.
- The Rotting Rothschild Mansion in Paris - "The Rothschilds are known as one of the greatest European banking dynasties ever established, amassing the largest private fortune in modern history. The family is less well-known for anything to do with squalor, ruin or decay. But just 5 miles from the Notre-Dame, beyond the lush green lawn of the Edmond de Rothschild park, standing defiantly behind a thick wall of shrubbery and bramble is the ghostly figure of the Chateau Rothschild." Having been occupied after the Rothschilds fled by both the Nazi and US military and then abandoned, the place definitely needs a bit of doing-up
- Retro Vectors - "Royalty free and free of charge." Neat collection of free-as-in-beer-and-speech artwork and fonts ranging from Victoriana to 80s tech, in Encapsulated PostScript (.eps) format, usable with a wide range of graphics software including many free packages.
- The Secret Bits Of The Northern Line - A five minute film by Geoff Marshall about the bits of my favourite tube line you might have missed. I thought I'd already posted his Secret Bits of the Victoria Line, but it seems I hadn't. You may have seen him recently on the BBC site, which has a short film about one of his recent attempts at the Tube Challenge.
- AtariLeaks - "In 2009, I sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI. I asked them for their 1970s and 1980s case files regarding Atari. They turned over a number of documents... ccording to the confidential sources in the FBI documents: in 1988, they shipped DRAMs from Japan to Atari's manufacturing plant in Taiwan. From there, they were shipped to their US offices. They had their employees strip off all the Atari logos and identifying information. The "cleaned" Japanese chips are then resold in the US in great quantity and at greatly inflated prices." Weird bit of Atari history, when they conspired to breach a trade agreement the US reached with Japan to protect the US RAM industry. Josh McCormick hasn't been able to fully analyse all the information relating to it, so he's made his source documents available here for your perusal.
- Behold the internet's most hilarious abandoned websites - Fun look at some of the old websites that still exist or have been archived by Ryder Ripps at his Internet Archaeology site. "...now that there's social networking and platforms like Tumblr, the idea of a personal homepage isn't as prevalent as it used to be... passion project sites -- like "Mike's Bong Cabinet," one of the many Ripps saved -- aren't as prevalent as they used to be."
- 88 Acres: How Microsoft Quietly Built the City of the Future - "A small, covert team of engineers at Microsoft cast aside suggestions that the company spend US$60 million to turn its 500-acre headquarters into a smart campus to achieve energy savings and other efficiency gains. Instead, applying an “Internet of Things meets Big Data” approach, the team invented a data-driven software solution that is slashing the cost of operating the campus’ 125 buildings. The software, which is saving Microsoft millions of dollars, has been so successful that the company and its partners are now helping building managers across the world deploy the same solution. And with commercial buildings consuming an estimated 40 percent of the world’s total energy, the potential is huge."
- The Time Salvador Dali Worked for Walt Disney - "Last month, Walt Disney Studios officially announced that the entertainment industry juggernaut had been gradually shutting down its hand-drawn animation department, an organization whose proud artistic tradition dates all the way back to the silent era of the Roaring Twenties and has included such unforgettable movies as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, and The Lion King. But did you know that the department also, briefly, employed the world’s most famous surrealist?" Interesting piece of movie history: Dali's project was finally brought to fruition in 2003 by Walt's nephew Roy:
- j2z80 - "A Maven plugin to translate JVM byte codes into Z80 instructions. It can be called as a pattern compiler. It takes a JAR file and translates all found classes into a binary block of Z80 commands. Of course it is not full JVM implementation and it has a lot of restrictions but it allows to use Java tool-chain and IDEs for Z80 developments. It is not a JVM implementation, it generates static machine code and doesn't have any garbage collector, but you can create new objects of course and use all sugar of OOP." The code repository includes a "Hello World" app written in Java that runs on the ZX Spectrum
- Reel SF - "San Francisco movie locations from classic films." Does exactly what it says on the can: lists locations used in movies, and shows you what they look like now. Naturally it includes Bullitt, and not just the famous car chase; here's his apartment building, then and now:
Happy invoicing!
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