Alex Little

I’ve just moved back to my old house in Northampton and have been trying to figure out if there is a way to get a decent broadband connection at home but without a 12+ month contract. there do seem to be a few places which offer shorter contracts (1 or 3 month notice), but then a phone line is also needed – which again, requires a 12 month contract. Plus for the short term contracts, there is a connection fee. The only place I found that would offer short term broadband plus phone was IDnet (http://www.idnet.net) – but this is going to be an expensive option. £17.99 per month for broadband, £10 per month for line rental and £47 connection fee = total of £130.97 for 3 months (or about £44 per month). I’m currently using a o2 mobile broadband dongle (£15 per month or 3Gb download), so works out at £45 for 3 months, unless I start going over the 3Gb limit (very likely). Although even with allowing for spending on extra downloads, this will still works out much cheaper. If anyone has any better, cheaper suggestions (not including hacking a neighbours wireless connection!), I’d be very interested to hear.

The main downside I’ve found with the mobile broadband is the speed, it’s noticeably slower than fixed line broadband – although with the connection speeds I had in Ethiopia, the mobile broadband in UK is a vast improvement in terms of both speed and cost. Whilst in Addis the other day I noticed that the CDMA internet connection was far slower than that available in Mekelle, I expect as a result of the number of people using CDMA now and the lack of capacity in the infrastructure. As a result more people are buying EVDO connections – these are monthly contracts and quite expensive (approx 460 birr per month minimum). If EVDO becomes too popular it’s only a matter of time before these seem slow and unreliable.

Apart from these hassles, moving back to the house has been good. Realised just how much stuff I managed to pack into the loft, so have spent the last couple of days moving everything down and getting it sorted out. Most of which I’ll get rid of in one form or another (freecycle, charity shops etc).

On returning from Ethiopia (the second time – at Easter), my little Asus Eee PC 701 was really starting to show signs of wear – after heavy use for the previous 2 years, the trackpad buttons had started to go, plus the space bar was getting far less than responsive. So just before I returned I ordered a new Asus Eee 1008HA which arrived a day or so after I arrived back in the UK. The increased screen size, disk size and slightly larger keyboard have all been great, but there have been a few things that I’m not so keen on:

1. the USB ports are too far recessed for some of my devices (notably the CDMA mobile internet dongle) to be properly inserted, so I end up using a small USB hub or extension lead. Plus there are only 2 USB ports
2. It feels a little too fragile. The 701 was chunkier and so felt more solid, with this I feel I should be wrapping it in cotton wool before I put it in my bag. The monitor adapter (the VGA dongle) and network port, plus the covers for the USB and headphone sockets, all feel as if they’ll break easily.
3. There’s not an easy way to upgrade the RAM. I had seen a video on YouTube on how you can open it up, but it’s not just a case of unscrewing a panel and popping in a new stick of RAM.

The reason I’d bought another Asus Eee was because of my experience with the first and I’d basically bought the 1008HA without having seeing one for real. Although I’ve not had any issues with the new machine in the nearly 3 months I’ve owned it, it only feels like a matter of time

Monitor comparison - my new 22'' desktop vs the 7'' of my Asus EEE PC

Since coming back I seem to have been unexpectedly busy – I had assumed that I wouldn’t have much to do, but have lots to prepare ready for returning to Ethiopia in June and attending the eLearning Africa conference at the end of May – where I’m giving a presentation about the Digital Campus project.

I’ve managed to catch up with many friends so far, but it’s been a little different than I’d expected. My time is very flexible and free at the moment, but everyone else still has work and other commitments, especially during weekdays.

I spend a very frustrating Monday trying to get my new computer set up correctly. I bought a new desktop machine with an ATI Radeon HD 5450 Graphics Card which doesn’t seem to work well with Ubuntu (9.10). I had a hard time figuring what was causing the display to freeze up at apparently random times. After being in use for anything from 5 mins to 8 hours, the screen would freeze up, with only the mouse moving and the only way of getting out of it being to do a hard restart.

