Chilly out today, but who needs to go out there anyway when you could read this lot instead 
Happy invoicing!
- The Story Behind the World’s Most Famous Desktop Background - "Microsoft has an insect infestation to thank for its classic Windows XP desktop background—an image that has graced at least a billion computer screens since the system’s 2001 launch.” The story behind the Teletubby desktop.
- In Defectors From the North, Doctors in South Korea Find Hope — and Data - Medical researchers in South Korea have a long-running programme to study refugees from the North, which reveals much about North Korean lifestyles: ”Studies of the health status of defectors… [suggest] that protracted hunger and lack of access to medical services are common in the North. Some refugees arrive in South Korea with acute diseases or injuries. Others develop chronic illnesses. North Korean refugees living in the South have high rates of depression, and many show risk factors for metabolic disorders.”
- Info Tech of Ancient Athenian Democracy - The Athenians made ingenious use of technology to ensure the smooth running of their system of democracy: ”Unlike the more autocratic forms of government that had been the hallmark of civilization hitherto, Athenian democracy depended for its legitimacy on a constant, high- volume circulation of individuals in and out of public offices. It was this channeled flow that made the system both impersonal and representative… The Athenians had to keep those bodies flowing smoothly, then, and that was largely a matter of keeping track of who belonged where and when. They also had to maintain a smooth and dependable flow of the information generated by those bodies -- the votes, the decrees, the endless speechifying. They had, in short, to do a lot of stuff that modern information technology would have helped them tremendously to do, and nonetheless they managed pretty well, with the materials at hand, to build the tools they needed to make their system work.”
- Steve Jobs, the Xerox Alto, and computer typography - Steve Jobs famously claimed that a calligraphy course he took led to the implementation of good typography on the Mac but, as so often, he wasn’t so much the centre of things as he claimed: ”While this is an uplifting story about trusting in destiny, the real source of this computerized "wonderful typography" is the Xerox Alto computer, built by Xerox PARC in 1973. The Alto was a revolutionary system, one of the first to use a high-resolution bitmapped display, a GUI, and an optical mouse. The first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor was created at Xerox PARC in 1974 by Charles Simonyi, Butler Lampson and other Xerox researchers. The Alto system supported many high-quality fonts, including proportionally spaced fonts with ligatures.1 Xerox PARC also invented the laser printer in 1971, allowing high-resolution documents to be printed.”
- The Online Disassembler - Got a binary executable and want to work out what it does? Upload it here and you can get started. ”A lightweight, online service for when you don’t have the time, resources, or requirements to use a heavier-weight alternative. Explore executables by dissecting its sections, strings, symbols, raw hex and machine level instructions. ODA supports over 60 machine architectures, including x86, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, and many more.”
- Let’s Enhance! How we found @rogerkver’s $1,000 wallet obfuscated private key - "Last week France 2 broadcasted a documentary about Bitcoin. They interviewed @rogerkver who decided to offer $1000 in Bitcoin to the quickest viewer. Unfortunately, the QR code and the private key were obfuscated by France 2… Near the very end of the interview, they showed a clear small part of the QR code… We decided to work on it to see if we could find the private key from such a small amount of information.” The beauty of error-correcting encodings
- Sinister omens & idle traditions: a twelfth-century superstition that the king of England must not enter Lincoln - "The following note discusses a rather intriguing medieval superstition which states that the king of England must not enter the city of Lincoln for fear of calamity." Dr Caitlin Green uncovers a bit of good news for the citizens of medieval Lincoln.
- Philosopher's Web - "A comprehensive map of all influential relationships in philosophy according to Wikipedia.”
- Agent Radio Operation During World War II - "During World War II the use of clandestine radio for agent communications was widespread… There was no part of Axis territory where we did not have clandestine communications representatives - "Joes," as they were called." The CIA on the perils of radio operation in occupied Europe.
- Kindle Cover Disasters - Cheating a bit to include Chuck Tingle, who knows exactly what he’s doing, but this collection also includes some excellent covers from older sci-fi and fantasy novels as well as the terrible consequences of letting people who self-publish slash fanfic loose on Photoshop.
Happy invoicing!
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