Another snippet of video and another quick look at Douglas Adams’ office space. Unlike my last post about Adams’ office, I’m having a little trouble narrowing down the source program – though the uploader of the original clip suggests that it may have been recorded around February 1995. If that’s true, then that suggests it was originally shown on a non-BBC channel as I cannot find anything in the BBC genome that references Adams during that period.
So the City of York Historic Environment Record department has a an interesting, if infrequently updated, blog covering archeology and historic conservation efforts in York.
Now my preferred way of reading blogs – especially those which are not frequently updated – is to stick that particular blog’s RSS feed in my reader and to let the updates come to me. Unfortunately the YHER Blog doesn’t have an obvious link to a feed, but, after a little poking around at the page’s HTML, I’ve managed to find a URL that seems to work: York Historic Environment Record Blog RSS Feed.
And that should perfect to be fed into your reader of choice!
In June of 2010, the National Archives released copies of the 1946 US-UK intelligence sharing agreement generally known as the ‘UKUSA Agreement‘. These files were, at one point, stored here. Alas, time and link rot comes for us all, and all that following that link will get you now is a ‘404 – Page Not Found’ error.
So I’ve extracted them all from the Wayback Machine and attached them below!
The core of the UKUSA agreement is covered in HW80/4, with the files HW80/1-3 and HW80/5-11 covering various amendments and procedures.
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There are two Giant’s Quoits in Cornwall; the first – and most famous – is the table-shaped Dolmen better known as the Carwynnen Quoit found just outside of Carwynnen near Camborne. The second is an odd-looking rock formation found next to the road between St. Keverne and Porthoustock. This post is about the second of these.
Having recently re-watched ‘Missing Believed Wiped‘, I stumbled across a pair of nice articles covering the lost and wiped dramas of Northern Ireland – a region that, like the rest of the UK, lost a number of pieces to a poor archiving policy and the the claws of the bulk eraser.
It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these but… here are 511 additional map images of Northumberland (using the old Meridian) from the ‘Ordnance Survey Maps – Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952’ series.
Interesting places covered this update include:
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Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead
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And Berwick upon Tweed and Tweedmouth
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Another interesting spot of archive footage – Brewers drays trotting around Sunderland!
This appears to be Douglas Adams’ nicely messy office and his cable spaghetti’d computer setup – complete with what appears to be a fantastic stack of external SCSI drives. Taken from this clip of October 1996’s ‘Break The Science Barrier with Richard Dawkins‘, this footage was likely filmed in the summer of that year.
LMS No. 5428 “Eric Treacy“ of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway leaving Whitby on New Year’s Day 2024.
And a few pictured before she left.
It also turns out that the North Yorkshire Moors Railway has a lovely 3D tour of 5428.
An interesting little bit of history today; one of the few surviving bits of film of a British warship under sail to be taken while she was still part of the Royal Navy.
First laid down in Devonport in 1810 and launched just before Waterloo in 1815, HMS St. Vincent – a 120-gun first-rate ship of the line – managed to hang on as an armed training vessel until she was scrapped in 1906.
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