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.

I just read that the internet is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Most of us here in Africa are connecting via satellite or VSAT connections which are a fairly expensive way to transmit data (though costs are rapidly dropping). While I am finding sufficient knowledge on how to purchase VSATs, I have found very little discussion or collaboration online concerning how best to maintain VSAT internet connections.

Just yesterday I received an email from a friend here in Malawi describing the experience of another friend who “successfully” installed a VSAT connection for their NGO. The NGO found that the the installers from the company they hired to install the VSAT “haven't got a clue [how to install a VSAT]. It took them over 10 days to get it running - basically they installed it and it didn't work and they couldn't work out why.” After asking help from a local internet cafe owner the NGO found “the VSAT company had supplied the wrong kind of network cable (not a cross over one) - a fairly basic mistake and they haven't apologised or anything - so we're not really very impressed.”