Announcing...

Cape Connect now has a hotspot / access point in Strand!

Find us diagonally opposite the Pick 'n Pay centre near the beach or on-screen via your wireless device.

Quick survey

If you have a smartphone / PDA that can recognize & access the image in the previous post, please would you leave a "yes" in the comments to let me know it works? Or a "no" if you have the capability to do so, but it doesn't work.

Unfortunately my phone is not as technologically enhanced as most, so I'm sorta looking for "outside testers" on this one :-)

Thanks!

Tech support

Tech Support, verb: To keep one's Favourite Geek supplied with coffee, Coke, pizza and cookies while he does geeky things with routerboards, number strings and support people.

(May be one of the most important jobs in the process.. or at least I like to think so! :-) )

Good Fences vs Good Neighbours

Way up against a local mountain sits a Cape Connect high site. (Blasting forth uncapped wireless to everywhere from Gordon's Bay to Tygervalley, FYI :-) )

Developing this site has been a bit of a mission. First there's the obvious issue of it being up in the sky - with some serious offroading to get to, steep slopes to drag things up and down, weather to consider etc.

Then there's the neighbour. A few metres from everyone's sites (we're not the only ones up there) is the border fence with a flower farmer who has nothing better to do than watch his blommetjies grow and make kak. We first tried very hard to get along with him. We offered to share costs to put in power further up the hill which both he and we could use - which fell through. We had his permission to use his access road to cart sand/stone up. He even unlocked the gate between his farm and the property where our site is. All went well until he locked me in and wanted to know what I was doing on his farm. We had his permission to use the only source of water right next to the fence, on his property, to mix our cement (he, after all, uses electricity from a nearby site for his pumps without bothering to pay for it). Water permission went OK until he suddenly retracted and threatened violence. He regularly "visits his proteas" and "checks the water tanks" to sit in the bushes with binoculars and check out what we're doing. And when we're not there... well we've found footprints in the sand around our site.

So we've taken to ignoring him, using roads not on his property, bringing our own water, and providing solar power to our site. In other words keeping well out of his way and hoping he'd do the same.

Seems it's not to be.

Last week he upped the ante.

You see, many years ago a lot of high sites were on his land. He charged rent for each, but then started changing costs randomly, "felling" towers he didn't like etc. So everyone moved next door. And suddenly that source of income disappeared.

Now, being the off-season for flowers, he's got time on his hands and is plotting. There's a new, legal, very expensive tower going up a level below ours to provide digital TV to the area. Suddenly he's trying to get it stopped with court orders and trouble. He's complained to our site landlord that our new tower is "reflecting in their eyes" - although it's no more silver than any of the other towers around it. That the solar panel shines in his mom's eyes and she can't play tennis anymore - which is a physical impossibility as she'd have to be in heaven for it to do so at any time of the day thanks to its 30 degree pitch skywards and his location way below. He called out ICASA to report an illegal site - they scanned our signals and found everything perfectly legal. He wants an environmental survey - this on a site that uses solar power and has re-vegetated the surrounds. Heck, we even used recycled glass as aggregate in our construction!

Today Favourite Man headed up the hill to get a job done, which required a further trip later in the day. Between trip one and two, SOMEONE climbed to the top of the tower, removed a nut off of it, placed it very prominently on top of the equipment box at the top of the tower - and then attempted to rip the top off the equipment box so the (not cheap!) equipment inside would be ruined the next time it rains.

There's really only one suspect. But no-one seems to have the ability or the balls to do anything about it - YET.

But Karma is a bitch, and his time will come.

Windows 7 Beta

Want it? Click here.

Honda take 2

Remember that Honda hydrogen-powered car I like? Treehugger has a "there's a problem" post to give perspective.

And here's the Top Gear clip - what do you think? Thumbs up or thumbs down?

Power to the people

Top Gear had a look this week at the Honda FCX Clarity - and I have to admit I'm really impressed. It looks reasonably good (LOVE the colour! strange shape though), it goes well and it's a green as you can get.

Unfortunately it's only available on a lease programme in Southern California, but I'm sure it will make it to the rest of the world eventually.

