Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 92 of 153).

Missing: Joshua Clay Inscoe

Joshua Clay Inscoe


Have you seen Joshua “Josh” Clay Inscoe? Josh went missing from Carlbrook school in Virginia and was last seen in Durham. He is believed to be in Raleigh.

Josh is a white male, age 16 years, height 5’7″ and 145 pounds. He has short, light brown hair; a medium build; green eyes, and a medium complexion. He was last seen near the Durham Bulls stadium on Friday, August 24th, wearing a blue plaid shirt with collar, khaki pants, and a black backpack.

If you see Josh, please call the Halifax (VA) police department at 434-476-3334.

A flier with Josh’s information may be downloaded here.

More pictures below the fold.
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How Apple Killed the Linux Desktop

Nice look by Wired at the current broken state of Linux user interfaces.

Wired thinks OS X killed the Linux desktop but I maintain it’s suicide. I read Linus Torvalds’s rant about Fedora 17 and Gnome3 and have to agree with him. Not only did Canoncial break the Ubuntu desktop but Red Hat broke Fedora’s, too.

It’s hard to say exactly what percentage of desktop and laptop computers run Apple OS X, but it’s clear that the operating system has made slow but steady gains at chipping away at that the sizable lead Microsoft established in the ’90s with its Windows operating system. Some figures put the number at about 6 to 7 percent of the desktop market.

But one thing’s for sure: OS X has been more successful than Linux, the open source operating system that has found a home on data-center servers but is still a rarity on desktops and laptops. Linux may have seen a surge last year, but it still hasn’t seen the sort of growth OS X has, nor the growth that Linux supporters have long hoped for.

via How Apple Killed the Linux Desktop and Why That Doesn't Matter | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.

Little Raleigh Radio planning downtown broadcasts

Little Raleigh Radio grew up a little bit more today when the News and Observer covered its successful Kickstarter campaign. I hope we see many new volunteers at tomorrow’s open house at Kings!

Downtown is on its way to having its own radio station – and the community is invited to be part of the broadcast.

Volunteers are starting an internet broadcast called Little Raleigh Radio, and they hope to launch in October with an eclectic mix of music and talk, all produced by locals. Starting a radio station from scratch in 2012 might seem like a long shot, but the group has plenty of support. Within weeks, they raised more than $10,000 on the Kickstarter grassroots funding website.

via Little Raleigh Radio planning downtown broadcasts – Local/State – NewsObserver.com.

The Cheapest Generation

Here’s another look at the dramatically changing demographics taking place in America. Raleigh leaders, take note.

In 2009, Ford brought its new supermini, the Fiesta, over from Europe in a brave attempt to attract the attention of young Americans. It passed out 100 of the cars to influential bloggers for a free six-month test-drive, with just one condition: document your experience online, whether you love the Fiesta or hate it.

Young bloggers loved the car. Young drivers? Not so much. After a brief burst of excitement, in which Ford sold more than 90,000 units over 18 months, Fiesta sales plummeted. As of April 2012, they were down 30 percent from 2011.

Don’t blame Ford. The company is trying to solve a puzzle that’s bewildering every automaker in America: How do you sell cars to Millennials (a?k?a Generation Y)? The fact is, today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

via The Cheapest Generation – Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic.

Update 1:38 PM: The authors cite the same thing I did back in March: that technology is making travel less necessary than it was before.

Smartphones compete against cars for young people’s big-ticket dollars, since the cost of a good phone and data plan can exceed $1,000 a year. But they also provide some of the same psychic benefits—opening new vistas and carrying us far from the physical space in which we reside.

“You no longer need to feel connected to your friends with a car when you have this technology that’s so ubiquitous, it transcends time and space,” Connelly said.

In other words, mobile technology has empowered more than just car-sharing. It has empowered friendships that can be maintained from a distance. The upshot could be a continuing shift from automobiles to mobile technology, and a big reduction in spending.

Bringing a rooftop garden to East Raleigh

I read this interesting tidbit in yesterday’s N&O about a company that builds rooftop gardens for grocery stores and thought my neighborhood would be perfect for this.

  • There are relatively few choices for good, healthy food in my area (a.k.a, a food desert).
  • An often-heard complaint about my local grocery store is the quality of its produce.
  • Said grocery store has lots of rooftop space and a large, southern-facing, sunlit, vacant outparcel nearby.
  • The Brooklyn-based owner of my local shopping center has rooftop gardens on the Brooklyn warehouses she owns.
  • This should be a slam dunk, shouldn’t it? We’ll see!

A New York company has developed a hyper local way to get fresh produce to grocery stores: grow it on the store’s own rooftop – or at least one very close by.

BrightFarms builds hydroponic greenhouses on top of buildings and then sells the lettuce, tomatoes and herbs to local supermarkets. So far, the company’s partners include A&P in Brooklyn, Whole Foods in New Jersey, and Homeland Stores in Oklahoma. Now BrightFarms wants to come to the Triangle.

P.S. The link in the N&O blog entry is broken. The contest URL is http://brightfarms.com/projects/north-carolina-envision-us-here-contest

via .biz – Company seeks roof garden sites | newsobserver.com blogs.

Pussy Riot case shows Russia’s dark path

Last week, Russian authorities handed down a harsh sentance to the three members of the female punk band Pussy Riot, after the band staged an anti-Putin “punk prayer” in a Russian Orthodox Church. It shows the increasingly autocratic ways of Russian prime minister Vladmir Putin, who is apparently leading the country away from its experiments as an open society (while lining his own pockets at the same time).

Below is a statement from one of the band members which was posted to one of the band’s support groups on Facebook. She is absolutely correct when she writes that the country’s heavy-handed response to their stunt shows the Russian leadership’s fear of opposition.

I hope their case will wake other Russians to Putin’s looting of their country and their rights.
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Ecuador to Let Julian Assange Stay in Its Embassy

Julian Assange might be a pain in the ass to governments everywhere, but the British threat to revoke the diplomatic immunity of the Ecuadorian Embassy in order to fetch him – a man charged with no crime – seems wildly inappropriate.

“We remind the public that these extraordinary actions are being taken to detain a man who has not been charged with any crime in any country,” the statement said. It added: “We further urge the U.K. government to show restraint, and to consider the dire ramifications of any violation of the elementary norms of international law.”

via Ecuador to Let Julian Assange Stay in Its Embassy – NYTimes.com.

WineDiningFun.com

My multi-talented former boss Rowland Archer and his lovely wife Lana have just launched a resource for wine events around the Triangle. Give it a look!

We are Rowland and Lana from Raleigh, NC. We love wine events and hope you do too. We have found it very hard to find wine dinners, tastings and festivals in time to get reservations or tickets and have missed a lot of them that sounded great — after the fact. There are hundreds of web sites, Facebook pages and mailing lists that seem to get updated inconsistently if at all — and who has time to look at all of them hoping to find that one piece of gold buried in all the out-of-date information?

via About.

Raleigh will soon have its own business startup ‘Hub’

HUB Raleigh


It looks like Raleigh may have a place for startups to get started after all, about a year after I mentioned it here. I’m looking forward to learning more about HUB Raleigh!

Frustrated by lack of respectable, low-cost office space and support of other new and emerging business owners, a team of entrepreneurs in Raleigh is launching an equivalent of Durham’s “American Underground.”

Led by Brooks Bell, owner of her own rapidly growing high-tech integration business, and Christopher Gergen, who launched the Bull City Forward business program in Durham, “HUB Raleigh” is set to open on Sept. 15 at 711 Hillsborough Street.

via Raleigh will soon have its own business startup 'Hub' :: WRAL Tech Wire.