Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCXIX

[xoggoth]

Now we know that Paddy's wobbly RAM extension falls off at the wrong moment while he's watching porn.

PS Fnaar fnaar

[Dark Black]

And the wobbly RAM extension falls off at the wrong moment. (I soldered mine permanently)

Good alternative to soldering it on was to use a short extension ribbon cable - no more wobbling on the back of the ZX.

[Paddy]

The porn was terrible on my ZX81.

And the wobbly RAM extension falls off at the wrong moment. (I soldered mine permanently)

[xoggoth]

The Race to Catch the Last Nazis

Seems pretty pointless now. As it says in the article, any still alive are not going to be the camp commanders, but just guards and secretaries etc. who would have been juveniles at the time and may well have had no choice about what they did. What would have happened to a rookie cadet who refused to do his job as a guard because of sympathy with the prisoners? We like to think we'd all be heros but doubt most of us we would be.

Some may say you can't let something like that go unpunished but more practically, wouldn't resources be better spent pursuing today's dangerous criminals and terrorists?

[xoggoth]

pixel art graphics retain a certain charm, even in their apparent roughness

The porn was terrible on my ZX81.

[NickFitz]

Time to take a break from watching the world go to hell in a handbasket

• Who Killed the Fudge King? - ”In the early 1960s, Harry had a string of Copper Kettle Fudge shops up and down the Shore. So revered were his stores that Harry was known far and wide as the Fudge King… He was savagely beaten to death on Labor Day 1964. His body was stuffed under the dashboard of his Lincoln Continental, parked at an after-hours nightclub called the Dunes. The case was never solved.” Tom Donaghy investigates the murder of a New Jersey sweet maker.
• We might have accidentally killed the only life we ever found on Mars nearly 50 years ago - Typical: ”Life may have been discovered on Mars almost 50 years ago, but it could have been unintentionally destroyed. This theory arises from the ambiguous results of life detection experiments conducted by NASA's Viking landers in the mid-1970s.”
• A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant - ”Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.” And that's why we all have to go to work rather than lounging around in caves eating berries
• Arctic-adapted dogs emerged at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition - ”Although sled dogs are one of the most specialized groups of dogs, their origin and evolution has received much less attention than many other dog groups. We applied a genomic approach to investigate their spatiotemporal emergence by sequencing the genomes of 10 modern Greenland sled dogs, an ~9500-year-old Siberian dog associated with archaeological evidence for sled technology, and an ~33,000-year-old Siberian wolf.”
• The world’s last internet cafes - Remember going on holiday in the 1990s and having to find an Internet café to check your email? ”Not all the cafes are gone. Around the world, a few hang on — out of a sense of duty, inertia, or simply because there’s still money to be made… These are some of the world’s last internet cafes.”
• The Race to Catch the Last Nazis - ”A lifetime after the Holocaust, a few of its perpetrators somehow remain at large. And the German detectives tasked with bringing them to justice are making a final desperate push to hunt them down.”
• The Last Descent - Susan Casey on the loss of the OceanGate submersible: ”Though the world wouldn't catch on until disaster struck, a tight-knit community of seafarers, explorers, and bold submariners worried for years that Stockton Rush's OceanGate implosion was all but guaranteed.”
• A Malware retrospective: SubSeven - Jean-Pierre Lesueur looks back at a renowned hacking tool from the turn of the millennium, with contributions from its creator: ”There comes a time in the life of every hacker or cybersecurity professional when a singular catalyst sparks the transition from novice to seasoned expert, from enthusiastic script kiddie to dedicated professional. For me, that catalyst, that game-changer, was SubSeven. This program wielded an influence on my life that remains unparalleled to this day.”
• Reverse-engineering the mechanical Bendix Central Air Data Computer - Ken Shirriff gets his hands on a piece of pre-digital tech:”How did fighter planes in the 1950s perform calculations before compact digital computers were available? The Bendix Central Air Data Computer (CADC) is an electromechanical analog computer that used gears and cams for its mathematics. It was used in military planes such as the F-101 and the F-111 fighters, and the B-58 bomber to compute airspeed, Mach number, and other ‘air data’.”
• Pixel Tarot - A pixel art representation of the Rider-Waite tarot deck: ”Dominant from the 70s to the 90s due to the limited power of computers, pixel art graphics retain a certain charm, even in their apparent roughness… The Pixel Tarot deck embraces this longing, recalling the golden age of pixelated video games.”
  
  

Happy invoicing!