Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCXVIII

[DoctorStrangelove]

indeed seriously cool.

I could also use it to set the clock and program an ancient Grundig VHS recorder.

If there was anything for it to record.

[vetran]

Gosh a teletext encoder: that'd be handy to use with the Sinclair Spectrum teletext decoder upstairs in a box somewhere.

indeed seriously cool.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Gosh a teletext encoder: that'd be handy to use with the Sinclair Spectrum teletext decoder upstairs in a box somewhere.

[OwlHoot]

Low Earth Orbit Visualization - Ever wondered what might be whizzing over your head right now up in Low Earth Orbit? This site shows you ”The LeoLabs platform provides applications for operating in low Earth orbit. It's built on top of a real-time map of LEO provided by our unique radar network.” ..

That site is awesome, although it will take a while to get the hang of the interactive controls.

It certainly would NOT be a site I'd visit if I was up on the International Space Station, judging by the amount of debris flying around!

[NickFitz]

I know Hallowe'en was yesterday, but that wasn't a Monday, so you'll have to have the spooky links today

• When Your Mother Is a Ghost Hunter - ”It was nightfall in Spring, Texas, when I approached a perfumery called Crazy Mama’s Celestial Emporium… A small group of women had gathered there to commune with a ghost child named Shelby. As I walked up the porch steps, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.” Cat Cardenas meets some spooky (well, spook-adjacent) Texans
• Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles? - ”Years of conflicting neutrino measurements have led physicists to propose a “dark sector” of invisible particles — one that could simultaneously explain dark matter, the puzzling expansion of the universe, and other mysteries.” It remains unclear whether the particle physicists are making this stuff up as they go along, or if the Universe is just teasing them by adding new particles whenever they think they're getting close
• This AI Resurrects Ancient Board Games—and Lets You Play Them - ”In 1901, on an excavation trip to Crete, British archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed items he believed belonged to a royal game dating back millennia: a board fashioned out of ivory, gold, silver, and rock crystals, and four conical pieces nearby, assumed to be the tokens. Playing it, however, stumped Evans, and many others after him who took a stab at it. There was no rulebook, no hints, and no other copies have ever been found. Games need instructions for players to follow. Without any, the Greek board’s function remained unresolved—that is, until recently.” The very cool Digital Ludeme Project works out what the rules of long-forgotten games must have been; you can have a play with their games at the Ludii Portal
• Low Earth Orbit Visualization - Ever wondered what might be whizzing over your head right now up in Low Earth Orbit? This site shows you ”The LeoLabs platform provides applications for operating in low Earth orbit. It's built on top of a real-time map of LEO provided by our unique radar network.”
• Found in a Trunk: The Lost Avant-Garde Movement that came Decades before Dada - ”‘Les Incohérents’ was a short-lived French art movement that originated from Montmartre in Paris in the 1880s. Unconcerned with the intellectual, political or spiritual facets of the arts (which Dada would address a mere 20 years later), they did, however, attempt to question through satire and ridicule, what exactly ‘art’ was, who it was intended for and why on earth it had to be so darn square.” I studied modern European art in a supplementary course at university, and I've never heard of this lot. This is Mona Lisa fumant la pipe by Sapeck (AKA Eugène Bataille) from 1883, nearly forty years before Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.
  
  
• The House of Lost Souls - ”When a down-and-out doctor finds his rundown mansion is haunted, he pulls the quintessentially American move: opening the house to the public for a fee. Everything goes wrong from there.” (N.B. I'm a bit wary of linking to "member stories" on Medium because they only let you have three before hitting you in the face with a paywall, but it's the first of the month so it should let you have this one for free.)
• The Legacy Of Unicron - Kris Carter tracks down the evidence for a lost Transformers toy, incorporating traces of Orson Welles: ”Unicron’s toy would have first started to have been thought about during production of The Transformers: The Movie in 1985. Character designer Floro Dery had drawn up character sheets for several new characters, and those sheets were passed across to Hasbro and Takara as the basis for newly designed toys… As it turns out, cinema legend (and Unicron voice actor) Orson Welles had recorded ten phrases to be used in the toy.”
• Ceefax from an old Raspberry Pi - ”Got an old Raspberry Pi? Nostalgic for the golden age of teletext? Why not make your own in-house teletext server?” Why not indeed! In the mid-1980s I wrote systems software in Forth for a Teletext transmission CIU (Channel Insertion Unit), but it seems a bit easier nowadays
• Hardcore Software - Starting at Microsoft in 1989, Steven Sinofsky came to have a pivotal role in the development of Windows. He's now in the midst of publishing his memoirs in the form of a newsletter, with previous instalments archived here. ”My mother, Marsha, told me that computers were a fine hobby, but she reminded me that I wanted to be a doctor. I received a good talking to once she read the descriptions of ‘hacker’ culture—flannel shirts, no shoes, and working late at night in the solitary computer room of the nation’s colleges… She wanted assurance that I was attending Cornell to study something more in line with what was expected, what I wanted. She was concerned that I might become a ‘hacker.’ Too late.”
• Tbilisi's Soviet Underworld - ”Beneath the streets of Tbilisi lies a network of tunnels, bomb shelters and Soviet-era chambers that many locals know nothing about. Over the past several months, photographer David Tabagari has been exploring this silent underworld with extraordinary results.” No underground nuclear war command post is complete without a switchboard
  
  

Happy invoicing!