August « 2010 « Hackers For Charity

This is reposted form the forums and the volunteer list. Sorry if you’re getting it through more than one channel!

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Hey everyone! It seems that we have a team from MD coming over to
Uganda and they have a suitcase they’re willing to use for us! It’s
just in time. We’re in such need of equipment, but we have very little
lead time — the gear needs to be in MD by this weekend (Sunday at the
latest).

If you guys would be willing to help, I would really appreciate it. I
thought of spending money to get some of this, but I’ve always been
VERY hesitant on spending on things I think might get donated.

I’m trying to build out some proof-of-concepts for the mEducation
“School in a suitcase” project we’re working on. Basically what I’m
looking for is:

“Portable” USB Hard Drives: 50GB or larger, USB powered, no external
power required. The larger the capacity the better, obviously. Include
cables if you have them.

USB Flash drives: 4GB or larger.

“QWERTY” Wi-Fi capable smart phones: Wi-Fi capability must work
outside US, although we have the capability of unlocking most phones
here.

Flash Memory cards: MicroSD / MicroSDHC / SD / SDHC: 512MB or larger.

Wireless USB adapters: With driver software if you have it. For our P4
and P3 laptops we’ve got.

Unlocked 3G modems (USB) or 3G routers

One MacBook (Just kidding).

2.5″ IDE Hard Drives (>30GB) for our Compaq EVO P4 laptops.

Thank you guys. If you have anything to send, please let me know and
I’ll get you the address!

Johnny

This post really has nothing to do with anything except, “huh… cool”. A silly kinda digital anecdote. My wife has been whistling this song for weeks. Neither one of us had a clue what it was. But it came up all the time. She would whistle the main theme, and then ten minutes later she would whistle a variation of it until thirty minutes later it became a remix far removed from the original.

It was funny. When we asked her about it, she told us it was from a music box her grandmother gave her. “It had a birdie,” she said, “like this.” And she proceeded to make a perfectly cute birdie with three fingers and show me how, exactly, it pecked.

It had some deep connected meaning to her  and I just had to find out what the tune was.

I thought of “Shazam” on my iPhone but somehow I lost it. So I Googled for “music box songs” and found this site. Jen’s whistle was vaguely familiar to me, and thanks to my vast knowledge of music box tunes (!) I skipped quite a few. Eventually I saw this link and I knew even before I clicked it that I had solved the mystery.

I unplugged my headphones to let the tune play out loud and Jen’s eyes lit up. “That’s the one!” she said, “How did you find that?”

I smiled and she continued.

“It had birdies!”

And again with the three fingered pecking birdie.

I knew then I couldn’t stop there. (Or maybe it was my years of Google hacking or the fact that a challenge was brewing…)

A Google image search for “music box love story bird” was next. There on the first line was a music box that fit the description. I clicked the link to find this site. I turned the laptop to show Jen and she lit up again.

“That’s the one!” she said.

“With the birdie,” I said, making my best attempt at the three-fingered pecking birdie. She didn’t even notice that I failed to properly emulate her cute birdie.

The pictures on the site were cool, but in the middle of the page was a broken link to a video that “Hellomrfox” Hannah had shot of the music box in action. Firebug pointed to a Flickr stream, and another link later, I searched Hannah’s Flickr stream for “bird” and eventually found this gem.

Even if you don’t care about the story, the video is worth a look. It’s so calming and.. unexpected. It’s darn near the same exact music box that Jen’s “Nanna” gave her when she was a little girl.Who knows, it may even be the same one.

And here I am in Africa watching Hannah’s amazing video of what just might be Jen’s Grandmom’s music box.

And once again, the Google hacking blood is flowing. If that’s all my years of hacking amount to, that just might be OK. Jen smiled in the midst of the madness.

And now, I’m going to be whistling that song for weeks.

