These are handmade iPad/iPad 2 cases and laptop cases. The cases are hand stitched and quilted and are lined with fabric to keep your electronics safe and sound. Each case is different and all are made from African fabrics. Some are made with a water resistant core that’s also pretty unique: A Jinja Pure Cane Sugar bag! The cases close with either a button and hoop or with Velcro strips.

Quantities are rather limited so come by the booth early if you want to grab one of these cool cases!

Motorcycle gear: We’re traveling a lot more by motorcycle because of the ridiculous fuel costs. However, Uganda isn’t the safest place for bikes, so we’re trying to do our best to stay safe. Motorcycle protective wear is very expensive, so we’re looking for some donated gear. We’re looking for: lightweight reinforced bike jacket (M/L), helmets (of all sizes for men, women or teens), gloves, trousers and boots. If you have anything bring it along. If it doesn’t fit, we can exchange it for gear that fits.

Oddball cables and connectors: We’re looking for oddball stuff (some from Radio Shack) including 3.5mm mini-stereo-to-RCA cables, mono or stereo 1/4″ female to 1/4″ female adapters, decent RCA cables, iPhone/iPod/iPad data cables, Mac power supplies and cords, iPhone chargers (the little white bricks).

Tools: Decent RJ45 crimpers, micro tool kits (all those oddball teeny drivers).

Thanks for anything you guys can offer. I really appreciate it.

But the tale involves a pirate in the Caribbean, my friends at Offensive Security and an interesting new career twist for me.

Muts has posted part one of my blog here: http://www.offensive-security.com/blog. The first part of the blog talks about the course and the second part (soon to be published) talks about the rest of the course and the bit about the career twist. Stay posted.

• Blackberry Unlock for Arise Africa (http://www.ariseafrica.org/index.html)
• Hard drive recovery for Nile River Explorers (http://raftafrica.com)
• iPhone 4 unlock for Nile River Explorers (http://raftafrica.com)
• System backup for Global Outreach International (http://www.globaloutreach.org)
• Software download and installation for Nile River Explorers (http://raftafrica.com)
• Software download and installation for Amani Baby Cottage (http://amanibabycottage.org)
• OS Security Update for Water Missions Uganda (http://www.watermissions.org)
• OS Security Update for The Boones In Africa (www.boonesinafrica.com)
• Email Migration for Global Outreach International (http://www.globaloutreach.org)

The power situation is worse than I’ve ever seen it. The local (only) power company, UMEME is doing what’s called “Load Shedding” which some places call “Rolling Brownouts”. Whatever you call it, it’s really annoying. There’s barely enough time to charge a laptop or a cell phone, then the power’s back off.

I was sitting in the UMEME office, complaining and the attendant walked away to talk to a supervisor. I couldn’t help but take a phew (sic) photos. This was one of my favorites:

It shows a CISCO IP phone and the new Dell PC used by the agent. Nice gear. Someone’s got money. Ironically, though that doesn’t trickle down to the customer. Some paying customers go three weeks without power. Some like us get it in 8-hour bursts every other day. We have enough hydroelectric power in Uganda thanks to the Nile dam(n)s to supply three East African countries, but we sell it to Kenya. So Kenya has great power and we get the dregs. But I’ve gotten into a rant. The point of the picture, and the thing that grabbed me was the UMEME desk calendar. It show a closeup of a technician’s belt with loads of brand-new, unused tools, and a torso shot of (I guess) a technician. The technician is tangled up in the cable and he looks concerned.. worried.. clueless. Either that or he looks like he’s about to get bitten by the cable. Either way it’s funny, to me anyhow. UMEME. It is supposedly the local word for “Power”. We, however, think it’s an acronym. Ugandans Mostly Expect Missing Power.

