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"the boy who harnessed the wind"

did you guys see this on the jon stewart show?
a guy built an electric wind "turbine" (out of sticks) in africa.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba

I really enjoyed that interview. Great story about discovering Google
after the fact. Although I bet it wasn't so funny at the time. Cool
guy, and his English is better than our resident edotir. :)

BTW, I saw that interview immediately after watching an episode of
Peep Show, the one with Jez's soliloquy about the motivation of HAL
the boiler. My gawd, that was so funny it bordered on painful. Season
6, episode 2 if anyone's interested.

Wayne
 
W

William Wixon

Jan 1, 1970
0
I really enjoyed that interview. Great story about discovering Google
after the fact. Although I bet it wasn't so funny at the time. Cool
guy, and his English is better than our resident edotir. :)

BTW, I saw that interview immediately after watching an episode of
Peep Show, the one with Jez's soliloquy about the motivation of HAL
the boiler. My gawd, that was so funny it bordered on painful. Season
6, episode 2 if anyone's interested.

Wayne


are you completely off grid? you power your tv with your windmill? do you
have satellite tv or cable? i'm not sure if we have "peep show" here, what
channel is it on? i've never seen a single episode. i watched the episode
you mentioned on youtube. maybe some of the guys here would like to hear
jez's poem?


that's a good one, "hi i'm jez, how's it hangling?". lol. good writing!


have you ever seen "the mighty boosh"? i only just recently found out about
"mighty boosh" the first episode i watched was this one.

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/entertainment/watch/v4095998FxwxJE6A#

it's kinda sick, and there are loose ends in the writing, but at the time i
thought it was the damn funniest thing i'd ever seen. or, at least the
brits have more advanced humor on tv than we do.

b.w.
 
are you completely off grid? you power your tv with your windmill? do you
have satellite tv or cable?

We're some 8 miles from the nearest wires. Solar and wind supply about
98% of our home energy, the rest comes from a backup generator. 6 meg
DSL via Ethernet radio (12 mile transmission), with dedicated VOIP for
primary phone, plus Skype and cell. C Band satellite and the usual
Internet sources. 5' flush-mounted RPTV fed by HTPC. Recently rebuilt
that around an MSI Diva motherboard with a built-in 5.1 amp, which
allowed scrapping the AV receiver that had been suffering from an
intermittent fault. Very slick having large passive speakers connected
directly to the PC, and more energy-thrifty than the previous setup.
i'm not sure if we have "peep show" here, what
channel is it on? i've never seen a single episode.

You can buy the older episodes on DVD, and get the recent ones via
P2P.
i watched the episode
you mentioned on youtube. maybe some of the guys here would like to hear
jez's poem?


that's a good one, "hi i'm jez, how's it hangling?". lol. good writing!


have you ever seen "the mighty boosh"? i only just recently found out about
"mighty boosh" the first episode i watched was this one.

http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/entertainment/watch/v4095998FxwxJE6A#

it's kinda sick, and there are loose ends in the writing, but at the time i
thought it was the damn funniest thing i'd ever seen. or, at least the
brits have more advanced humor on tv than we do.

Big Boosh fans here. Agree that the Brits tend to be more creative
with humor in general, although we do have Curb Your Enthusiasm and
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Since you like Boosh, you owe it to
yourself to check out Monkey Dust. And if you enjoy that Brit humor
applied to political satire, you'd probably like In the Thick of It
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0459159/, or something similar from Oz,
The Hollowmen http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1242819/. Most of that stuff
is older, but easy enough to get one way or another.

Wayne
 
V

vaughn

Jan 1, 1970
0
DSL via Ethernet radio (12 mile transmission),

Wow! Whose radio did you use? What freq band? How did you get the height?
(convenient mountain?)

Vaughn
 
Wow! Whose radio did you use? What freq band? How did you get the height?
(convenient mountain?)

Vaughn

Our DSL costs something like $50 per month. We were pretty fortunate
to become our local Telco's experimental location for this unit. They
have a bunch of customers on an old BETRS system, plus some other
various scattered radio customers like us. A couple of times over the
years they needed somebody to test out hardware they were considering
purchasing in bulk. The setup we have now came from these guys
http://www.thinroute.com/products.html#anchor2.

