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Submitted by Xenoveritas on
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Xenoveritas

In reply to by Anonymous (not verified)

Since the Christmas theme is down and the background is back to solid-white, I figured I'd explain the parent comment.

And it really depends on your monitor and display settings - on most machines I had no problem reading with the background.

In low-light conditions where my MacBook turned the backlight down to its lowest setting, on the other hand, things became pretty unreadable.

I was hoping to redo the theme at some point anyway, so I'll have to make sure the version this year is less noisy.

Thu, 01/15/2009 - 20:29 Permalink

I'm watching an episode of NCIS off my TiVo HD - which means nice resolution, and I can pause and rewind it. The episode involves the NCIS agents investigating a weapons deal. They discover an email detailing where the deal will take place - at 45 26' 29"N 71 41' 29"W, which is, in fact, the actual coordinates for the airport mentioned in the story.

But then they show aerial photos of the airport in Google Earth. Google Earth places a copyright notice at the bottom of the window. What's this? "Image © 2006 Maine Office of GIS"?

So the airport shown is most certainly not the one given, unless Maine has been taking aerial photos of Quebec.

What airport did they actually use? Well, it's clearly near a highway and there's a river near, which helps locate it. Turns out it's really Augusta State Airport.

I'm guessing that it was easier to get permission to show that airport than the real one.

I'm also curious what the placemark named "Home Globe" is in the shot they gave.

I do love that NCIS's version of Google Earth makes sounds as it shows things, just like all computers on NCIS. It makes a little beep whenever the city labels pop up as it zooms in. Cute.