I had got the ATI drivers installed as it was the only way I could get the full resolution from my monitor (1920 X 1080). I’m quite sure I had everything installed correctly, despite being confused by all the advice and postings about installing these drivers.

In the end I read a post which mentioned trying out the next release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx (10.04) – even though it’s not officially released for a week or so, it apparently has better support for ATI graphics cards. After the installation of Lucid Lynx, I haven’t need to installed any proprietary drivers and the monitor is working well at it’s full resolution. There are a few other issues at the moment (such as not being able to install Adobe Flash plugin), but then it’s still an Alpha pre-release so these issues are to be expected and should be resolved when the full release comes out next week.

We’re still having a few problems with the server over at Ayder (Health Sciences) Campus. It’s made more problematic by the fact that the contractors digging up one of the nearby roads cut through the fiber cable linking Ayder to the main campus. So not only is there no internet at Ayder, there is no network connection to the Moodle server to allow staff there to be uploading their courses and activities.

On Friday and Monday I spent several hours (about 7 or 8 in total) on Skype to Eduardo in Barcelona who is helping us to get the server fixed. Things are made a little easier by the fact we have 2 identical servers, alpha and bravo. Alpha is (generally) running fine at Arid campus and bravo is the broken server at Ayder, so the plan was to make a copy of alpha onto one of the spare disks, modify it slightly (name, IP address etc) then use this to fix bravo.

The clone had already been made – to one of the 4 physical disks in the machine. All I needed to to do was switch the disks around to test the clone, then take the cloned disk to Ayder. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the cloned disk to work and on Friday it took Eduardo and I a little while to figure out what the problem was. It turned out that the way the disks were numbered on the server label:

didn’t actually match how the were referred to by the operating system, so rather then switching the disk in positions 0 and 2, we should have been doing 0 and 1.

Finally we got this issue resolved and the disk ready to take to Ayder, plus a few other backup options that Eduardo had come up with in case this disk didn’t solve the problem.

On Monday, I took the disk over to Ayder, got on Skype, and spent a few hours messaging Eduardo (and a little later Mike) and we managed to get the server booting up correctly. In the end we managed to fix the problem without needing to use the disk we’d had the confusion over on Friday.

But unfortunately all is not quite finished. The terminals at Ayder aren’t yet connecting to the properly. So next job is to get that resolved.

All of which means that we still haven’t been able to get the lab open for students to use, but hoping to be open properly in the next week or so. Still much more work to be done, so will keep us all busy for the coming weeks I’m sure.

I’ve used Camtasia Studio (Windows) a few times before for creating some training/how-to screencasts, but now I wanted to have a go doing something similar using open source software (on Ubuntu Jaunty) instead. To make it more interesting I also wanted to run it all on my Asus Eee PC (4G) – not exactly a machine designed for heavy video processing.

First issue was how to record the screen, for this I used RecordMyDesktop. A very simple program to install and run, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Selecting the area to record (I wasn’t selecting whole window) was a bit fiddly and sometimes took me several attempts to capture the right area, without chopping off a side or two.

If you’re recording a for a long time and your screensaver kicks in (or screen goes blank for power saving), you’ll need to disable the screensaver and power saving – unless you particularly need a recording of it.

What I had most trouble with – and only came up with a workarounds solution to – was capturing the audio. RecordMyDesktop wil capture the audio fine but had problems getting the recording volume level right without creating a lot of hissing. The hardware on the Asus for sound isn’t exactly fantastic. In the end I found that I had best results when using a jack lead to plug the headphone output into the microphone input! If anyone has a better solution to this or some advice about on the recording levels to capture the audio more reliably, then please let me know.

So, now I’ve created a .ogv (OGG video) file but want to edit it a little. I wanted a really simple video editor for 2 reasons, firstly I don’t wand to spend the time learning a bit video editing package and, more practically, secondly, I don’t have a huge amount of disk space left on my 4Gb drive!