What's so great about it? Well first off it's zero-emission. Yup, no emissions whatsoever except water - and we all know water is in short supply on the planet. It runs on Hydrogen, which is freely available. It doesn't have to charge overnight using electricity probably produced from non-green raw materials. Nor does it suddenly run out of power when the batteries die. Talking of which, there are no huge batteries taking up half the car or weighing it down. It's big enough to stick your family in and go places, and quick to fill up at a hydrogen pump.

It's the car of today, built for tomorrow, as James of Top Gear said.

I like.

Multifunction

I'm not just a one-dimensional blonde....

Yesterday I'm sitting at my new desk (which is kinda the testing server dump-all area) when I hear commotion behind me. A small network cabinet is being taken apart to stick some rackmount servers and things inside. Removing the sides and extras was the easy part.

The trouble started when it came time to fill it up.

Now Favourite Man knows servers and network cabinets. I've been the manual labour on many an occasion when things need moving or adjusting or replacing in ours. So I know a thing or two about cage nuts! :-) And after watching the poor bloke struggling to figure them out for a few minutes I decided to put him out of his misery and help.

Thus the Tech Writer ended up sticking cage nuts into the appropriate holes, holding servers while they were screwed in, helping grab cables and place cable management strips and generally get the thing installed neatly.

Upon which time they decided it was time to move it - and seeing I was SO helpful with the installation, perhaps I'd like to lend a hand...?

Um.. no. Thanks for asking! :-)

The network cabinet behind me is still a work in progress. The latest attempts include finding a way to mount a mini board that has cables attached to it's ports but no surround - without damaging anything or shorting it out on the cabinet. This could be fun.

From there the entire cabinet and contents moves off-site to a facility near where I live - a call went out this morning for a bakkie (pick-up truck) to help get it there.

And then it will just be me and the other testing servers in this corner, them humming quietly along and me back to being a tech writer.

But hey, I have my uses.

Third-world bandwidth

I have a new beef... pre-online-vid ads.

Take this for example:

I'm trying to view a snippet of news on the BBC website, but I first have to sit through a compulsory 30 seconds of ad for Egypt. Now I'd love to see Egypt one day, but here in Africa streaming bandwidth is more like drought-year stream flow than a rainy-season flood. It's taking forever to load a few seconds of news video - and having to first load that ad is eating into what's available in a big way.

Here in Africa we also tend to pay by use - some folk sit with a 1GB cap on their monthly allowance. Which makes viewing a 30 second ad all that more irritating when you know it's eating in to what you COULD be doing, using up your precious time and access.

I know those offering up these vids have a living to make - paid advertising is probably working well for them.

But us folk stuck on a third-world connection with bandwidth restrictions could really do without it....

Technological Marvels

Favourite Man is on a mission. Last night he got a bee in his bonnet - downloaded the lastest Ubuntu and is attempting to install it.

After two apparently failed installation attempts (the poor machine was merely pondering before taking action!) it's up and running.

And 'elo and b'hold - what is the first thing that happens? Ubuntu installs SEVENTY THREE updates.

Eish - this is worse than Windows!

(nearly)

Ubuntu also seems to be a little fussier about hardware than Windows - in its previous life the graphics adapter worked at 1024x768 with 16 million colours (can the human eye even see that many?!) and the sound circuitry on the board produced some irritating noises now and then. Ubuntu doesn't recognize the sound thingy, and won't get the display past 800x600.

Or so says Favourite Man. Me - I think it looks pretty, but it needs a big screen :-)

Oh - perhaps it's because we made the login in the dog's name? The dog can't type too well and doesn't know too much about IT. Yeah, let's blame the dog.

People you may know

As mentioned before, I'm not a huge Facebook user. I check in now and then to feed my pup and see what folk are up to (minimally..), but I don't go whole-hog addictive on it or stalk anyone.

Still, it's been nice to connect with my very first best friend from grade 1, people I knew way-back and colleagues I say more to online than in the flesh! :-) Also interesting to see what my kid's up to.

And then there's the "people you may know" thing. This morning it popped up the name of an ex I never want to see again. It's popped up people I had hoped to forget - and some I had forgotten when I didn't intend to. And as those names appear, so do the memories both good and bad.

