Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 72 of 153).

Paul O’Connor: Big government from Raleigh | Salisbury Post

Well said.

RALEIGH – The true conservatives were all in a lather about federal intrusion into states’ rights during Tuesday’s House Education Committee.

First they complained about the federal courts and their attacks on God, then about federal intrusion into education and then about the lack of judicial and congressional attention to the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The true conservatives, you see, believe that local folks know best how to govern locally and that this big, bad government in Washington should just stop interfering in the affairs of North Carolina.

What was most amazing about the prolonged committee meeting, or you might call it a rant, was that no audience member stood up and shouted: “Pot, kettle. Pot, kettle. Pot, kettle.”

via Paul O’Connor: Big government from Raleigh | Salisbury Post.

The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos | Raw File | WIRED

Fascinating story of how geeks restored long-lost moon photographs from NASA analog tapes.

Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald’s. You won’t get a burger there, though–its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who’ve rechristened the place McMoon’s. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the ‘60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites.The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise first slide above. Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it’s being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible.

via The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos | Raw File | WIRED.

Photographing art

Intellectual property? Um hmm.

Intellectual property? Um hmm.


I’ve never understood why artists get so uptight when someone photographs their art. It always makes me shake my head when I go to a concert or show and the artist prohibits photography. Are you really worried, Mr. Artist, that a simple photograph could compare to actually attending your show? Is your act truly that boring? If a photo of you onstage is so much of a threat to you, why are you in business? What are your fans getting for their $50 tickets? I’ve never seen Bruce Springsteen live, but I can’t imagine a photo could take the place of the three-hour experience he provides. I ran into a similar attitude at Carnegie Hall.

I felt the same way when I walked among the stalls at Artsplosure last weekend. A few artists that had put up signs restricting photography, so obviously I had to photograph them. Now I know these folks put a lot of work into their art and they’re justifiably proud of it, but when they display it openly in a public place on a public street there’s nothing to keep it from being photographed. And why should they fear this? I couldn’t possibly reproduce this man’s sculpture from a photograph, nor could a photograph ever capture the essence of a three-dimensional work of art like sculpture.

At least Mr. Mosquera said please on his sign. The one at this next booth takes the cake. Continue reading →

Raleigh tops list of shallow single men?

broken-heart-pixabay.com
Raleigh ranked tops in one category it might have wished to have avoided. My single female friends were nodding in agreement last week when dating service Zoosk proclaimed Raleigh to be the least open-minded dating city in America. Even Birmingham, Alabama, is more open-minded, folks.

Zoosk claims it analyzed one million conversations between the singles who use its service and ranked cities based on how willing someone was to date someone different than themselves. Raleigh ranks last in single men’s attitudes about age and college degrees.

Now, I’m leery of any infographic-driven website. Anyone who’s used Facebook lately knows that numbered lists are sure-fire clickbait: people love to read numbered lists. Mention a few major cities in that list and you’ve got a sure-fire recipe for free PR. Also, with only an infographic to go by and no real data, we’re left wondering how these conclusions were drawn.

It all sounds like a publicity stunt. At the very least, since Zoosk draws its information from its user base, it is really nothing more than a reflection of its users. Perhaps Raleigh’s single men who use Zoosk are simply … well, losers.

Now, back when I was single in Raleigh (you know, before the Internet), my complaint was that there were not enough women around. Too many male engineering geeks crowded the Hillsborough Street bars. Fortunately, Raleigh gained some higher-quality clubs and diversified its job market a bit (I would have preferred that more women would have chosen engineering careers since I find female geeks quite attractive, but I digress) and going out became somewhat less of a swordfight.

There are obviously plenty of men who go the young bimbo route (or, at least, there are men like this who also use Zoosk), but looks alone were never my thing. I think that’s the same for many men, Raleigh ladies, so don’t despair. Keep those standards high, keep your heads up, and stay the hell away from Zoosk if you want to find the right guy!

Your Clever Password Tricks Aren’t Protecting You from Today’s Hackers

Good password-choosing advice from Lifehacker. Bottom line: if you can remember your password it isn’t good enough.

Our passwords are much less secure than they were just a few years ago, thanks to faster hardware and new techniques used by password crackers. Ars Technica explains that inexpensive graphics processors enable password-cracking programs to try billions of password combinations in a second; what would have taken years to crack now may take only months or maybe days.

Making matters much worse is hackers know a lot more about our passwords than they used to. All the recent password leaks have helped hackers identify the patterns we use when creating passwords, so hackers can now use rules and algorithms to crack passwords more quickly than they could through simple common-word attacks.

via Your Clever Password Tricks Aren't Protecting You from Today's Hackers.

