Muni inspects the alternator

While 1000RPM is far from ideal for our work (hence the usage of the 10:1 gear system), there are no stores in Nepal which are selling low-RPM high-output generators. We plan on mounting the wind turbine at the top of the antenna that is currently hosting the WiFi setup I talked about in the post “A Mile Of WiFi“, or attaching it to a bicycle with the wheels removed. Either way, 12V @ 40amps is 480W, and for $50 less than the solar panel and charge controller setup, it would be a much more cost effective method of generating electricity, if we can get it to work.

After Muni and I got home, Bishwa and I rode his motorcycle to a local bank to fix a Buffalo TeraStation Pro we had sold them. The TeraStation is a device with four 1TB hard drives and a RAID controller. The TeraStation Pro makes these four drives (since it is RAID 5, it is effectively 3TB) available to anyone on the local intranet (this is called a NAS — Network Attached Storage). Unfortunately, a combination of both hardware errors and user errors makes it seem like we will only be able to recover the data by removing all four drives from the TeraStation and putting them into a computer with four SATA ports and RAID 5 support. That’ll have to wait for another day, we’ll see how things turn out.

After this, Bishwa took me to lunch at a place I haven’t been to before. It was a hole-in-the-wall kind of restaurant with all different varieties of food, rather than the usual “fast food” offerings of buffalo Momos. I had a variety of different foods which Bishwa recommended. After I told him that the spicy meat he recommended “just wasn’t that spicy”, he asked the chef to bring me some buffalo with extra hot sauce on them: the kind of hot sauce which requires a pair of launch codes to serve to customers. They arrived and I ate them. Nothing! I told Bishwa the story behind my tolerance towards spicy foods: on a plane ride to India once upon a time, I noticed that the people around me weren’t eating their chillis. Considering the surprisingly small size, I foolishly assumed that they would be mild. I was very, very wrong. Shunning the now-evident wisdom of the locals, I popped the whole thing in my mouth, and it was by far the hottest pepper I’ve ever eaten. Considering this flight was aboard a low-cost flight on a small airplane en-route to India, they had no complementary beverage service to satiate my burning taste buds. In fact, the chilli was so hot that my ears were sweating, which I believe to be a world wide culinary first. It was actually making me radiate heat, and I don’t doubt that it raised my core body temperature a few degrees. I sat there for what felt like a transatlantic plane ride’s worth of singed tongue tissue before we landed and I ran to the airport bathroom for a drink of water. Since then, I haven’t had the same reaction to spicy foods — so I hope the restaurant owner didn’t feel too bad that his prize-winning blend of spices didn’t reduce me to a shivering wreck.

I feel like Anthony Bourdain!

On the way home, Bishwa wanted to take me to a place “that my blog readers would love to read about”. With an invitation like that, I just couldn’t turn him down. My mind was racing among all the things it could have been: a skate park for rhesus monkeys wearing inline skates? A 20′ tall fondue fountain?  The largest ball of yarn in the world? I was glad that the destination exceeded my wildest (and most preposterous) dreams. He was instead going to be showing me an interesting part of Nepalese culture. The store he took me to was a clothing store for children under one year old, selling traditional outfits and clothes, including the elaborate gowns worn by boys when they turn six months old. The shop keeper was a fascinating 70 year old who had worked at the store for years and years.

It did make me a little nervous that they sold honey at a store for kids less than a year old. Botulism?

Bishwa also took me upstairs, where almost all the merchandise sold in the store is manufactured with traditional materials homespun on metal looms — I was glad to see that the store was using cotton rather than some cheap blend of synthetic materials. This store also houses a social welfare aspect, funded in part by the merchandise sold on the floor below. Let me know if someone you know needs an awesome baby present: these clothes are fairly priced, incredibly high quality, locally made, and support a growing social welfare network. Bishwa was right, this is certainly a lot more interesting than the stuff I was thinking of: I’m glad I had the chance to visit a store as successful and well-meaning as Nepal Grihini Udyog.

