Today Nani and I made one last stop at the bank to send out a telegraphic transfer. Finished! Done! No more! As a way of saying thanks, I asked Nani if she wanted to get ice cream at the local Angan store, a high-quality Indian sweets store. She declined, but I asked “are you sure? I’ll get you one. What flavor?” Her response? “Butterscotch”. Yes!
I guess this is just a little mini-update, because that is the only real news from today. I will talk about what we ordered this week, however, as I think it is important. I ordered the components for thirty more computers on this low-cost low-power computer project. The final setup that will be given to schools is a 945GSEJT motherboard, 2GB RAM, 250GB 2.5″ SATA HDD, WiFi, custom-built cases and custom-built monitors. The cases are larger than the other computers I’ve used, but they are a quarter of the price. They can also support 3.5″ HDDs (which are cheaper but require more power) and DVD burners, if the schools require them. The monitors were designed to my specifications by a Chinese company: they feature 12V DC input, VGA input and a 3.5mm speaker jack for the integrated speakers. They also have a headphone jack which will mute the speakers when a student uses headphones. I’m not sure if I will use this feature, but it is handy to have it.
Rather than distributing all 35 computers to one school, we are going to have a number of pilot programs in different schools, so that we can get feedback based on how these computers perform in different areas of Nepal: how do they perform off-grid? How do they perform inside of Kathmandu? How can the software or operating system be changed and improved? Did any of the schools prefer to use Ubuntu, or should we use Windows? Distributing five or six computers to six or seven schools is far better than distributing all of them to just one.
Shyami is turning into quite the model. He is always asking me "kyamera?" "picture?"
Over the next few days, I will be finishing up the work done on the software side of things in anticipation of the arrival of the hardware. Keeping busy!
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. 