Pretty much invisible at night, still officially at war with their southern neighbour and under United Nations economic sanctions, North Korea is a blank spot on political maps of the area.

Even the satellite imagery layer in Google Maps has little additional detail to offer.

But compare and contract against the updated imagery for North Korea that Google Earth has had since December of last year.

Finally add in the Google Earth layer that the North Korea Economy Watch has created and all of a sudden North Korea springs into view. Ever wanted to see where the Hoeryong Essential Foodstuff Factory was located? Now you can.

Forgive me; it's been 5 conferences and 2 months since my last Deliciousness post and I offer this one up by way of atonement.

• Stamford Brook, Parr's Ditch, Counter's Creek ... all part of the network of lost rivers beneath the streets of London. I grew up next to and played in one of them, Beverley Brook, as a (very muddy) child.
• Some maps are works of art but Jason LaFerrera makes works of art from maps. No, really.
• OpenStreetMap, waze and Map Maker announce the formation of the Closed Street Map alliance, but check out the date of the post and the registrant's details from the WHOIS record as well.
• A search for estate agents in Islington on Mountain View's favourite search engine seems to say that prisons and estate agents are one and the same.
• Forget dogs that look like their owners. Forget owners that look like their dogs. Fonts that look like dogs, that's the thing.
• While I'm on the subject of fonts; best alphabet. Ever.
• While I'm on the subject of best (ever); best beer name. Ever.
• The last time I mentioned bacon deliciousness was October 2009 so here's a double helping. Still cooking your bacon the old fashioned way, you know, in a frying pan or under the grill? Try wrapping it around your machine gun for a change. You're going to be thirsty after all that cooking (and possibly that shooting) so slake your thirst with a beer, bacon flavoured of course.
• I want this tee shirt, part one. Some days you make the coffee, some days the coffee makes you.
• I want this tee shirt, part two. Nerd is the new cool you know.
• I want this tee shirt, part three. Bacon makes everything better.
• Not much in the grand scheme of things but two of my Flickr photos made it into the 2010 London Schmap guide. This pleased me.
• Still drinking your coffee, the old fashioned way, by mouth? That's so passe. Inhaling is the new drinking.
• Not one KitKat. Oh no. Nineteen of them. In Japan only, sadly.

Today's social bookmarking deliciousness, from down the back of the internet.

• Got a colleague who keeps wandering away from their desk and leaving their mobile phone behind, which then keeps on ringing? Maybe they need one of these signs left on their desk. Maybe.
• Fancy a challenge? How many times a day do you type the incorrect command at the shell? Once, twice, three times a day? More? Maybe you should give Suicide Linux a try; it helpfully turns any mistyped command into rm -rf / thus helpfully erasing your root file system. Concentrate now.
• The WordPress Flickr Manager is a wonderful plugin which integrates your Flickr photostream into blog posts. Alas it doesn't work with WordPress 2.9. Until now.
• Posting the same article to multiple blogs severely impacts your search engine ranking results. How did I not know this? It's stopped at least one person from using the Posterous autopost function.
• Sometimes, just sometimes, sub-editors trim just a little bit too much from an article prior to publishing.
• We're used to online slippy maps being able to zoom in and out; but zooming in and out of paper maps? That's something else indeed.
• What's happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; but sometimes it stays on FourSquare as well.
• Photo of the year so far; the Space Shuttle Endeavour, caught in silhouette from the International Space Station. That phrase alone sounds like it's been lifted wholesale from an Arthur. C. Clarke novel.
• ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ pǝǝu noʎ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos ʇsnɾ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos

This week's selection of what I bookmarked on Delicious.

• Illustrating just how broken the mobile operator's customer support is, Rummble's CEO Andrew Scott details his 9 month battle with O2 after they refused to honour an agreed deal and MoanLog's Gaurav Patel details the extraordinary length that 3 went to so they didn't have to give out a PAC code to a customer.
• Twitter was brought down by a distributed denial of service attack; but some people survived thanks to a PostIt note.
• Chiswick Business Park knows how to speak to humans and to dogs.
• The world didn't end at 12:34:56 on 07/08/09; probably because it had already happened in July to the US.
• The Londoner and the geo geek in me took a trip down memory lane with a collection of London Underground Tube maps.
• And finally, thanks to MobilePress, vicchi.org went mobile.