I opted for Aviremux, though unfortunately this doesn’t accept OGG video files, so I used mencoder to convert to AVI (basic instructions).

For the actual editing I used Aviremux. I found it very easy to get started with and use – unlike some other video editing software.

In the end I found that my original screen recording had sound out of synch with the video – not in the initial few mins of the capture, but further in. I’m not sure why this should be the case – if anyone has any idea why, I’d be pleased to hear them.

Overall, it was a little frustrating getting this to work. I’ve not managed to achieve what I set out to do, but think this was more to do with the hardware than anything else.

I’m not generally what you’d call an early adopter, and not usually into gadgets. For example, I only bought myself a GPS device a couple of weeks ago, shortly before the hype about the GPS system failing within the next year or so.

The same is true of mobile phones, for years I’ve only owned a very basic phone which only does phoning and texting, no mp3 player, camera etc.

Well, last week a friend gave me their old Nokia 6230i. The camera seems reasonable and I started thinking about how I get the photos off the camera onto something more useful (such as my laptop). The options were to use a cable, bluetooth or IR, but since my laptop (Asus EeePC) has neither bluetooth nor IR, I bought myself a cable, also thinking that a cable is likely to be the most reliable connection method anyway.

I installed Gammu, but then kept getting the message that “No response in specified timeout. Probably phone not connected.”. Trying a few different settings made no difference. I also installed KMobileTools, which did manage to connect to the phone and retrieve contacts lists, but only has limited functionality for managing or transferring files.

After spending most of an afternoon trying to get this working I gave up, and posted a message on the Ubuntu forums, but no replies as yet.

Whilst searching for a solution, few people seemed to be using a cable connection, far more instructions and help seemed available for those using bluetooth – or maybe they jut have more problems getting it set up?. So my next plan is to get a little bluetooth adapter and see if I have any better luck with that. Unless anyone else has any better suggestions/solution?

I’d be quite surprised if it did work with bluetooth, especially since it’s always had a bit of a reputation as being fiddly to set up correctly. But maybe I’ve an instance where bluetooth can do what a physical cable connection can’t?

Since I’ve been back in the UK, although I’ve been pretty much tied to the house, with Amazon now back available to me, I’m able to spend money again. One of the items I bought was a GPS. Originally I was going to be borrowing one from someone in Addis to be able to do some mapping of Mekelle, but since I’m in the UK it seemed to make sense to get hold of my own whilst I was here. I eventually opted for the very basic Garmin eTrex H, thinking that it does everything I would want and I’m unlikely to spend money buying maps to download onto it – the main reason for buying it was to contribute to the OpenStreetMap project.

Once it had arrived my first challenge was getting it hooked up to my Asus EeePC (running Ubuntu) and installing the right bits of software.

For up & downloading to the GPS I installed QLandkarte, which only started recognising my device once I’d also installed the gpsbabel package.

Next I needed a desktop program for editing OpenStreetMap – using the online Potlatch application wouldn’t be a great option for me once back in Ethiopia with no decent internet connection.

I started off by installing Merkaartor but quickly ran into problems. When I tried connecting to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) server to download a map to edit, I kept getting “403: Forbidden” messages. The problem was that the particular version of Merkaartor the Ubuntu package manager installs doesn’t work with OSM Protocol v0.6. I think there may be a version of Merkaartor which works with v0.6, but I’m not generally very keen on installing software outside the Ubuntu Add/Remove Applications

I then tried Java OpenStreetMap (JOSM), again installing from the Add/Remove Apps and I was getting similar problems in being unable to connect to the OSM server. Again the problem was the protocol version.

Merkaartor and JOSM appeared to be the only programs available for editing OSM on Ubuntu (please let me know if there are others), so I had to resign myself to manually installing one of them. I opted for JOSM as it was quite easy to run manually and once installed all seems to be working relatively well.