Here are some photos from the most recent Jinja Linux Users Group. For those of you that don’t know, we started the group at our training center in Jinja to start a community of Linux enthusiasts. Even though this meeting had relatively few attendees, we had a lot of fun. We had members of the local community as well as several local police officers (which we train for free) in attendance. We had an Ubuntu 10.4 install party to show how to install Ubuntu dual boot alongside an existing Windows installation. All said we loaded six machines in our center, which is amazing because none of the users had even USED Linux before. None of the machines croaked, so they all did a great job! Thanks to John Chamberline, who sadly will be leaving us for a spell back home. We look forward to seeing you when you return, John!

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. I’ve been spinning my wheels a bit at the cafe between fixing the odd laptop (the ones that stump Fred) recovering deleted photos from tourists’ cameras and tweaking out our “fastest in Jinja” Internet. I’m finding a few niches that can be filled to make some money and serve the community here, which right now is mostly missionaries in need.

But a path has formed and the more time I spend on it, the more I’m feeling an urgency and a drive and a certain wind in my sails that tells me there’s a goal I’m meant to pursue. The topic is education.

In our center we teach computer skills. It’s relevant and of course we’ll keep doing it. But there’s more to education than just computer training, and my eyes were opened by Kyle and Simon who I met at our first Jinja Linux User Group meeting. Kyle had his phone, and he launched his phone’s web server, and served this thing called RACHEL. I was stunned at how much content was on his phone. There was an offline copy of Wikipedia, a huge collection of books from Project Gutenberg, Medical books like “Where there is no doctor”, courses from MIT, John’s Hopkins and more. But the most amazing part of this thing was this stuff from “Khan Academy“. I had never heard of Khan or his academy, but I was most impressed with the chalkboard talks that succinctly and almost casually walked through hundreds of topics from basic addition to chemistry to calculus and physics and much more.

The seed was planted and over the next weeks I found myself thinking about RACHEL (the server, not the girl) and how easy it could be to push this out to remote villages all over the country. It would provide a relatively easy way to provide education to places where it had previously been logistically difficult.

Then I met Daniel Stern who worked with Simon and Kyle and had come up with a solution to push RACHEL to the outer reaches using an Edubuntu-based server and thin clients. He even had a cool truck that he could drive out to the villages and do classes in even the most remote areas.

It was cool, but in my mind, it was possible to do a whole lot with a minimal amount of equipment. Daniel was toying with old smartphones as wireless clients (instead of laptops) and had branded this thing called mEducation (mobile education) that in theory could put a solar-powered classroom in a suitcase. I told him about Aleutia which he hadn’t heard of, and suddenly, the vision really started coming together. I urged him to throw me needs and challenges that the community of HFC could help with.

And just like that, I felt crazy about something I hadn’t previously thought of. A solar-powered classroom with a huge virtual library that could fit in a suitcase and cost as little as possible.

I can’t articulate why I’m so crazy about the idea, but I simply am. There are challenges, like security of the devices and whether or not we can educate teachers to keep students on a learning track and how we would do maintenance, but I’m not daunted by those challenges.

If anyone is interested in batting this around, please check this forum link.

We need to throw wireless long distances. We need tiny, durable, low-cost servers. We need to drop power consumption on everything. We need old smart phones. We need more content for the server. We need a lot. Join us.

Thanks!!!

Johnny

(Comments turned off. Post to forums).

I missed DEFCON. I couldn’t afford to go. I couldn’t justify spending the money to fly from Africa. It made me feel unplugged from things… or should I say MORE unplugged. I’ve tried for years to connect the skill of the hacking community to unmet needs in the NGO / charity world. I’ve yet to figure out how to do it, and that frustrates the crap out of me.
I’ve had hundreds of people tell me that HFC is a “great idea” and that they want to help, and short of bringing them to Uganda to work with me on the ground, I have nothing to offer them. My stock answer is “send money, get on the mailing list, and spread the word”. I get asked all the time if we can use excess gear. Here in Africa, I can use it, but taxes and shipping stress our tiny budget to the limit. I’ve often said, “Yeah, hold on to that gear. I’m going to find a way to get it to local charities that need it.” Somewhere, I imagine people are hoarding equipment in the hopes that I’ll come through on that statement, but I haven’t. I don’t even remember who had what or where they were.