I guess it's like going for a hypnosis session. All that stuff you'd buried intentionally or unintentionally comes flooding back and sticks in the front of your brain, leading to knock-on memories of places and people and times gone by. I'm the shy girl, just arrived in South Africa and finding her feet. I'm the outdoors-all-the-time confident kid with a 12-speed bike in Zimbabwe. I'm the new single mom with low self confidence. I'm the high school teen who can only remember one event in Std 9 and has blanked the rest out as a bad memory.

Perhaps that's why I stay away from Facebook so much. I'd rather have the positives of now.

Hackers Wanted

Calling all geeks and soldering-iron-wielding technology hackers!

Right - so I have this large pile of laptop hard drives sitting around looking at me, and I'm thinking I could do things with that in terms of portable storage... but I'm a mini-geek and non-hacker, and I'm running short on how-to's for this one.

Basically, I'd like to stack them all up in an EHD-type tower enclosure (will make one myself if I have to with appropriate brackets and stuff), then hook them up and access them off a USB connection to my computer. I know I'll need a fan in there (got some lying around), and power (off USB? or own power supply?), as well as the appropriate wiring. But as to exactly how to go about this, I'm clueless.

I know some of you out there have a corner of the garage reserved for furtive projects of this variety. I can't for the life of me find info online as to how to put it all together. So here's your chance to come out of the corner and teach me the ropes!

Where do I start? What will I need? How do I construct it so it hums along and doesn't explode?

Social Flutterby

I really suck at the whole online social networking thing. OK, so I have blogs and a Facebook profile and a LinkdIn one and a Flickr account and a DeviantArt ID and all that stuff - but I'm not Working It, not to the extent that others do. I'm a member of 19 forums, all of which haven't heard a word from me in ages. I'm a terrible social flutterby.

Case in point - I've just responded to a Facebook message that's been sitting in my inbox for 4 months. Eish. It's not the only one. There were 10 messages waiting for me to one day pull finger and get around to writing back. Including one from my very first best friend from Grade 1, who I haven't seen or heard from since primary school! Eish again.

Perhaps if I had more time to get deeply into these I'd be better at it. But I like the sunshine and the great outdoors, I like doing things that don't involve a computer screen, and necessity dictates I need to work too. I simply don't have the hours available to go virtual bells & whistles on my social life.

Hell, I hardly have the time to go NON-virtual on the social life.

So I'll remain a bad social networker, with occasional spurts of inspiration - and if you hear from me on a semi-annual basis, count your blessings.

Phones - what to get?

The time is rapidly approaching to replace and upgrade a couple of cellphones in our household. Each of us has a wishlist, but here's generally what we're hoping for:

* VoIP capability - with associated features of course
* Windows mobile stuff
* Batteries that don't die an hour after they're fully charged
* Preferably something that rings and can be answered.. :-)
* Reasonably robust design - no fiddly finicky bits, especially considering some of us have large hands, some like to add their phones to the washing, and some deal with heavy equipment
* Quite probably three different user-levels: basic for the kid, mid-fancy-functional for me, and pimped-out for Favourite Man

There are many nice bells and whistles available, but a lot of them really aren't necessary. We have laptops and digital cameras and a kitchen sink.

So I'm throwing this out to you guys - what are good options out there and what should we avoid?

Gadgetry

A few weeks back we got a couple of old nonfunctional laptops in as e-waste. Usually we'd strip them completely and process the bits, but this time I decided to claim a part - one of the screens.

It's not a complete screen. The outside bits have been removed, leaving me with just the "innards" and essentials. I have a cunning plan...

But hey, I know there are brilliant minds out there with an awesome imagination. So let me throw this one out to the masses.

What would you do, make or pimp with an old LCD screen?

Technogeek

One thing that blew my mind at yesterday's conference was the amazing range of possibility that technology offers.

We tend to think of the latest and greatest as being only available at huge cost to the rich and the high-class, to those willing to invest in top-of-the-range branded everything. The truth is innovation happens at the edges.

It takes innovation to see a gap in the market and develop a solution.

Like the bloke further up the continent (Uganda, I think) who discovered the only tall tree in his village, once climbed, offered cellphone reception. He built a platform and steps up to the top of the tree and now charges $1 for people to "reach new heights" and make their call.

Or what about the mobile wheelchair payphones in Kenya - folk who are wheelchair-bound, who mount a payphone to their transport and offer a mobile service. Brilliant.

And the system of money transfer also operating further north, where one person buys cellphone airtime, transfers it to another phone, and the recipient can then cash out the equivalent amount in real currency.