I do however had a few gripes about the user interface, especially on the small screen of the Asus EeePC. For example some of the dialog boxes are fiddly to expand to get the OK/Cancel buttons to appear. Also, the drop down list of “presets” (the different map features, places of interest, amenities etc which can be added) is too long to appear on the screen, but there’s no way of navigating down to the bottom of the list to see which options are available.

Apart from that, I feel like I’ve got the hang of OSM editing (a little at least) and I’ve managed to add a few new roads. Hopefully once I get back to Mekelle, I’ll be much more productive, especially since I’ll be starting on a blank canvas.

My previous comments about the computing ability of some of the Computer Science students may not have been too generous, however, if they’d all been given a laptop on arrival at Uni, something like an Asus EEE PC or OLPC XO, I’m sure many would not be having the problems I mentioned.

The OLPC project is certainly having some problems and I previously criticised how the OLPC laptops were being used in schools. Looking back now I realise that maybe the project isn’t meeting it’s intended aims, but even if it’s just getting students used to being able to use a keyboard and a computer generally, then surely that’s not a bad thing? I’m dealing with first year computer science students who have little idea about even login names, passwords or keyboards.

In the last week I conducted a mini-survey amongst our Computer Science Uni students about their access to computers and attitudes towards having access to course materials online, almost all (around 90%) said that access to a computer was one of their main problems. Given that this survey was online (OK, maybe not my brightest of ideas for this type of survey!), the total figure is likely to be more than 90%. For info, there are about 10-15 working PC’s per 80-90 computer science students and less than 10% have access to a PC outside the those provided by the university.

I’m sure that giving the uni students a laptop, even just a cheap one, would be immensely beneficial to the next generation of computer science students/graduates. So if anyone is looking to improve the computing capabilities of those in the developing world, you could no worse than providing laptops to university level students. In my opinion, the more access and practise students have with PCs, be that Window or Unix, the better.

As an aside, I’ve been quite surprised by the number of university computer science students who don’t yet have an email address. I hadn’t even thought to ask this in my survey, but it’s come up in training sessions, when students fill in their profile, many have asked what to enter in the email field if they don’t have an email address!

For the technically or gadget minded, here’s a little about my experiences with using an Asus EEE PC as my main machine for the last few months. OK, main machine is a bit strong, as I have a ‘proper’ desktop PC at work, but I mean for all my personal computing at home or out and about.

Firstly, here are all the bits’n'bobs I have:

• Asus EEE PC (700 series)- 4GB drive, expanded to 2GB RAM and with 8GB SD card
• running Ubuntu 8.04
• external LiteOn CD/DVD rewriter (USB powered)
• Freecom 400GB external drive (USB powered)
• circuit breaker and voltage regulator – although these aren’t strictly computer related they are essential for me here

What I use it for:

• listening to mp3s
• watching DVDs
• downloading and organising photos
• offline writing of emails and blog postings
• backing up to CD or DVD
• copying CDs/DVDs – legally of course!

All of these generally work really well and I haven’t found much I’d like to do but can’t. It might be handy to access the internet on this machine but since it would only be dial up, I’d need a modem. Not having internet at home can be a good thing as it means I don’t spend my evenings ‘constructively’ browsing the web, watching youtube or checking for ‘important’ emails!

I’ve been very pleased with my external DVD rewriter, it’s come in incredibly useful, possibly more so than having a laptop with built in rewriter. When I came out to Ethiopia I had a Freecom 250GB Toughdrive, which unfortunately failed – not quite sure of the reason, worked slowly on Ubuntu, but not at all on Windows. When I reformatted all worked fine – very puzzling (although perhaps a virus?) but by that time my parents had sent a replacement external drive. After this failure I’d recommend having 2 external drives, if only because it makes backing up so much easier than a whole series of DVDs!

My main niggle has been that with plain Ubuntu installed the 4Gb drive is almost totally full, so a larger hard drive would be nice. I know (thanks to Liam) that there are now Ubuntu variants available especially designed for netbooks such as the Asus, but I’ve not had the chance, or fast enough internet connection, to download and play with these.