Once we got home, Muni asked me if I was ready for the visit from the Minister Of Education. I had completely forgotten! I was working at light speed with a knot in my stomach, making sure I knew the computers inside and out before he arrived. With Ram’s help, we setup the solar panel on the roof with enough high gauge wire to have the solar charge controller inside my room. The solar charge controller had one output going into the 12V deep cycle 40amp-hour battery, and another output going directly into the computer. With the solar panel producing 23W, the controller was able to both fully power the computer and supply around a third of an amp to the battery: even while using the computer, the battery would be charging.

Around half an hour passed and I hear the gates open, and I see a blue SUV pull inside. They first stopped and talked with Muni a while, but then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs: this was it. Doomsday. Armageddon. Zero-hour. Four people enter: the Minister of Education, followed by his wife, a friend of his (who is a doctor by profession), and a political adviser. Muni brought up the rear, entering fifth. I greet them the best I can (by saying swagaat and offering a handshake), and ask them if they would rather see the computer first, or how it was powered. The Minister asked to be given a tour of the computer, so I gave them the complete rundown, starting with technical specifications. At 13.8V, it was drawing 0.9amps. It is a 1.6GHz Intel Atom powered computer running Intel’s 945GSE chipset. 2GB of RAM, 160GB hard drive dual booting Ubuntu and, for now, a beta version of Windows 7.

First, I show the Nepali script integration I have been working on: programs which have been translated to Nepalese, input of Devanagari script, the hotkey “CTRL + Space” to switch between English and Nepalese character input, how to switch between phonetic (Romanized) and traditional Nepali keyboard input, etc. I then showed them the capabilities of the machine, opening a 185 page dictionary in .PDF format with different languages, some 3D accelerated programs (such as the amazing desktop planetarium software Stellarium), the CPU usage monitor to show that these activities weren’t fully maxing out the computers, etc.

After that, I demoed some of the excellent free and open software that is provided as an optional download on Ubuntu. I demonstrated some basic learning tools like touch typing software and a geography program with a test of the states / regions of any country in the world, plus things like the continents, the oceans, world capitals — you could learn a lot of geography from this program. I also showed other interactive learning software from kindergarten up to college-level material: they were especially interested in the chemistry program which had a built-in periodic table of elements, a chemical equation solver and a whole host of other chemistry-related functionality. I also demonstrated some math software, especially the software KMPlot. I entered two basic functions and found the intersect, then I entered two functions and found the derivative and integral for each: it could make learning everything from basic algebra up to calculus more interactive, interesting, and easy to understand.

After I had exhausted the walk through of the computers, I thanked the Minister of Education for taking time to look at our prototype, and they left to go discuss other things with Muni for a while. I heard from Muni over dinner that they were very impressed about the project. The previous Education Minister had tried a similar project of distributing computers to schools a few years ago. Two things got in the way, he told Muni: first off, the blackouts were too prohibitive, especially during the winter months where there is only eight hours of electricity a day. Secondly, the computers fell out of use around six months into the project because nobody had bothered to update or maintain the computers: the Minister was sure that these computers would prevent the first problem from becoming a nuisance, and that HTP could provide a reliable support network to maintain the computers, even if they were distributed to the 12,000 public high schools across Nepal. This project took a huge step forward today, and I’m really excited about what the future brings.

After they left, I wanted to try my hand at some astrophotography. I haven’t tried this before, so I took some photographs of the sun [disclaimer: don't try this. Even at f/72 and 1/8000 at ISO100, it was blindingly bright. Don't ruin your retinas!] and some of Jupiter. The sun photographs were over exposed, and there is too much atmospheric lensing (whats gives starts the ‘twinkle’) to get any sharp photos of Jupiter, but it was interesting and I thought I’d share them with you here.

Surprising how bright the sun is, even at 1/8000, ISO100 and f/72.

I overexposed this photo to better show all four of Jupiter's 'Gallilean' moons.