Africa is full of innovation. One of my favourite mind-blowing sites is right here. Africans are amazing when it comes to figuring out a plan. They see a gap and they take it, using incredible figure-it-out skills and whatever's lying around.

And it's all happening at the edges - not in the big, well-paid and well-equipped corporations.

I have to wonder if corporations are killing creativity by taking their workers out of the "real world" and sticking them in a "lab rat" environment. How much more innovation would happen if they simply set them free to go find cool stuff to do?

Prime example is opensource software - much of it developed in someone's mom's basement and contributed to by the masses as it grows.

Take Facebook - young bloke, cool concept, took off. Flickr. Digg. You name it. The best stuff isn't "sponsored" at start-up.

Yesterday I attended a Sustainable Business seminar that got me thinking very very hard about technology, opportunity, green business practice and the community I live in. I wrote stuff down furiously as ideas and concepts hit my braincells. Now it's going to take time to sift through all that and find the jewels, the things that Could.Just.Work. Most of it's going to take more knowledge-gathering and a whole lot of determination to push past nay-sayers. A good deal of it is going to need to percolate before it gets let out in word, text or practical application.

But I'm inspired. Enthused. Had that mind-window opened and the possibilities truly are endless.

Yet another website gripe

Yesterday I was on about websites that take too long to load. I've got a new gripe today - unfortunately triggered by the same site that I gave up on yesterday!

And here it is - websites that don't actually do anything useful.

I'm back at trying to access a user list via the slow-loading website. Having cached itself as far as graphics and look & feel go, it's now loading a bit faster. However, the information I'm looking for, which is obviously being pulled out of a database somewhere - well, isn't. There's no information appearing on the screen.

This isn't the first time it's happened. Two months ago we contacted the customer support bloke to inform him of this, and he passed things on to the IT blokes, and then we waited. Eventually we had to go to insistant mode - I took to emailing him a "please confirm receipt of this message" on the hour, every hour - and after two days he caved :-) We at least got a reply out of him. It still took numerous phonecalls to get things fixed.

Except it seems they actually weren't. The site is still trying to pull information unsuccessfully, making it completely and utterly useless.

Seen those kinds of websites? They either send you around in endless circles of "click here for..." or throw up "page not found". Perhaps they do look useful at first - but finding anything you need is basically impossible, whether it's contact details or a product price. They're simply not content-functional. They don't work.

You can have all the bells and whistles you want, you can pare it down to lean and mean, you can have it functioning efficiently - but if it's not providing what it's supposed to provide, it's just a waste of bandwidth.

I give up

If there's one thing I've learnt about website design, it's that you have about 3 seconds to catch someone's attention and give them a reason to stay on your site. Attention spans of internet users are notoriously short - and patience even more so.

My dad has written a book. It's been selling pretty well via word-of-mouth, but when he had someone design a website and asked us to test it, we discovered that the designer had added all sorts of bells and whistles. On our reasonably-fast Third World line, it took about 10 minutes to load! There's no way anyone other than the most determined would hang around long enough to buy a book from a site like that. Fortunately it's been redesigned since.

This morning I was on one of my business sites, trying to access information to sort out a list of users. The site simply wouldn't load. As urgent as that information is, after half an hour I simply gave up. There are so many background scripts running that the actual stuff you're trying to access doesn't work. Which makes the entire site completely and utterly useless.

Those in First World countries may be used to streaming media, big graphics, flash eye-candy etc loading with the speed of light. They may have always-on access. But it's not the same everywhere. Most of Africa can't handle loadtime-heavy sites well, so by default the users will go elsewhere instead of sitting around waiting. A lot of internet access is pay-per-minute, and most folk can't afford to spend all day online.

It's precisely that reason that makes me consider very carefully what goes onto the websites I design. If it takes more than a few seconds to load, it's gone. No matter how cool, nifty or smart it is. Lean and mean, baby - lean and mean.

You don't want potential customers and clients giving up and going away. Equally, you don't want a boring site that doesn't catch the eye. There's a very fine balance to achieve between good-looking and functional. And it's not at all easy.

Find that balance - and you're good to go. Miss it, you'll see me giving up and taking myself off elsewhere. Along with a whole lot of others.

Time is money in more ways than one.