It can do 10 meg and accommodates 4 POTS lines. But the far end, which
is in a rural subdivision, only has 6 meg available at residential
rates. The antenna there is mounted at about 12' on the roof of the
CO. Radio and VOIP powered from the Telco's batteries, and the DSL
"modem" powered from a standard UPS. Zero copper on our installation
compared to people who live in the subdivision, some of whom are miles
from the CO.

The antenna at our end is mounted on our garage roof, which is
something like 1000' higher. Ideal location. Our end is mounted in
outdoor pole box, and designed to be powered entirely by AC. It has a
couple of batteries, charger, and an inverter to power the VOIP and
the router. I mounted it indoors, and bypassed the inverter. It uses
about 20W now.

If you have line of sight to somewhere with good broadband, and were
willing to shop around, you could probably do one of these setups for
about $2k complete, but it would have to be different hardware than
ours. Here's our radio
http://www.eionwireless.com/products/vip11024.html, and this is the
VOIP unit
http://www.voiplink.com/MP_104_FXO_p/audiocodes-mp-104-fxs.htm. That
stuff would be pricey, but I think that there are newer VOIP units
that are only about $50 each, and Ethernet radios that are about $500
each.

Wayne
 
[email protected] wrote in



Thats pretty cool man. You are lucky to have such a flexible telecom.
Fecking arsed Versizon has had DSL available in my nearest town for like
5 years. Too few customers they say to bother offering the service. A
couple years ago they ran a fat fibre optic line down 101 and people in
other towns can get direct access to very reliable high speed. NOt us ..

But the rumour is that Verizon is selling off this unit to some other
outfit that got a bunch of Govt stimulus money -- part of the rural high
speed internet cash, so in theory we'll have some high speed within 10
miles of me soon.

If it helps, some of these Ethernet radios can do 40 miles with the
right antenna.
Maybe I'll bug those guys for some radio ethernet .. your setup would be
perfect for me. My problem is even if I hit the local town with the
wireless none of those poor bastards get high speed either.

That's how it is in some places near me as well. In one 12 miles away
by road, folks have power lines and phone service, but are too far out
to get DSL or cable. Plus they don't have line of sight to anywhere
with broadband. One of them wanted to set up wireless Ethernet to my
place, but it was a non-starter for a bunch of reasons. He had to
settle for satellite Internet, which is affordable if you can live
with the limitations. http://www.copperhead.cc/myrant.htm
There is
another option the other way inland but it'd require at least 2 repeaters
with solar or whatnot to power them .. in serious wilderness. Too much
trouble probably

Now if only they'd get electricty out here too that'd be a bonus. Its
amazing that there are areas in the USA that still aren't on the grid.

Not so amazing when you think about it. There are subdivisions in my
neck of the woods with thousands of vacant 40 acre parcels, and a
gazillion more 2.5 acre parcels that will probably never get the grid.
Most such areas fill in slowly, so there's never enough demand or
money to run many miles of wire to serve just a few. I predict that by
the time sufficient density is there in say, 30 years, independent
power and wireless broadband will be so commonplace that few will want
the mess of overhead wires.
But it does keep the riff raff out :)

Here's how it is near me: thousands of off-gridders of every
description. All the way from folks living off their vehicle
alternators, to million-dollar homes. *Lots* of riff-raff, believe me.
:) Every gunnut "survivalist" thinks he can live off-grid so long as
he owns a pickup truck and a camo ball cap. :) Down in the valley
below us where the power lines end, there's a minor threat of the grid
leapfrogging up the main county road and bringing more development
with it. The main holdup is the real estate slump.
cheers

-Zachary in Oregon

Hah .. the other thought I had at one point was a wireless receiver on a
helium baloon I could send up several thousand feet. But its highly
impractical + the whole air plane issue .. and useless for most of the
winter with the storms and all:)

Which reminds me - these days one can often do home power more easily
than good broadband. When we chose our parcel, one of our main
concerns was to verify LOS to the then current BETRS phone transmitter
30 miles away, which was supposedly capable of 9.6k. How times have
changed in less than 20 years.

Wayne
 
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