A small windup radio, tuned to the BBC Africa, on most Malawi evenings, brings Marissa and I the days news from around the world. Before moving to Africa I worried about loosing touch with Latin America and my travels there. Little did I know that the BBC Africa would provide us better coverage of Latin American news and events that I could have ever hoped for. (Yes, BBC Africa has far better coverage of Latin American news than any of the mainstream English news outlets in America – I regularly receive updates on all of Latin America... more than just the border crazies).

Last week the BBC Africa discussed Hugo Chavez, the current President of Venezuela, and his recent visit to Africa.

Just wanted to let my other Linux loving friends in Malawi know that we have successfully downloaded a copy of the newest version of Ubuntu Linux here at the University. We are installing it in a few of the computer labs.

We are happy to make copies of the disk for anyone in Northern Malawi who, for bandwidth reasons, might not be able to download this new version (700MB). Please bring (or send) us a blank CDR to Mzuzu University. If you want to send 150MK and have me buy a blank CDR that is ok too (arrange by email first).

Use the

Here is a new version of a simple script I have written to create local copies of websites suitable for browsing offline. We have been using the program successfully at the university to schedule downloads of websites during off peak hours of internet usage for reading the following day.

The program uses the *nix wget utility to do its magic. My code is simply a wrapper around wget which sets the proper command line arguments for wget to create a mirror website. The script uses conservative settings by default for fetching sites in order to be respectful to website owners and other users of the network. Once a site is downloaded the program automatically zips the file in a tar gz for you. You will need python and wget installed in order to run.

Last weekend, I turned our kitchen into a chemistry lab. The Quest...to successfully make long lasting paint using only my hands and natural resources. The Result…fabulous egg tempera paint!

Egg Tempera ExperimentI was inspired by a number of factors including Victoria Finlay’s book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Malawian artists’ need of access to affordable paint, and personal curiosity. Over the past few months I have been researching pigments and paint making techniques. Egg tempera paint is one of the oldest paints known to man, even older than oil painting. Some date egg tempera paint back to the first centuries AD, but it was most widely used in the Middle Ages with the Byzantine painters. The Greek Orthodox Church has maintained the tradition, and up to the present still uses egg tempera for icon paintings. In the secular world of art this tradition has seen a revival over the past 10 years. So much so, that there is a great online forum where you can read and participate in discussions about issues relating to egg tempera paint and painting

Today a friend at the university showed me Loband, a service that simplifies web pages, in order to make them download faster over slow internet connections. Loband strips out colors and images, leaving only the text and links of the original web page. Images are replaced with an “i” logo, and by clicking, you are able to load images on-demand.

Loband doesn't work well with most webmail applications, but has been working great for me for reading news websites. It filters out many of the image heavy advertisements.

To use Loband: just go to http://www.loband.org and type in the URL of the website you would like to simply in the gray bar at the top of the web page.

Its amazing but two of our best friends here in Malawi are graduates of the University of Arizona also!! As if Cheri Blauwet were not proof enough that Arizona Wildcats are taking over the world... :)

Our good friends have been living in Malawi for about 20 years now working in health and water/sanitation issues. We were over at their house the other night for dinner and had a fascinating conversation about toilets that I wanted to share with everyone. Yes I said toilets... enough talk about computers and the internet for the moment... lets get serious for a moment folks and talk about toilets.

Ever accidentally delete a file you really needed from the recycle bin? Ever format a disk and install a new operating system only to find later that you forgot to save off some really important files first? The former recently happened to us here at the Univeristy in Mzuzu... we thought doom was upon us until we stumbled upon a open (free to change, use, and distribute) software utility called Sleuthkit (http://www.sleuthkit.org).

When we realized our disaster, we started searching Google for "data recovery", "recover my files", etc. Listings appeared for companies charging hundreds of dollars for data recovery services and software. We tried some of the trial versions of the commercial software, but nothing was able to detect our files. Finally one of us here in the office in Mzuzu stumbled upon Sleuthkit, an amazing utility that was able to recover out deleted files from a formatted disk and didn't cost us a penny!

Just before moving to Malawi Marissa and I changed our email adresses from YahooMail to Google's Gmail accounts. I was pulled away from yahoo buy some great new features that Gmail offered and I was worried that Yahoo's beta interface for webmail would not work well on older computers in Malawi.

Since arriving in Malawi however, I have found that my Gmail account is not suited for connecting over the overworked internet connections currently in place here in Malawi. In fact I am almost never able to access my email via Gmail's web interface (so we use POP access instead) during the daytime peak hours for internet usage. At night, when few other users are online, Gmail works fine.

This week I'm feeling more and more convinced that money can't solve anything around here. That may be obvious, but it's a daily frustration as everyone from personal friends, to the staff that works at the house, and the random person on the street asks us for loans, money for their cousin in the hospital, school fees, food, anything and everything! The challenge is...if you say yes once, the expectation is that you can help the next time, and the next person/people as well.

After developing a friendship, we decided to give a Malawian friend a six month loan of $100 to start a rice business. We saw this as a personal investment and an opportunity to learn how business works in Malawi. Our friend has great people skills, a lot of enthusiasm, some experience trading maize, and a large local network of friends who could be suppliers and potential clients. We challenged him to do simple market research ahead of time and when through cost analysis and cash flow budget scenarios with him ahead of time.

Further evidence of a dotcom boom in Malawi... Last week the students of Mzuzu University went on strike because they felt that they had not been provided enough access to computers by campus administration. Unfortunately, (or fortunately depending upon how you look at it), Marissa and I were out of town at the time, in Tanzania. We have heard that the student strike was mostly peaceful. Students organized a sit-in and skipped classes. One of the days of the strike, however, things seem to have gotten a little out of hand. Students decided to burn old tires near the campus gate, so the police and some sort of weak tear gas became involved.