L8: The Ghost Blimp

Link chain from another waste of time on the internet: The story of L8: The Ghost Blimp. A mystery from 1942 in which a sub-chaser blimp returned to shore, crashed, and the crew was missing. Commonly assumed to be unsolvable although an obsessed fan believes that the aircraft was involved in a radar test and the crew was incapacitated by stray microwave radiation.

Here's a summary of the story, in a page with a nightmare geocitiesesque layout:

http://links.ghostblimp.com/Home_Page.php

The original link that started it, a page with jpgs of the supposed inquest report:

http://links.ghostblimp.com/L8_Inquest_Records.php

Here is the guy's blog. The research story is so perfectly laid out that it seems almost too good. It would be interesting to double check some of the facts presented in this:

http://ghostblimp.blogspot.com/

A cool independent aviation history site's page on the story, with some interesting pictures and the fact that the gondola was reconditioned and used for Goodyear blimps well into the 1960's:

http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/L-8_crash_site.htm

Delia Derbyshire

Another linkfest sausage, thanks to Joe Wall.

Delia Derbyshire, the British electronic artist of the 1960's responsible for the Dr. Who theme did a lot of great stuff and also has a lot of great photos on the internet. Searches result in links to other female synthesizer artists.

The photo that Joe posted can be seen on this BBC official site:

http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/

which is notable to me for this quote:

"On being told at the Workshop that her music was 'too lascivious for 11 year olds' and 'too sophisticated for the BBC2 audience',..."

That site has a link to this article with some very short clips from well known and recently found compositions:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7512072.stm

All of which pales next to this unauthorized fan site which catalogs every single published work complete with background and other commentary:

http://delia-derbyshire.net/

Here is a lovely but ultimately shallow retrospective on the occasion of a Dr. Who anniversary, complete with a recent photo of her:

http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/whats-on/whats-on-opinion/backbeat-delia-derbyshires-doctor-who-6351030

Here is an also tantalizing article which seems to show her giving a lecture during a "Delia Derbyshire Day":

http://www.northernsoul.me.uk/delia-derbyshire-day/

Here is an article about another electronic music festival, notable mainly for the "Gilliagan's Island" photo that seems to have been published only in this one article:

http://hackneycitizen.co.uk/2013/03/01/pioneers-of-electronic-music-nonclassical/

Photo Searched of Delia Derbyshire result in astonishingly close near-misses with other synthesists who are interestesting in their own right.

One of these is Suzanne Ciani, because an article once referred to her as an "American Delia Derbyshire":

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/suzanne_ciani_american_delia_derbyshire_of_the_atari_generation_explains_sy

Found on this hilarious synthesizer-focused pintrest board:

http://www.pinterest.com/drawdrawdraw/sounds/

She is often seen in photos with short hair like Delia, but also long 70's hair, and has a big online footprint from later in life as well due to having remained busy. Her photos show an immense range of studio equipment, from patch panels to TRS-80's to a grand piano in a Hollywood mansion:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Suzanne+Ciani&tbm=isch

The reason that movie star Sarah Winter's photos occasionally come up in Delia image searches is because she played her in some TV movie:

https://www.google.com/search?q=delia+derbyshire&source=lnms&tbm=isch

Latest find, containing a lot of the same info and pics from elsewhere:

Every Nun Needs A Synthi

Wikia downloading the wiki

One of the prime reasons that I decided to go with Wikia is that it promised portability. Here are the links to what I know about how to download the wiki. Apparently the photos are not necessarily downloadable, but can be done in a separate step. If I had to take it down and put it up again somewhere else, I could probably do what I needed to do with sed and other linux tools.

Here's how to do the download. It uses one of the "special pages". The first download had to be "requested", which apparently involves manual approval by an admin then I got the link and it seemed to work. Will the download links get updated weekly as promised? I haven't tried yet to find out.

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Database_download

Here is a page about downloading everything, supposedly including the pictures. I haven't tried it yet though:

http://how-to.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_download_all_image_files_in_a_Wikimedia_Commons_page_or_directory

Now, what is missing from these download options is an upload option using the same file. Maybe this exists, I don't know.

Wikia administrative tools

I haven't had a chance to try out all the links on this page, but many of them look like they would be incredibly valuable in maintaining the links in Vygisstories:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Special_pages

However, after a couple of false starts I have tried out special page "Multiple Uploads" which seems to work but each photo of course still needs to be individually captioned:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Multiple_uploads

Wikia making a gallery

Like everything else in Wikia, it seems nighmarishly labor intensive:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Galleries,_Slideshows,_and_Sliders

This is the closest that I was able to get to finding some way to upload albums for a wiki (it doesn't seem like it is possible). Also, you'd think that since Wikia can pull photos from flickr, that it would be natural to make albums in flickr and pull or imbed from there, but flickr is an unusable mess, and the only way to link pictures from it in Wikia seems to be an almost completely useless search tool.

Here is the guide to uploading photos that does *not* mention flickr, and still manages to give a sense of how pointlessly constrained photo uploading is in Wikia:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Import_free_images

The Fantastic Four Series that never was

Making the rounds recently is a mock documentary web page about a imagined 1963 Fantastic Four TV series.

http://io9.com/if-only-this-history-of-the-1960s-fantastic-four-tv-sho-1596106086

The site itself, pretty funny if you've got the time to read it:

http://auntpetunia.com/

It turns out that the story of the 1990's Roger Corman B-movie that the photos on the spoof site are from is in itself a very interesting story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fantastic_Four_(film)

One of the sources for the Wikipedia article, a magazine article now on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=SF8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA219&dq=%22So+what+happened,+really?+Arad%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=n7bjUNvtKLGQ0QHvyIGwDA&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22So%20what%20happened%2C%20really%3F%20Arad%22&f=false

The movie itself is on YouTube, and it's astonishingly awful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbMaPdofB4

All of which leads to the possible conclusion that the spoof site is viral marketing for a documentary about the Roger Corman movie itself:

http://doomedthemovie.com/

http://comicsalliance.com/doomed-the-movie-fantastic-four-1994-roger-corman-documentary-video/

Awk multiple field separators

The syntax for specifying multiple field separators for Awk is actually pretty convenient:

awk -F "abcd" {'commands'}

Link:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1319/awk-using-multiple-field-separators

And here's a nice basic syntax tutorial that I found on the way the previous link:

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/01/awk-introduction-tutorial-7-awk-print-examples/