Another niggle has been the battery life, so much so that I very rarely use my Asus when not plugged into main power – albeit through a circuit breaker and voltage regulator to account for the erratic power supply, which can vary anywhere between 0 and 300 volts. When unplugged, I’m unlikely to get more than 20 or 30 mins from the battery, even when apparently fully charged. This may be due to the external hard drive and rewriter, but even so, it’s not great!

Having had my whinge, I’m pretty sure that both of these niggles have been resolved (or at the very lest reduced) with the more recent versions of Asus EEE PCs. I bought this one in March 08 and have always thought that maybe I should’ve waited until nearer my departure date (Sept 08) to make a purchase and bought one of the Asus EEE PC 900 or 1000.

Sure, I don’t think it would be a suitable set up for everyone, many people have made comments that they don’t think they’d be able to use a machine like this – even for just watching DVDs! But at least I never have to lug around a 3 or 4kg+ laptop and I don’t need a special permit to take it in or out of work. Everyone gets searched on way in and out of work to check no-one is stealing or bringing chat (drug) or beer onto campus, although, being ferengi, the search is quite cursory. To take a laptop off campus a permit is needed to prove that it’s yours rather than belonging to the university, my Asus doesn’t seem to register with security as even being a laptop! The one time I had a problem was going into the bank where they were more concerned that it was a camera.

At work I use a normal desktop PC, so I’m not having to use my Asus for programming, writing documents, speradsheets etc – not sure I’d cope with that, but for everything I want to do outside work, my Asus suits me just fine.

p.s. Looking forward to being able to access my GMail account whilst offline. Recently the internet has been more off than on – more problems with the fibre cable down to Addis.

p.p.s. This has been a much longer posting that first intended, but this has been the first evening for a long time that I’ve spent the evening alone at home – my housemate has gone off to Addis and no-one else has invited me out!

I attended my first English lesson in about 20 years this morning when I visited the Maiwayni School in Mekelle to see their trial of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. OLPC trials are being run at a few other schools in Ethiopia, but this is the first in the Tigray region. It’s a model school for the area and has very good facilities for it’s 600+ students and staff.

Around 100 students of grades 6 and 7 were given the XO laptops just over 2 weeks ago. Teachers were given a one day workshop in how to use the laptops and how they can use them in their teaching. Technical support for the laptops is provided by MIT (probably not the one you’re thinking of, but the more local Mekelle Institute of Technology), though so far they’ve had few technical problems. Students can charge the laptops up at home if they have electricity (and the electricy is on), or there are charging facilities at school – unfortunately not solar power (Matt, if you’re after a project, then come over and fix up a solar panel for them!).

I didn’t get chance to talk to the students/teachers/parents to find out what they felt about having the laptops, although the head and deputy head seemed very keen and happy they were chosen to be the trial school.

Before going into the class, the headmaster (Tsegay) gave us chance to have a little play around. At first I found the interface was a little tricky to navigate, but once I’d got the hang of it, it was fine. As well as the games and cut down Wikipedia, all the grade 6 and 7 text books (mainly in Amharic and Tigrinya) have been scanned in and pre-loaded as ebooks. During the English lesson, all the students (around 55 in total) had grade 7 English ebook opened at the right point – I was half expecting most of the children at the back to be playing with the games!

Most of the students seemed to be taking an active part in the lesson, even if it meant having their hand up for a while before the teacher had chance to get to them. The use of the XO laptop in the lesson we observed was restricted to using it as an alternative to a paper textbook – I didn’t get the feeling the lesson would have been much different if all the students had had a paper textbook in front of them. However, it is still very early days for this school and the students have only had the laptops for a couple of weeks to get to grips with them, at least the students here each had a copy of the ebook – unlike many schools where there aren’t enough paper textbooks to go around. Also, it will probably take some time (and more workshops) for the teachers to gain experience in how to make best use of their new IT facilities.

It will be interesting to see how things have changed if I can get to visit the school again in a few months time.