The power has been out for way too long. I haven’t had a good stretch of power for a week, so I’m getting nothing done. The email is piling up, projects are slipping. I spent some time reading a few books and taking care of some odds and ends. I finished the Jobs biography, and found it to be a great read. I see a lot of Steve Jobs in me. I don’t mean that egotistically .. I’m not a genius or anything. I just mean that between his emotional extremes, laser focus and my too-often problem of not being able to put myself in other people’s shoes. Overall, I have a lot of respect for Steve, but moreso for the other players in the story, specifically Bill Gates for his philanthropic insistances and Woz for his heart, passion and principles. I found Woz’s story to be particularly fascinating and through the brief glimpses I had of him, I find that I relate to his philosophies in a lot of ways.

I’m engergized to DO SOMETHING with my life, make a difference, leave a legacy but I keep getting mired down by so many things. It’s a strange time. In a way, I’m almost happy we’re without power. It’s giving me time to think about what my life’s priorities are ..

When I moved to Uganda and rolled johnny.ihackstuff.com to point to hackersforcharity.org I lost my personal blog. I tried posting personal stuff on here, but after the first year, it didn’t feel right. I felt like I should be posting more business-related stuff, especially since I was funded by donors.

I thought of using my Facebook or Twitter accounts for their intended purposes (personal minutia) but too many people were following them to get HFC updates, since I cross-posted there.

I thought about the idea of using another blog, but then I couldn’t figure out who would care, or where it should go, or what it would really be about and then it struck me that at least right now my life is inexplicably intertwined with HFC, so I might as well just post personal stuff here inline with work stuff. So, until I figure out how to separate my “existances” I guees I’ll just use a disclaimer when I post so people who don’t care can just skip my junk. Something like…

(On a personal note):

A few days off (thanks to no power) and I woke up prepared to get back to work. I should have known better when the power started flickering.

But that wasn’t the real sideliner: turns out one of our new German Shepherd puppies died in the night. This turned into a bunch of frantic calls to the vet, and several back-and-forth runs to the pharmacy for the other puppies who are anemic and losing weight because the mother isn’t producing milk for some reason. It’s been a long morning and now it’s already lunchtime and it appears the Internet won’t be cooperating, so I thought of just eating lunch and calling it a morning.

Then a second puppy went lethargic and a few hours later was forcing his last breaths. It was the saddest thing I’ve seen in a long time. There was nothing we could do. No, it’s 4:30 and I’m just too exhausted to do anything else but eat and chill for a bit. More later.

Brad is an amazing guy. No matter what I was dealing with, he always has a way of lifting me up. His smile is permanent. His laugh is contagious.

Despite his very serious situation, I refuse to write about him in the past tense because my earnest prayer is that he will pull through. I am praying that all his well-wishers will get many more opportunities to tell him in person that he is a light in the darkness and that his smile is appreciated. He is one in a million.

We’re working on a fundraiser to help with his family’s expenses but more than anything, please pray for Brad and his family.

http://www.social-engineer.org/brad-smith-updates

I began to pay the rent for the next six months at the Training Center, and I started going through the end-of-month students report. I’ll post the details here soon.

The storm did drop the temperature nicely for a few hours, so that was nice.

Anyhow, today I worked on two hard drive recoveries, one for  LightGivesHeat (which failed because of the click of death) and one for Busoga Trust Bank (which succeeded despite the rampant viruses). I also did some software installs for Ekisa. I worked with Emma (our HFC Uganda web-guy-in-training) to get him rolling with XAMPP and Joomla on his laptop as he prepares to put together a social networking / CMS site together for a local paper-based teen magazine.

I also cleaned my desk, a task that takes an hour every couple of days because I just don’t clean up after each job.

On a personal note, I started two new books, which is just suicidal because I read at the speed of a salted slug.

I worked with the electrician a bit on the inverter at the Keep that I didn’t have the money for, but miraculously someone repaid a loan in the exact amount I needed.

I finally finished burning all the operating system update DVDs for the community, but few people seem to be coming in for them. That’s a bit of a downer considering the pitiful bandwidth available and hearing from so many people that it would be “wonderful” to have updates on DVD.

Slogged through about 100 pending comments that were queued up on the website. I didn’t know they were there. I found about two dozen volunteer offers that didn’t make it to the volunteer form (emailed them), discovered more than one extremely generous offers of assistance (emailed them) and discover three irate donors whose comments had been queued no less than six months (still working on how to best make amends there).

