Welcome to the Jhai Foundation is a group doing some great things with ultralowcost computing. I envy it. THey have a remote IT project which gives cheap and robust computers to villages that have no electricity or phone, and they're hooked up to wireless (like airport) networking to all the villiages. Then the farmers can find out, by email, if the price of grain is high enough to warrant the 30km walk into town to sell it. WOW!
Some of you, up early and regularly reading this blog, may have noticed, along with a bunch of Roger Kuin's English 3150 students, and perhaps some KMDIers, that Edublog suddenly became unavailable last night. I quietly panicked and made my way in this morning to see what had blown or crashed. Luckily I have years of experience with things going wrong. So I wasn't shocked to find that the server was running, and started poking about. First I found out that though the server was running, it couldn't find the internet either. The ethernet connection to the hub was flashing properly, but just for the hell of it, I unplugged the ethernet cable and plugged it back in. Nothing looked strange, but of course that fixed it. Loose cable. Not even a broken one. Just a slight jiggly connection. Almost wrecked my morning, but it didn't. Gotta get better backups though. I'm doing them manually, as OSX doesn't have a good backup system that I can use yet, but I'm testing backing up the machine to an old iMac I've called Pollen. Happiness.