Note: two lines running from the upper left to the lower right, plus the barely visible Great Red Spot

As I was taking these photos, a large firework exploded off in the distance: every day closer to Divali / Deepawali, the celebrations intensify. Two days ago there were sporadic cracks and bangs from fireworks, but these days they are going off every few minutes from sundown until around 10:00PM. I didn’t manage to get any good photos, although I did get to take this video. Unfortunately, even with the camera running at 24p, the shutter speed must be 1/25 or faster. At night time, it is just too dark to get any reasonable low-light performance out of the camera. From now on, I’ll stick to still images once the sun goes down.

That’s all for now.
Charles

We did manage to get an accurate (and safe) reading with the multimeter. I asked Shyami to hold the terminals one time so that he won’t have an irrational fear of batteries for the rest of his life. I held the other one just so that he’d feel safe, and Ram helped set everything up so that we wouldn’t have the same problem we had yesterday. The reading came through as 13.8V at 1amp when the computer was first turned on (a power spike, as high as it will ever be when the computers are running) and then dropped to 13.8V at 0.91amp while the computer was booting up with the hard drives spinning at full speed (5400RPM). This translates to ~12.6W under full load, which is great. There is always a margin of error when measuring electrical devices, though, so the real power draw could be anywhere from 11.3W to 13.9W, assuming a +/- 10% accuracy. Considering the previous rating taken in America using a P3 Kill-A-Watt was 14W (when using a AC-DC converter with 95% efficiency), I am guessing that the real power consumption is around 13W under full load, which is excellent.

Later in the day, a Panasonic Toughbook came in for repairs. I thought this would be a good time to disassemble the DVD drive in my M1530, as it has not been working for over a year. The Toughbook had a faulty DVD drive too, and needed a reformat and re-installation of Windows. By fixing my DVD drive, we could put the hard drive in my computer, use my DVD drive to install Windows on the Toughbook’s hard drive, and then switch the drives. The Toughbook wouldn’t have a working DVD drive still, but at least it would have a working copy of Windows. Upon completely taking apart my computer (the DVD drive is literally the last thing you can access if you take it apart step-by-step), we found what was wrong with it: the last DVD I had put in was still there, just as I had remembered it (if Anders wants his DVD with yearbook photos on it, it’s sitting in Kathmandu waiting for him), but the motors in the DVD drive had died as the ribbon cable had somehow detached at one point. It is also not a SATA drive as I had thought (I have a replacement slim line SATA DVD burner with me) but a PATA one. Realizing that we didn’t have the necessary tools to fix my M1530, we decided to move on to the Toughbook and test the hard drive in my computer. It booted fine into Windows XP, but I then got a warning message telling me that it was official US government property and that all data and communications would be monitored. Yikes. The laptop seemingly belongs to someone in the Multi National Force serving in Iraq, judging by the workgroup login “MNF-WIRAQ”.

Other than that, early celebrations for Deepawali / Diwali are starting here. Fireworks explode every few seconds — although they seem to be on-ground “report” style fireworks (little flash but a lot of bang) rather than the sort of airborne fireworks seen during July 4th in America or October 1st in China, so I haven’t managed to catch any with my camera (yet). I certainly want to take as many photographs as I can: I emailed the editor of www.boston.com’s popular “Big Picture” blog, and he told me to send my best Diwali photos to him as the festival progresses. Here’s hoping I’ll be published!

That’s all for now.
Charles

In terms of software running on the computers, I have successfully setup Nepali fonts on Ubuntu. Using a phrase book and online translations, I managed to change a lot of menu bars and other system-level features of Ubuntu into Devanagari script. I showed Muni what I had done, and he was mostly happy with the quality of the translations, although some of them should be replaced with colloquialisms and more common language.

Finally, I’ve had email contact with representatives of One Laptop Per Child and Open Learning Exchange Nepal. OLE Nepal is using computers based on the 945GC chipset, which was the chipset I was originally using: when I switched to the slightly more expensive 945GSE chipset, power consumption was cut in half. They are currently getting their computers retail from MSi. The representative seemed interested in the computers I brought to Nepal: perhaps I can provide them computers at lower cost compared with the computers they receive from MSi, with the same specifications, at half the power consumption. We’ll see.

