Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 118 of 153).

Top-secret America

Here’s a fascinating look at the ballooning American intelligence world, which has gone on a growth binge following the 9/11 attacks with no limit in sight.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

via Top-secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control – The Denver Post.

Tulsi-Hybrid Solar Oven

Tulsi-Hybrid Solar Oven

Check out the Tulsi-Hybrid Solar Oven: a hybrid solar-electric cooker. I’ve been wondering if we could use the abundant sun on our back deck for cooking food, and this solar cooker looks like the perfect solution. When the sun isn’t available to do the cooking, the Tulsi-Hybrid uses electricity to keep your food warm – avoiding spoilage.

I’ve found the Tulsi-Hybrid available online for as low as $240 at the Solar Store.

Sun BD Corporation, presents Hybrid Solar Oven Technology at its finest, it is easy to use, portable, sets up in seconds and is safer to use because there are no dangerous open flames. The Tulsi-Hybrid produces zero carbon emissions!

Continue reading →

Birds can see magnetic fields

Found this fascinating:

Some birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and orientate themselves with the ease of a compass needle. This ability is a massive boon for migrating birds, keeping frequent flyers on the straight and narrow. But this incredible sense is closely tied to a more mundane one – vision. Thanks to special molecules in their retinas, birds like the European robins can literally see magnetic fields.

via Robins can literally see magnetic fields, but only if their vision is sharp | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine.

Google creates fiber Internet resource site

In response to the overwhelming demand that 1,100 communities showed for the Google Fiber project, Google created the Fiber for Communities website. This site is a collection of resources that is intended to pave the way for communities to acquire fiber Internet.

I really like how Google has positioned this new effort. They know that their fiber project will only serve a handful of communities, leaving many to fend for themselves. By creating this site, Google shows it is committed to sharing its findings and supporting those communities who want to make this jump.
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Integrating QEMU with your Linux desktop

Here are some handy tips for making QEMU work much better with your Linux desktop. You can now park QEMU on an unused workspace and not have to click in your QEMU window to use your mouse in a QEMU guest.

Integrating QEMU a bit with your desktop

Presently you have to run QEMU with a slightly lower resolution than your real desktop or run it in full-screen mode to get a decent experience out of it. With a patch I have written and a few tricks it can work a bit better.

via Integrating QEMU a bit with your desktop.

RPD officer parks vertically

A friend forwarded this FailBlog picture of an RPD police car that inadvertently got parked vertically. It looks like a new model car, so I’m thinking this happened somewhat recently.

Anyone know any details, like when/where this took place?

Update: My brother Jeff thinks this is the area near Six Forks Rd. and Millbrook Rd. I think it might be somewhere along Six Forks Rd., or maybe Lead Mine Rd. near Glenwood Ave. It could also be Six Forks close to Strickland, near

Look at the light pole in the top of the picture: it seems close enough to make this a narrow road, perhaps two-lane. On the other hand, the retaining wall looks new, too, so perhaps this road has gone through some widening recently. The close telephone pole could simply be an illusion caused by a telephoto lens.

The large bundles of copper telephone wires seem to point to a location close to downtown. I’m trying to identify that building in the background, too.

Streaming music to Ubuntu from a Bluetooth device

I’ve been intrigued by my new Samsung phone’s apparent ability to stream music to my laptop via Bluetooth. Ubuntu doesn’t appear to be able to do this out of the box and I had no idea where to search for this.

Today, I found the secret, thanks to this page:

After a few people asking me how to use the A2DP Sink with BlueZ, I’ve decided to write this mini-tutorial with a step-by-step on how to establish a A2DP stream from any device to a BlueZ-enabled host.

Before we start the hands-on, let’s see a little bit of nomenclature. In our use-case we have an stream being transmitted between two devices through a pipeline. Our pipeline is constructed of the remote host, BlueZ and PulseAudio. Each element of this pipeline has a Source (SRC) and a Sink (SNK) interface. The stream is handled between different elements by being sent from one element’s source to another element’s sink. So, the big picture of our pipeline is something like this (with the stream being represented by an arrow):

via 1, 2, 3, 4, A2DP Stream « jprvita’s weblog.

It’s still wonky out the wazoo but it looks like it can be done. I will wrestle with this more this evening.

My photo of Raleigh seen again in the wild

My public domain picture of Raleigh I uploaded to Wikipedia continues to make the rounds. Flipping through the newspaper this morning, I spotted a small ad on page 2B of the Triangle section. The ad, placed by the City of Raleigh Recycling, featured the picture in the header, with a “swoosh” ribbon thing coming out of it. There’s no doubt that it’s my picture as the cars line up perfectly.

Some photographers get upset when their work gets used without their permission. I suppose there might be a time in the future when I work professionally as a photog. Even then, though, there will be shots I take that I’ll be happy to pass around, either because it’s the right thing to do or because it’s a great way to advertise my skills.

Hallie’s complaint to the library

Hallie checked out a book from the library which was bound incorrectly, getting the chapters out of order. Not one to let a problem go unreported (she takes after her dad), Hallie write the library a note to bring this to their attention.

The note reads:

To: Library

The Book Young Cam Jansen And the substitute Mystery is totally MIXED UP! The chapters should go like this 1,2,3,4,5. In the book, they go 1,2,4,5,3. No wonder it doesn’t make sense! It was bound out-of-order! Somebody already wrote the correct Page numbers in the book. I know it isn’t good to write in books, but What Are You Supposed To DO When You Find A mystery in a mystery?

-Hallie Turner,
age 8