waider

This appeared on del.icio.us' "popular" page a few days back: http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/maps/1900s/1942world4000.jpg which is a proposed remaking of the world after the Second World War - obviously drawn up during that conflict, and by someone with a very idealistic view of things. The main reason I'm linking this, though, is because of item 25 in the list:

25. The areas known as Eire and Northern Ireland shall be unified as a demilitarised independent republic of "Eire"

It seems odd, given that so many other places (like the assorted Pacific and Atlantic islands, for example) are assigned to the role of "USA Peace-Security Outposts" and yet our own little sod is given complete autonomy.

Italian guy discovers buried Roman villa through Google Maps - wasn't this part of the setup for some book or another? The vague details I recall involve the site being revealed as shadows in an overhead shot, but utterly invisible from on-site unless you stood at just the right place at the right time. And there was something about sealed jars in catacombs containing some sort of virus, too. I initially thought I might be thinking of Crichton's Congo, but it's not that.

This is a pretty ghetto GPS tracker I threw together yesterday, having come up with the idea while I was out on my morning run. It requires: Firefox, set to open URLs from remote applications in the current window/tab, Perl, and a means of piping NMEA data from your GPS to the script’s standard input. The sleep commands are a blunt way of allowing the remote-control calls to take effect and may need to be tuned for your system/bandwidth.
( shielding you from the gory details )