Shyami and I also went out to get some momos (Nepali: मम), which are traditional Tibetan dumplings which are popular in Nepal. I’ve become a total addict over the past few days, as we’ve been having them for lunch every day. They have a variety of fillings, usually buffalo, goat or yak but also vegetarian dishes like potato or various vegetables. There are also two kinds of hot sauces, mild and strong (buffalo momos and the strong hot sauce is down right amazing, today I had 20 and it was only US$0.80).

The momos are made on the spot and then steamed in large containers, maybe a hundred or more at a time. The momos are either eaten on the spot (as we did, today) or taken home in black plastic bags (which we have been doing every other day).

After work, I prepared to watch the LCROSS impact, and was disappointed to see that the moon wasn’t visible. Around this time (around 5:15PM, the time LCROSS was to hit the moon), my neighbors appeared on their roof looking in the direction the moon was to rise. They saw the telescope and the 1000mm lens setup on the camera, and were obviously interested. I naively assumed they didn’t speak English, so I broke the ice by saying namaste. One of them responded, “No luck seeing LCROSS tonight, eh? The moon is still below the horizon, I read that you’d need to be in Australia to see it. Better luck next time!” He then laughed, turned around and went inside, leaving me all alone on my roof with a aluminum body reflecting telescope, a dSLR and two lenses, a chair, and nothing to look at. Ouch.

That’s all for now.
Charles

Ashish loves online games; I showed him Canabalt, which is one of my favorites.

A quick word on Canabalt: It is a simple game with no end. There is only one key, the “jump” key. The game scrolls to the side at a fast pace, and you have to jump over obstructions and from building to building seeing how far you can get. Ashish’s record was 1999m. I think a modified version would make a great way to teach touch typing for kids: rather than having one key mapped to jump (in this case, the space bar), the game tells you which key you need to press on a QWERTY keyboard to jump, so that you can learn the key placement of each letter. Rather than pressing spacebar each time, you’d have to press y, then j, then o, and so on. Hit the wrong key, and you don’t jump over the obstacle: the game ends. I had this idea while watching Ashish play, because when he types he needs to look at the keys, but with a fast-moving free runner dodging obstacles, there is no time to look at the keyboard. Also, while the game itself wouldn’t be considered super-violent in today’s terms, there are some parts which are questionable: hitting a wall says “Game Over; You ran x distance before hitting a wall and tumbling to your death”. Another end scenario is that bombs get dropped, and if you hit them, it says “Game Over; you ran x distance before turning into a fine red mist”. Stylistically it fits the game, but its not really appropriate for kids…a version of the game where falling only means you get back up and start from zero at that area would be much better, in my opinion. Think Pokémon: your Pokémon never died, they only fainted, and could be revived in a clinic.

In other news, we leaped another hurdle in internet communications today, or at least it seems we did (more on that later). Bishwa and I were wondering if there were any programs similar to Skype that would also allow voice communication or video conferencing over a local area network, or if we’d have to ask Sunij or Yogesh to help us develop one. While the internet speeds here are relatively slow, Hi Tech Pioneer’s clients can all appear to be on the same LAN if we put a bit of work in down in the server room. The problem with Skype and other VOIP programs is in the name: VOIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol, meaning that the data — even though it is P2P (peer-to-peer) has to be compressed (and often encrypted), sent over the internet, authenticated through Skype’s servers, and then sent to the destination. Or so we thought. I was on the internet reading up on VOIP technology and in particular Skype, where I learned that the only data which goes to Skype’s central servers is the authentication: when placing a Skype call, you are signed in using your username and password, and you connect to another person connected with their username and password. Skype needs to authenticate this data before the call is placed: are both ends registered Skype users? That authentication process takes place over port 80, the standard port for internet communications. We wondered what would happen if we set voice / webcam data to be received over port 8001 from one computer, with another computer receiving on port 8002, while forcing our router to send all data destined for port 8001 / 8002 to the respective IP addresses for each computer.

