Check out http://borninseptember.org Basically some guy decided that instead of getting birthday presents one year, he was going to ask people to donate $31/person so he could invest in wells in a bunch of villages in Africa. The OBA project coordinator in the Mbarara office showed me this link (ostensibly to illustrate to me the [...]
Posts from ‘August, 2008’
Poynting Antennas and Wilson Antennas
I’m posting this here mostly for my own future reference: I’ve been using tri-band antennas from Wilson Antennas, but unfortunately they don’t actually work in the places where you need the antennas because, well they’re made for the US-based frequencies (e.g. 1900, rather than 1800) Jeff Wishnie from Inveneo points out this antenna for boosting [...]
Preparing for Power Cuts
I’m pretty gadget heavy on this trip. In terms of power stuff I have: 1 solar flexible-panel charger (retail $99-ish) for 4 AA batteries2 solio solar chargers, for mobile phones and usb devices (can be charged via solar or grid power. I only have one adapterfor grid power) (retail about $80 each)1 inverter (retail about [...]
My Secret Public Service to African Computers
Since I’m about to do this to my VMware installation of windows I thought it would be a good time to write a quick blog post on how to prevent your Windows computer from being infected by cds, dvds, and usb drives. Of course this means that when you pop in a cd/dvd, it will [...]
Having an Impact as a Global Woman
Elizabeth Basha, Ruth Anderson, Revi Sterling, and I are presenting an ICTD panel at the Grace Hopper Celebration in Colorado on October 4-5, 2008. For those of you interested in pre-conference participation, we just set up a blog/resource website so everyone can talk about what we directions we might want to take during the panel [...]
Back in the Field
I’m on my way back out to Uganda, this time to run a pilot study of the software, working out some of the details of the design (co-design?) with the people in the management agency and the clinics, and doing a comparative study between a bunch of possible device platforms: Palm 680, Palm Centro, Blackberry [...]
