History

The Mysterious Uncrackable Video Game

On their quest to unearth lost video game coding secrets, researchers John Aycock and Tara Copplestone of the Universities of Calgary and York stumbled accross a piece of code from the 1982 Atari 2600 game Entombed which they could not reverse engineer. The video game archaeologists contacted employees involved in developing the game, and they too recalled not being able to decipher the logic behind a particular data table which was used to generative valid maze structures within the game.

Podcasts Of The Week: The David McWilliams Podcast - Exploring the ramifications of a united Ireland

This week I caught up with some episodes of The David McWilliams Podcast. I like the format of the episodes where his friend asks the (sometimes leading) questions which makes the content more of a conversation down the pub rather than a sermon in the church of behavioural economics. The stat man Finn also sounds a bit like The Viper, so I picture The Viper in a smoke filled room speaking in hushed tones over a laptop with Excel in full screen mode :-p.

1919 Dáil Eireann & Usk Prison Break

This week Ireland celebrated the centenary of the first Dáil in 1919. An article on IrishCentral.com tells the remarkable story of the prison break of Joe McGrath TD (a member of the Dáil), Barney Mellows and George Geraghty from Usk prison in Wales on the same day. The three Republicans pretended to be American tourists and tried to head for the ferry in Fishguard but couldn't get a train.

Books from 1923

The Internet Archive has released a wealth of scanned books published in 1923, the majority from the University of Toronto Robarts Library. Adding "Ireland" to the search results brings back an interesting collection of books such as The Irish Revolution and How It Came About, Pagan Ireland, and most interestingly, Michael Collins' Own Story.

1961 Cork

The BBC Archive Twitter account posted a fascinating video of writer Frank Connor talking about his native Cork in 1961. While his nostalgic meanderings about Cork are somewhat interesting, the real gem here is the footage of inner city Cork from 1961 and its inhabitants going about their daily lives.

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