The setup went like this: Bishwa went to his “Advanced / Networking” settings in Skype and set his Skype to manually receive connections through port 8001. His computer was connected via Ethernet cable to the router with the IP address 192.168.112.55. We setup Port Forwarding on the router to send ALL data bound for port 8001 straight to 192.168.112.55. We set Skype on my computer to receive on port 8002. My computer was connected over WiFi on IP address 192.168.112.34. We set Port Forwarding to send all data for port 8002 straight to 192.168.112.34. This was telling the router that whenever it saw a connection bound for port 8002, it would send it straight to 192.168.112.34:8002, rather than ever sending it to Nepal Telecom and back. To test it, he sent two 1GB files to me over Skype, and I sent two 1GB files to him. With all this bandwidth, we were hitting speeds of 600KB/s each, meaning a total download (and upload) speed of 1.2MB/s (big B for Bytes), which translates 9.6Mb/s (little b for bits). Considering our internet connection is 256Kb/s down and around 64Kb/s up, Skype was transferring data at a speed 37.5 (down) / 150 (up)  times faster than ADSL — we had successfully configured Skype to run on a Local Area Network*. Skype still authenticates the username / password over the main server on port 80, but when actual data is being sent, the router (with DD-WRT firmware installed) sees that they are destined for port 8001 / 8002 and reroutes the packets over LAN. The best part of this is that the router will still correctly route calls, chat and files coming from outside to the proper Skype address: as I type this, I am on Skype chat with friends in Hong Kong (hopefully now everyone on my list understands why I’ve been starting each conversation with, “hey are you getting this?”).

*I have to reiterate: while it seems that this is the case, Skype may have been incorrectly reporting the speeds, it’s hard to tell. Tomorrow, we will check the network usage of the ADSL router while sending and receiving files over LAN. If there is a correlation between usage on the ADSL router and when we are trying to send files, it could be that we actually haven’t set it up properly, and that data was still being sent over the Internet, albeit at an unusually fast speed.

Read this far? Good. One last communication-related anecdote. Muni had told all of the guests that I didn’t speak any / very little Nepalese. Thankfully, the first guest to arrive asked me if this was true, so I had access to vital information: I knew that nobody knew I knew they thought I didn’t know Nepalese. The whole time, I tried my hardest to use every single word and phrase I…knew. By the end of the party, I had asked for all my food and drinks in Nepalese, talked to the kids while babysitting, told one toddler not to go up the stairs, as well as saying my now-trademarked phrase bola keta (crazy boy, or the “crazy girl” variant, bola keti) roughly 250,000 times. By the time I left, one of the guests said to me with a smile, “your Nepalese is very good”. YESSS! Success! All my hard work has paid off! My Nepalese is now officially very good. I can leave Nepal a happy man.

That’s all for now.
Charles

With the exception of last Thursday, when Muni’s staff was leaving right as I arrived, today has been the first day with people other than the Sakya family, Sami and me. Bishwa (whose comments you can see elsewhere on this very blog) studied and worked in America (Wyoming, Minnesota and Atlanta) before returning to Nepal. Yogesh is a local Linux guru, who is also familiar with PHP. It’s great working with people who clearly know far more than I do about computers, Linux, troubleshooting, etc. With their help, we powered through a number of problems that have been shunting progress on our computer project. We discovered that the “driver problem” I was having with the WiFi cards may not be a driver problem at all, but an unfixable hardware issue. Both Windows and Ubuntu were detecting the cards, and the chipsets were heating up (indicating use), but there was no way to coax a WiFi connection out of the device.

With Bishwa’s advice, we pinged various websites and IP addresses (including localhost, which I hadn’t thought of). After much tinkering, we checked the router for the MAC address of the WiFi card, which ended in 83:8E. DD-WRT had no record of that card ever connecting (even though Ubuntu and Windows both said it had), meaning even after all the work and troubleshooting we had done, the cards were not even connecting with the router: internet access over these cards seemed futile, so we scrapped the idea.

