Geeks Without Borders
Feb. 14th, 2003 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plutherusThere was a good article in the San Francisco Chronicle today, regarding a local group, not Geeks Without Borders, but doing the same kind of thing: they're setting up a couple of computers in Laos, in a remote village with no electricity or phone, in a dangerous area of the country (they ended up hiring the army to guard the equipment, I'll be interesting in seeing how
that turns out!).
They did some of the things we have discussed, including a series of wireless transmitters to connect to a phone line 20 miles away, to get onto the internet. Nice to see that that works! The bicycle generator is an interesting idea, as well. We've been looking into water and windmills, as well as solar panels, and Stirling engines.
The headline, of course, focuses on the minor setback they just had (we could have told them about the need for a beefy surge protector, as the exact same thing happened to the computers we set up in Chiapas!), but the rest of the article is worth reading:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/02/14/MN183059.DTL
I wish them the best of luck when they go back next month to replace the hard drives!
that turns out!).
They did some of the things we have discussed, including a series of wireless transmitters to connect to a phone line 20 miles away, to get onto the internet. Nice to see that that works! The bicycle generator is an interesting idea, as well. We've been looking into water and windmills, as well as solar panels, and Stirling engines.
The headline, of course, focuses on the minor setback they just had (we could have told them about the need for a beefy surge protector, as the exact same thing happened to the computers we set up in Chiapas!), but the rest of the article is worth reading:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/02/14/MN183059.DTL
I wish them the best of luck when they go back next month to replace the hard drives!
