Pwnie Express (www.pwnieexpress.com) has offered to donate one of their PwnPlug Wireless units to our DEFCON auction! Thanks guys! These things are really amazing. I plan to play with it all weekend before letting it go from my cold dead hands. =)
I’ve really gone back and forth about my trip to DEFCON this year.
When I sit down and look at things financially and logically, it makes no sense to pay around $3500 to go to a conference, even if that conference consistently generates over half of our annual operating expenses. If we’re that tight financially, wouldn’t the $3500 be better served staying in the HFC account?
However, when I take logic and finance out of the picture, as Rob Dixon says, “it’s better all-around for HFC when you’re there in person.” (or something like that).. Because, I suppose, as the founder and spokesperson and official talking head for an organization built around a community, there’s just no replacement for being there In Real Life.
So I’m going to try everything to make it to DEFCON to be with the folks that make all our work possible. But we just don’t have the funds. So since Kickstarter refuses to even allow our shirt sales (contrary to the fact that other shirt sales are running just fine), We’ll just do it this way.
We’ll be selling a limited number of the DEFCON shirts for $20 at the show, but the white shirts will not be sold anywhere except through this fundraiser. They are a very limited printing (100 shirts) only for our volunteers, staff and supporters of the “Get Johnny to DEFCON fundraiser”. The white ringers can, of course, be signed.
Note that right now, these are for pickup only at DEFCON. We will hold your shirt through the conference, and if you don’t pick it up, we’ll try to ship it out to you.
Click on the shirts below to get to the store, and thanks for your support!
Click the shirt to buy now!
Click the shirt to buy now!
I wanted to use Kickstarter to raise some money to fly to DEFCON., but that failed. I still don’t understand their response. The winning line was, “Ideally, our platform is a tool to fund creative output from an experience — not the experience itself.” I guess I’m missing the point of kickstarter.
And I’m admittedly bitter when I see approved kickstarters for $5,000 parties to watch the movie Hackers, (regardless of the add-on EFF fundraiser) poor student Thesis films, buying some random guy a camera, and albums from groups whose acronym will even make your granny blush (FYKMA).
I mean I just wanted to sell some T-Shirts, which seems reasonable considering the Grace Jones doesn’t Give a F$% shirt, the “I’m with Genius” shirt and the “This is not a kickstarter” shirt, all approved by Kickstarter, but no dice. They rejected the idea. I mean, ‘cmon. This kickstarter is just a T-Shirt sale, so what the heck?
Whatever. I’ll submit again, just to advertise T-shirts, and see what happens.
In the meantime, look to a future post for my own ghetto attempt to do the same thing.
What really happened with AOET?
I will stick to the facts in this post. Despite the fact that I, my family and HFC have five years invested in AOET Uganda, I will try to leave emotion out of this post.
Also, we are in the process of cleaning the equipment, servicing it and re-donating it to other more worthy (and hopefully more honest) organizations.
March 2008
I went to Uganda with my family for a three-week trip. We brought ten donated Pentium 3 laptops donated by a Canadian donor to install at Rehaboth Primary School in Bugembe. We paid shipping on the laptops (hand luggage), purchased keyboards, mice, power strips and power regulators using our personal funds. We also paid to have the windows in the room finished and paid for the glass in the windows. We trained the local staff on the use of the machines and turned the lab over to the Headmaster, Ernest.
June 2009
When we relocated to Uganda as a family in June 2009, we found the lab completely disassembled. More than half of the machines were missing. The headmaster had one in his office, and he told us that some of the teachers had some. The others were “missing”.
The room had been re-purposed into a storage room.
On this trip, we brought forty (40) Acer Aspire One notebooks for AOET Primary School. These were purchased at an approximate price of $200 per unit (HFC donor funds). A donor purchased keyboards, mice, power strips, regulators and power wire for the classroom. HFC donor funds were used to pay for excess baggage and shipping in the US to move the laptop batteries from Maryland to North Carolina where the batteries were shipped to Uganda (again using donor funds) because the laptop batteries could not be checked on the flight.
August 2009
Tim and Dwight flew in from the US to install the classroom. The spent ten days ghosting the laptops, configuring them and installing the custom software to keep the machines locked and virus free. They also supplied classroom (Read More…)
We just installed one of our first micro-centers. This is a small training cluster and it’s a departure from our large school installations.
These four stations are driven by a single PC, which is loaded with RACHEL content.
Gerald and Sparks were on hand to assist with the installation, and I think the final product looks great. As always, I fussed over the cables and tried to keep the installation super tight. (More photos after the break .. ) (Read More…)
