####Read

• My summer vacation in North Korea - long read, full of rare details and pictures

I glanced up from the paper at the airline safety video, which starred the exact same flight attendants who had greeted us minutes before. It made me wonder how many commercial planes there are in North Korea. Was this… the plane?

• Lost 1927 Disney Christmas film found in Norway archives
• You have to earn certain amount of £ in UK to keep your family in the country

Independent think-tank the Migration Observatory said an estimated 43% of British workers did not earn enough to sponsor a spouse from outside the EU.

• While hackers are spreading their findings hacked from Sony's servers, authorities once again took down ThePirateBay pages. Peter Sunde, now released from jail, thinks in his personal blog it's for a greater good.

####Watch

• Correct way of implementing interactive scrolling on a web page - better.coffee
• Something new and exciting is in development in CSS land
• Past, present and future of React JS by @Vjeux, broadcasted live from Red Badger HQ this week

####Personal notes

• Attended for the very first time book signing event. Space Commander Chris Hadfield was signing both of his books this Friday at Waterstone's Piccadilly. After queuing for about 1 hour outside of the shop, and another 20 min inside I've got my autograph and recorded a very super short interview for our podcast. Was pretty nervous about the idea, but Commander was super cool in this respect - even made sure that my recording is on before answering. Expect this thing in a first Radio Badger episode next year.
• Same day in the afternoon something happened to the air control computer in Swanwick, and all London air traffic was grounded. People of Twitter were posting pictures of the quiet airplaneless sky of London (while others were stuck inside planes in Heathrow).

It's almost Christmas, time for reflections, time off the office and trying not to be flattened at the city center madness. Enjoy this fresh issue of the Worthy Stuff, and have a cup of mulled wine (or a hot cranberry juice with spices).

####Read

• They found 11 millions of cubic kilometers of the oldest water on our planet, deep within the Earth's crust
• It's time for a third HFR 3D film, although from the same series. HFR debuted now 2 years ago in cinemas, and still remains something very, very original and new. Things do change towards the higher framerates in videos, with YouTube now supporting 60 fps, but in cinema world it's still all about 24 fps (or, to be even more precise, 23.976 fps). TheVerge did a fresh story with review, and reluctantly agrees that HFR is indeed cool when done right.
• It's time for a rocket landing... on a drone ship
• Language designed to be understandable by any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form

####Watch

• LapseLondon timelapse - A day in the life of London seen through the eyes of 40 photographers
• Episode of Small Empires on Vimeo and their mission to have ads-free videos

####Lifehack

• Google silently released better bookmarking manager for Chrome. You have to install it separately, but it's totally worth it.

####Personal notes

• Fresh 35mm black and white film is processed and scanned. Shot with Zenit ET SLR camera over the course of year 2014, with some episodes of Finland, and mostly London. Shutter fabric in my Zenit is fading, and so the whole camera acts a bit unpredictably. You never know what you gonna get.
• Kicked off post production stage of the London 3D timelapsing film I've been shooting for some time now. It'll probably be called London Timescapes 3D. Maybe should check with Tom Lowe first. Going to release special Oculus Rift version of the film, and maybe an experimental 4K HFR one.

####Read

• The Elephant's Foot of the Chernobyl is considered to be the most dangerous piece of waste in the world
• This guy is going to spend 28 days in virtual reality, living someone else's life
• Official Astronaut's Photography Manual by Hasselblad

It is impossible to have "perfect" exposure for the shaded cargo bay and sunlit earth at the same time. Since the cargo bay with the Orbital Maneuvering System burn is the more important part, the above image is properly exposed to make the best looking transparency.

####Watch

• Seat 22 — Trans-Siberian Odyssey
• Time travelling sci-fi trailer of this week - Project Almanac
• Even more stereoscopic pictures from Edinburgh

####Listen

• Serial podcast

####Personal notes

• Rules for servicing parachuting equipment in UK are sort of different compared to Finland. There was mandatory service check of the parachuting rig in Finland every 2 years with some small repairs here and there, which was usually performed by a special company in Turku. In UK they check your rig every 6 months when they repack a reserve, and that's it. Also, when it's time to send your automatic parachute activation device (Cypress) to the service in Germany, they rip it out of the parachute, and handle it to you, together with a padded box and a form to fill. The device is really handy, and fully autonomic, but the battery (and device itself) require a service at the manufactor place every 4 years.
• Seen a real crime scene today next to our tube station. With police tapes around the perimeter, police women with radios. That surreal feeling of being in the crime tv show. Also, spooky.
• Episode 08 of the Radio Badger podcast is recorded and will be released shortly. It is Christmas Special issue, but nevermind that - expect more topics on space exploration.

####Read

• Alternative ways of launching things to the orbit
• London life: A day in a life of a bookie
• Story on VR documentary shot for Oculus Rift
• Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind

####Watch

• Blackout city timelapse. An experimental film on how London would look like in a night if the city lights would go pitch black.
• Wanderers, short film voiced by Carl Sagan
• Stereoscopic pictures from Inverness, Scotland

####Listen

• Christmas special episode of our tech / art / science podcast Radio Badger is out in the wild

####Personal notes

• Average size of Christmas trees sold on London streets seems to be half of what you'd usually get in Finland. Then again, living space.

Suddenly there is this moment in your life when you find yourself at the Node JS conference in Budapest. One day single track event named One-Shot, with bunch of speakers and a nice variety of topics, complemented with great Kenyan coffee and Hungaryan craft beer. Organized by the local Javascript shop Rising Stack.

Some of the talks and slides are already available online, so I'll just go through some of those, worthy of your attention.

Matteo Collina did a rather brave demo of live hacking on a Tessel - Node-compatible microcontroller with built-in wifi and a bunch of extension modules.

What's the first thing you do, when you get a shiny new microcontroller? Make it blink the light.

There are a bunch of npm modules compatible with Tessel, which makes a great fun to hack on the hardware and make it do various things for you. Like blinking lights in a various fashion. As was expected, things didn't went smoothly, but Matteo managed to stay away from cursing and get things blinking (again).

Mathias Buus was venturing onto p2p side of the internet. After a short introduction to the technology behind torrents, Mathias demonstrated how easy it is to implement your own torrent client with Node, and even stream video. But that was not enough - the next stop was infamous Docker with its (rather large)images. During the course of a spotless demo Mathias managed to share a Docker image via torrent, stream it on another machine, boot it and launch things. If you'd decide to launch Node, if would torrent-stream all the necessary files for a proper launch, but nothing else. And yes, you can do this too - the thing is named Torrent Mount and allows you to mount a filesystem via torrent link.

Check his talk (Docker demo starts at around 15 min), and slides.

C J Silverio told a story of something we all take for granted most of the days - npmjs registry. How it's all started as a small side CoachDB project and then miserably failed when the world suddenly start doing npm install way too often.

Watch how things evolved for npm, becoming faster and more reliable (or check out slides).

Full list of talks is available on the Rising Stack YouTube channel. Ok, here is another worthy talk - Design for Retry by Aria Stewart. She talks about something we all try to avoid - errors and how to design proper error handling in web apps.

Breaks were spiced by a special kind of cold brewed coffee, mixed with nitrogen. Yes, nitro powered coffee is a thing, and I'd love to taste it again next year.