I tried a kind of forum (thanks for the effort, Zate) that sorted “charities” and “hackers” and that project fell over, mostly because I wasn’t available enough to help push it.

We’ve gotten a couple of shipments through (thanks Tim, Chris, Dean, Keith, Nathan) and that equipment (and HFC cash donations) culminated in a training center and two classrooms, but the training center is an abject failure, and is bleeding money because we don’t have enough customers and our prices are too low (free is a variant of low). People are learning and getting access to training that should (but won’t on our watch) cost six months wages, but we’re headed for bankruptcy as a result.
I recently learned about “Random Hacks of Kindness” (RHOK, http://www.rhok.org). An organization that uses “hackers” to “develop software solutions that respond to the challenges facing humanity today”. I read about their international “hackfests” where developers created software solutions to “save lives and alleviate suffering”.  In their short time on the scene, they’ve gone international, pulled together hundreds of coders and done something… collaboratively. They’ve garnered quotes from none other than Vint Cerf:

“Random Hacks of Kindness goes to the heart of what we believe at Google, that the creative and cooperative use of technology can help make the world a better place. Collective intelligence is strength, and if you supply free food, developers will come.”

They have none other than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, NASA and the World Bank as “founding partners” and these organizations have put their collective weight behind a “hacker” charity.

Don’t get me wrong. It seems they are doing good stuff. “Well done,” I say. But their success is somehow like sand in my underpants. Technically speaking, they’re using the word “hacker” properly. So that’s not what bugs me. It’s just that their success shines a bright light on the fact that despite our (my?) popularity in the “real” hacker community, HFC has done little relative to our collective capability.

We can throw an 802.11 signal a world-record distance of 275km using junk hardware. We can rootkit Android before it’s released, hack GSM, hijack global DNS, pick every lock on the planet, beat international news agencies to the punch, and weed our way into previously untrodden shadows of the digital world. There is amazing skill in our community. We build robots just because we can, and tweak just about every technology on the planet to unbelievable ends. We are motivated and brilliant. We are self-organizing and ultra-productive when assaulting “impossible” projects. We break, bend, and then re-create the rules. But can we really, honestly do some good in the world? My answer used to be a resounding “YES!” Now, my answer is a much-too-passive “Maybe”.

Yes, with me and my family on the ground here in Uganda, some positive things have happened (http://www.hfc-uganda.org). But is that work reflective of the power of our community? Hardly.

I accept the lion’s share of the blame for that. I’m not an organized person. I don’t have big, sweeping, clear visions of the future. I’m just a guy that went completely off the rails when I saw first-hand how valuable my skills were in a developing country. But that was then. These days, with my skills atrophying and my relevance in the community waning, I’m afraid I’ve just become another oddball character in the tome of hacker history. I wish I could have figured out the magic formula to cash in my visibility and popularity in the community for a movement that would be much bigger than the sum of it’s parts. I wish that after a year here in Uganda I could point to one project, regardless of how small, and say, “There! Look at that! See? It’s working! We’ve done it!” I wish I could point to one person and honestly say that HFC improved the quality of his or her life. But I really can’t. Success by that definition utterly eludes me.

On a personal note, our rent in Uganda just doubled. The increase will take intense financial “creativity”. I mention that only because it’s another element of why I’m scratching my head right now… wondering what, exactly we’re supposed to be doing.

So here I sit. And wait.

Psalms 62:5 all the way.

I hope I can mentally quiet down long enough to hear a thing or two.

Oh, and I launched a forum.

It was reflexive, and probably pointless.

http://www.hackersforcharity.org/forum

It took longer than it should have, but our forums are up. Check out http://www.hackersforcharity.org/forums. Spread the word, and if you know of charities in need of tech help, send them our way!