Luckily, Muni is a Buffalo distributor in Nepal, so he had roughly twenty USB WiFi cards we could use for the prototypes (we only need six for now). The computer cases themselves have two hidden USB ports behind the front bezel. I told Muni we could use these hidden ports to hold one USB WiFi adapter, and one wireless keyboard / mouse adapter; that way the three USB ports on the back are free for external DVD drives, webcams, other peripherals, etc.

We also lost power again today, which was EXTREMELY frustrating. I had the computers hooked up straight to the wall; not to the UPS. One of the computers was in the middle of cloning a hard drive, and I lost around two hour’s work. ARGH! One of the things that Bishwa, Muni, Yogesh and I are going to work on this / next week is converting Muni’s ISP / server room to run on the low power consumption computers.

The current servers are running Pentium IIIs at nowhere near 100% CPU utilization, so we can easily switch them over to the Intel Atom powered computers I brought without fear of maxxing the (admittedly weak) CPU. Plus, because each computer has 2GB of RAM and 160GB of hard drive space, so rather than having four servers each running around 150-200W, we can have just one computer with three Ethernet jacks (one on the motherboard, one through PCI, one through USB). This will emulate the four server setup while cutting the amount of power Hi Tech Pioneer’s ISP uses significantly (from around 600W down to around 25W): this way, subscribers can still access the internet when the power goes down. One step closer to an fully connected Nepal…

So what else did I do today? Phew, not much. It’s been an incredibly busy day. Everyone has been at work – Muni, his wife Nani, Sami, Bishwa, Yogesh and I. With the exception of the half hour of lost power, today was a day where everyone here at Hi Tech Pioneer was full steam ahead.

Nani at Work. We're all getting over the post-festival slump!

One thing I’d like to work on tomorrow is finding a command in Ubuntu which only copies hard drive sectors with data on them. The dd or disk duplicate command is excellent because it’s a complete mirror of the hard drive; you can switch them out and the computer won’t know the difference. The down side is that on a 5400RPM hard drive you are only looking at a 10MB/s copy speed between two drives; and with 160GB to clone, you are looking at nearly six hours! Because only 25GB of the 160GB drive has actual data on it, ignoring the blank sectors would be a much more reasonable one hour copy.

So yeah, I’ll try to get out more in the days to come and take some more photos. I know that these tech updates aren’t as interesting as the tales of armed guards and the photos of stunning beauty I’ve found in Nepal, but work also needs to get done. With Bishwa and Yogesh here, we have the chance to get much more work done, and I’ve got a lot to learn from them, so the time I’m spending here is definitely time well spent.

That’s all for now.
Charles

The goal is to provide telemedicine stations to rural clinics, so that they can have direct communication with specialists in Kathmandu and around the world. The clinics will have all the necessary tools that you could expect from your average checkup at the doctor’s office, but should any patient develop symptoms that the local clinicians can’t treat, the patient’s medical data and case file can be instantaneously forwarded to experts complete with audio, video and pictures if need be. Muni is converting a few rooms here to be used as the telemedicine headquarters of sorts, which will have dedicated ADSL lines (ADSL lines are among the fastest internet connections you can get in Nepal). A number of Muni’s friends are doctors who have mentioned working with Muni on this telemedicine project, so the future is looking good.

Other than that, not much. Now that the festival is over, the atmosphere is much more relaxed. I went for a long walk with Muni and Sami to pick up some vegetables and fruit from a local market. They had all kinds of things, and we picked up onions, garlic, potatoes,  sugar cane and coconut.

I’m still getting looks for being the only “tourist” in the non-tourist parts of town, and it’s a lot of fun to use as much Nepalese in conversation with locals as I can. I started off just by beginning each conversation with namaste and ending with shubha yatra, but now I’m trying to work in as much local language as I can. When I’m talking with Sami, I often call him bola keta or “crazy boy” when he’s up to his usual antics. I’m also trying to work on grammar, so that I leave Nepal with some semblance of understanding of the language.

This is Sami. I mistakenly taught him karate. Bola keta!

That’s all for now.
Charles