Keyhole

Jan writes

I just downloaded the trial version of Keyhole 2 NV, and it's pretty darn amazing. I'm sure you've all seen satellite photos of your own house before, but the hook in the Keyhole app is that you can drop from space all the way down to your house. Because of caching, the drop works much better the second time around. I also found our old apartment in Daikanyama, Tokyo. (Big cities get much higher-res coverage.) The "Tilt" feature is more interesting than I thought—don't miss Mt. St. Helens. Way, way cool.

[From (Jan's) archives] Meet the purple team.

In the 1999 game, we stopped our van, bristling with electronic equipment, just outside the World Trade Center. I'm sure we weren't legally parked. Five team purple members in matching shirts embroidered with scrabble letters spelling "PERMUTE PAL" (a TEAM PURPLE anagram, duh) jumped out of the van nearly simultaneously, carrying walkie talkies. I don't remember what we looking for—certainly no clues that I remember ended up being in the WTC. Then a WTC security guard stopped us. "What are you guys doing?" he asked us. "Uh, well, this is just a game," we said. The guard said, "Oh, I thought y'all we're the A-Team," and continued his rounds.

Nowadays, we probably would have been shot on sight, instead.

Darth Vader unmasked

Grim Reaper