I also sent a long email to the designer thats working on our new volunteer engagement and mapping system that we are hoping to launch at Shmoocon.

We had a few visitors from all over (northern Uganda, Kampala, etc) and we watched a bit of Monday night football which we get a day late on ESPN/DStv.

All in all it was a really long day.

http://www.newvision.co.ug/news/18725-two-american-evangelists-perish-in-jinja-accident.html

“We need a computerized way to handle:

* student registration
* student grades (recording, posting, etc)
* student emails

It would be great if all that were web-based, and it would be even better if it could integrate with Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions software we use for accounting so that we could allow students to see their financial status.”

I’m looking for suggestions about (open source?) approaches, and also looking for someone to be the point person to interact with the school contact.

Thanks, everyone!

Also, I have a local charity that has web host problems and I need a web-saavy volunteer to help them get their site back online. Thanks!

When I first started working in Uganda, I was stunned at how viruses snuck into every corner of the IT landscape and even more surprised at the devastation they caused. As an organization, we’ve done our best to keep treat the symptoms. We did A/V scans, quarantines, data recoveries, system updates and A/V updates but really we weren’t making a dent in the problem. I began to realize that most of the systems we were working on were hideously outdated and the primary reason for this was that there  wasn’t enough bandwidth to download all the service packs, security patches, application updates and A/V updates required to keep the systems safe.

Today, after several days of pulling all the packages together, we’ve released our first set of DVDs that will update Mac and Windows machines with all the latest updates. The Windows version is nicely automated, but the Mac updates are a pile of DMGs for now. (Anyone know a better way to update Macs other than chucking a pile of DMGs at our clients? Let me know.)

Next, we’ll work on A/V updates, and I’m looking for something that will automate that process as well so we can automate the download and installation of updates. Again, let me know.

My only fear with this little project is the inevitable: I just know that some unscrupulous people will get a hold of these disks, duplicate them from their virus-infected machines and try to sell these freely-offered updates for profit. My hope is that we’ll remain a trusted source for these packages and that we can make some dent in this problem.

Here’s the email that I sent out to the community.

————-

Hey everyone! Hackers For Charity is offering free operating system
update disks to anyone that needs them. The disks are free for the
asking, but we are requesting a donation of 20,000/= (if you are able)
to help us offset the (rather significant) costs we incur in
downloading the updates and creating the disks.

There are two sets of disks right now: one for Windows and one for Mac.

The Windows disk includes an installer which will automatically assess
your system, determine the updates that need to be applied and
incrementally upgrade your system to the latest version, after several
reboots and restarts of the program. The Windows disk will currently
update Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2003, Windows 7 and Office
2003-2010.

The Mac disk does not contain an auto-installer, so updates must be
applied manually. We are looking for a solution to this, but for now
updates are listed in categories by OS X version and application.
Novice users can simply install the latest operating system update,
while more advanced users can delve into the various application
directories. The disk will currently update OS X 10.5 (Leopard), OS X
10.6 (Snow Leopard), OS X 10.7 (Lion), iLife, iWork and all auxiliary
Apple applications. In addition, this disk contains the latest version
of iTunes for Windows and Mac as well as the latest updates for the
iPad 2 Wi-Fi and the iPhone 4 (GSM versions only). Note that if your
iPhone has been unlocked and/or jailbroken, you should not apply these
updates as you will lose your unlock, perhaps permanently. Older
versions of OS X, to include OS X 10.4 (Tiger) as well as Power PC
versions are included on a second supplemental Mac DVD, provided on
request.

Each disk can be re-used by multiple computers legally, as there are
no licensing issues since the updates are provided free from the
respective web sites.

Our plan is to update this disk every month and provide the updates as
a service to the community. We also are working on an anti-Virus
update disk to provide updates to the various A/V products.

If you’re interested in any of the DVD’s, stop by The Keep any time.
We’ll ask you to fill in a form with your name, phone number, email
address, organization name/web site and email address.

Thanks everyone.

Have a good day!