Great, great day today. A lot of work got done with the computers: I now only have two more programs to setup in Ubuntu: one is the English / Nepalese flash card program which I’ll setup using words from the .PDF file Bishwa linked in the comments on another post, the other is the BASIC programming language emulator named BASIC-256. There’s an odd bug. Every function in the program works: goto, run, input, next, etc. However, once you enter the command “print“, the application crashes. If you type “P-R-I-N-T”, the T won’t even show up. It just freezes. If you type “R-I-N-T” then go back and put a “P” at the start of the word, the program freezes. It’s definitely a problem with calling the function “PRINT”, but no one else on the web has said that they have encountered the bug.
Today, a customer showed up at HTP pioneer needing help. He had a 1TB Buffalo external hard drive he bought from us, and wanted to give it nine partitions. Hard drives only supports four primary partitions. I setup the hard drive with a mixture of two primary partitions, one of which was split into eight logical partitions — supported in Windows XP, Vista and 7 — so that when he plugged it in, it would be detected as nine different partitions. I’m glad I had the opportunity to help him, as it gave me a chance to put to work all the skills I learned as unofficial HKIS tech support! It’s always satisfying to be able to completely fix someone’s problem without having to go online to get help or check a reference book.
After this, I did a bit more work on the computers, then went out with Ram and Muni to get parts from the New Street. We shopped for a while, as the weather got progressively worse. By the time we left, the rain was full-out bucketing and my clothes were soaking wet. Regardless, we managed to pick up a 20W solar panel for a reasonable price (factoring in Nepal’s VAT), a solar charge controller, and a quote on four more AC-DC switching power adapters, in case we need to run the computers off wall outlets. With this equipment, we can setup our first computer as it will be running in the field: solar power mounted on the roof, charging a 12V deep cycle car battery through a charge controller, directly powering the computers through the 12V input. Here’s hoping everything goes flawlessly: if we get this step finished, we can distribute our first computer!
Click to see the full 1500 x 1000 image.
One funny anecdote: I did my usual bargaining method at the New Street. The price was already really good, but I turned to Muni, who was outside, and said, “this is exactly the same model as the ones I have in Hong Kong, only twice as expensive [a total lie]. The most I’ll pay is 750Rs, there is no point paying any more”. Muni stepped into the store and said, “yeah, why pay more when they are available in Hong Kong for a better price”. The store person looked at Muni and immediately got into an animated conversation. I assumed it was regarding the cost and our accusations of exorbitant profits, but then I started hearing words like “kyamera“, so I realized that they must have gotten a bit off topic. Muni turned to me and said with a smile, “the storekeeper recognizes me from TV!”. Muni had been featured on TV a number of times for computer-related projects, and the storekeeper — and avid engineer and computer hobbyist himself — recognized Muni’s face. We got the 750Rs price.
As has been the case over the past few days, I made another time lapse today. Unfortunately, this one is going to need some editing to look good (for some reason, there is a lot of variation in exposure between each photo), so I’ll just post the opening shot.
That’s all for now.
Charles
I was born in London, England. At the age of ten, I moved to Hong Kong, which opened up a whole new part of the world: Asia. Since then, I have enjoyed traveling to different locales around the world. Having graduated from High School, I am taking a gap year to work on a computer project in Nepal, and later a cultural immersion trip in Ghana. This is the blog I am using to keep the world notified. 