Heartbleed Bug

While many news outlets were blathering on about the end of life for Windows XP, a huge hole in OpenSSL was discovered. OpenSSL secures a huge percentage of the Internet, meaning many of the sites you use have had their security compromised.

These revelations, while painful, are very much necessary to create a more secure Internet.

The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as web, email, instant messaging IM and some virtual private networks VPNs.The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.

via Heartbleed Bug.

Bonus link: Bruce Schneier on the Heartbleed bug.

Sticky switcheroo: FDA cracks down on honey labeling – Health – Boston.com

The Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on the fake honey claims in some foods. Looks like I got my wish!

Have you been duped by a honey poser?

Companies have been selling sugary, sticky honey blends on grocery store shelves for years, adding syrups or sweeteners not made naturally by bees, but hiding their fraud on the packaging under the label “honey.” This food fraud also applies to foods that list “honey” as an ingredient. You might not be getting the real thing.

The Food and Drug Administration issued new guidelines Tuesday that will require companies to label any honey that is not pure, or even food containing this honey, with “blend of sugar and honey” or “blend of honey and corn syrup,” depending on the ingredients. This policy change is the result of organizations like the American Beekeeping Federation and other honey associations petitioning against the common food industry practice of misrepresenting “pure honey.”

via Sticky switcheroo: FDA cracks down on honey labeling – Health – Boston.com.

Saffron Technology moving headquarters to Silicon Valley after raising $7 million | Technology | NewsObserver.com

As if to prove my earlier point, the N&O reports local startup Saffron Technology is packing up for the West Coast – not for more favorable taxes but for the West Coast’s “wealth of talent.”

Wrong again, governor.

Saffron Technology, a homegrown big data analytics software company, plans to shift its headquarters from Cary to the Silicon Valley after raising $7 million in new funding.

Despite the move, CEO Gayle Sheppard said she expects the company’s 12-person Cary office to double in size by the end of the year. That would keep pace with the growth of the overall company, which she anticipates swelling from 20 to 40 employees in 2014 thanks to the new round of funding.

“We should not think of this as leaving Cary behind by any means,” Sheppard said. “I see that operation as an important part of our future. Terrific talent there.”

Nonetheless, Sheppard said that moving Saffron’s headquarters to Silicon Valley was designed to help it recruit the “wealth of talent” on the West Coast.

via Saffron Technology moving headquarters to Silicon Valley after raising $7 million | Technology | NewsObserver.com.

Physicists, Generals And CEOs Agree: Ditch The PowerPoint : All Tech Considered : NPR

NPR discusses organizations which have banned PowerPoint presentations. Here’s a pro tip: if your audience is tuning out your presentation, you’re doing it wrong. (Here’s how to do it right.)

About six months ago, a group of physicists in the U.S. working on the Large Hadron Collider addressed a problem they’ve been having for a while: Whenever they had meetings, everyone stuck to the prepared slides and couldn’t really answer questions that weren’t immediately relevant to what was on the screen.The point of the forum is to start discussions, so the physicists — from then on, they could only use a board and a marker.

"The use of the PowerPoint slides was acting as a straitjacket to discussion," says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and one of the organizers of the forum at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.He says it was as if "we removed the PowerPoint slide, and like a big glass barrier was removed between the speaker and the audience."

The communication became a lot more two-way instead of just the speaker speaking at length for 15, 20 minutes. The audience really started to come alive, to look up from their laptop computers and actually start participating in the discussion, which is what we were really trying to foster."

via Physicists, Generals And CEOs Agree: Ditch The PowerPoint : All Tech Considered : NPR.

Nothing spotted by planes searching remote patch of Indian Ocean for missing Malaysian jet | CTV News

The continuing search for signs of Malaysian flight MH370 remind us of two things: it’s a big ocean out there and there is plenty of debris in that ocean.

Search planes scoured a remote patch of the Indian Ocean but came back empty-handed Friday after a 10-hour mission looking for any sign of the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, another disappointing day in one of the world’s biggest aviation mysteries.

Australian officials pledged to continue the search for two large objects spotted by a satellite earlier this week, which had raised hopes that the two-week hunt for the Boeing 777 that disappeared March 8 with 239 people on board was nearing a breakthrough.

But Australia’s acting prime minister, Warren Truss, tamped down expectations.

“Something that was floating on the sea that long ago may no longer be floating — it may have slipped to the bottom,” he said. “It’s also certain that any debris or other material would have moved a significant distance over that time, potentially hundreds of kilometres.”

via Nothing spotted by planes searching remote patch of Indian Ocean for missing Malaysian jet | CTV News.