A Yellowbrick sat tracker for two-way comms using the worldwide Iridium constellation, a Linradio software defined radio receiver plugged to a discone antenna, and a Toughbook with Navigatrix GNU/Linux.
Aside from the required GMDSS, GPS, radar and so on, of course.
Credentials: a few years as radio operator on ships going around the workd
If you care for such things use Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics to help you sort through the manufacturers. Even if you don't agree with their methods it is a good point of reference
"...the tendency to stick to truthful answers can be manipulated by stimulation targeted at dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Right hemisphere stimulation decreases lying, left hemisphere stimulation increases lying. Spontaneous choice to lie more or less can be influenced by brain stimulation."
"force you"? "make it impossible"? Where is that bullshit coming from? It shows a significant change, that's very different from the absolute phrases used in the summary.
Bambuser. We did that here on my ship using an Axis wireless camera, the Axis driver that makes it appear as an USB connected device and Flash video encoder. It worked perfectly, provided a website with an always-on stream of our ship.
Bambuser does not have well-developed privacy controls, but for a single user you just provide them with your password. Each of you gets an account and stream to each other. Plus, you can check your remote kitchen from your mobile. And it's free.
Big vessels have to carry GMDSS, which are multi-channel safety and distress systems to be used in case of fire, man overboard or piracy. They have to be able to run for hours on battery power in case of power failure and to be super reliable.
An important part of the system is the Sat C terminal, such as the Sailor DT4646E, which are pretty nicely built and sturdy flat screen PCs with 640k RAM, running DOS and a terminal program for Sat C communications from flash memory. They use 3.5" disk drives -- with a proprietary connector and selling for $150. And this is precisely the less reliable part of the terminal, since the floppy is always inside the drive (for saving messages) and the heads are exposed to the salty air and have to be cleaned (and replaced) often. But the things are still running (always on) after may many years.
AFAIK fowed text was a candidate for the SVG standard but didn't get accepted in the end. Inkscape still supports it, though they will eventually implement it in a wy that complies with the standard.
I use Inkscape extensively for making maps, and it does pretty much everything I need. I export map layers as PDFs from Qgis and import them into Inkscape one by one, then save them as SVG for further processing.
Since Qgis' export to PDF and SVG sucks, it does require quite a bit of editing of the SVG file to reduce the size and get rid of invisible artifacts. But then one of the best things of working with SVG is being able to edit your graphics file with a text editor and doing, say, find and replace on symbols (to replace those nasty Qgis bitmap symbols for SVG ones) or text. Try that with Illustrator files!
Inkscape does not take advantage of multiple cores (yet), but opening a new instance creates a completely separate process so while one Inkscape window is busy thinking you can keep working on the other at full speed.
The sad part is that i haven't been able to find a free, fully-featured XML editor to do more advanced editing of the SVG file. Eventually I had to settle for oXygen, which is not free and kind of taints my workflow.
I live in one of those third world countries, and I see advertisements everywhere I look. There is a LOT of spending going on here. Only the cellphone market has hijacked a significant chunk of people's income. It's just that people won't click on irrelevant advertising.
It's true lots of great technologies have come out of military research, but it seems a very inefficient way of coming up with new stuff. If the US is going to have such a statist economy, wouldn't it be better to use all those billions on research that is not for world domination?
I also have one of those rotating Dell 19" LCD monitors and a second 17" CRT I had lying around. Unfortunately there is no way to rotate only one monitor when using TwinView (Nvidia), so my LCD remains horizontal...
Compressed air is nothing but an energy storage medium. And this is no side issue, as the race towards smaller and more efficient batteries shows.
The advantage of having this energy stored in a centralised fashion (i.e. in a big gas station, using energy from the power grid) is that you might get higher energy efficiency than with say thousands of small internal combustion engines. But still, given that centralised energy sources are scary (think nuclear power), this technology would allow anyone to compress some air and feed the car or sell it.
Sounds good in theory. Now if we only had some good numbers we could make the necessary calculations to check the actual efficiency of the process...
Congratulations on a great project. Mapping can really empower an isolated village to better understand their place in the country and the world.
I'm just back from a trip to what could be called uncharted territories in the southern tip of Panama. I a 1:50,000 map, which was last checked on the field in 1961. Since not a lot of people live here it is not a high priority for the government's mapping agency. The result is that all the names of the rivers on the map are wrong, the villages just don't appear and a lot of what shows as forest has now been cleared.
The big mistake I made was not to take a GPS, but in a way it forced me to do things the low-tech way, which is good to learn when you run out of batteries in a place with no electricity and no roads to take your car and plug things in the cigarrette lighter socket.
So first thing: get some free satellite pictures, check both Google Earth and Nasa's World Wind (unfortunately you need Windows for these) because you may find better images in one or the other for the part of the world you are interested in. You can also check https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/mrsid.pl and maybe you can find a MrSID reader for mac to look at the pictures and export tiffs. So print the images out in colour and have several copies because those bubble-jet printouts don't go well together with rainwater. Or laminate them.
Then go to the country's mapping agency if there is one and get the most detailed map you can find of the area. It might very well be a 1:250,000 one or worse, but it is better than nothing. Again, more than one copy is a good idea, one to leave intact and one for making notes on.
Fold your map. This is more important than you may think, as you can fold your map to have easy access to the part you will repeatedly check and you won't have to open the whole thing in pouring rain and be too obvious about what you are doing if you don't intend to.
Take a digital camera with good battery life. Not a lot of options in the "all weather" category for digital cameras, so maybe get a good regular one and keep it protected. Pictures of places and features also keep a record of the time and date you were there and may provide very good information when you forget to note it down.
Get plenty large thick zip-loc freezer bags before you go to Africa (might be cheaper in the US) to put your maps and papers and GPS and digital camera in.
It is maybe not a good idea to take a laptop or a Palm on the field. Humidity will probably kill it. Take instead a good Moleskine : low tech, no batteries, very reliable. Another option is Rite in the Rain. And several pencils which you can sharpen with a knife.
Talk to everybody, double- and triple-check the names of rivers and other features as well as the number of houses and the population of places. Be honest and open about what you are doing. Make sure you make the finished work available to the people in the villages so they can use it.
"There has been no US imperialism since before World War II"
tell that to the people who lost a grandpa or a daughter when the US bombed their neighbourhood here in Panama.
What a big moron.
If we switched all cars and industry now to biodiesel, can you imagine the increase in demand for monocrop, genetically-modified, high-yield soy or corn?
Soy monocrop is already destroying acres and acres of rainforest in Brazil. Argentina is one of the largest soyabean producers in the world, but every year thousands starve. Most of the soy is for export, most of it to feed farm animals in rich countries. Now add biodiesel to that.
We are gonna have to learn to live with less and smaller cars...
No, science doesn't explain everything. There are way too many things so far away from ever being fully described and explained by science that we are better off (and many people have been for a long time) using other methods to understand these "unexplained" things: intuition, art, philosophy or religion. Science is a very useful thing, but let's not get fanatical here.
There is no pseudoscience here, even if journalists decide to sue the term "sixth sense". It makes you want to read an article describing pretty boring cientific stuff.
These "weird fish" are brought up in enormous amounts every day by the world's deep-sea bottom trawling fleet, mostly from France, Spain and Russia. I was part of a Greenpeace expedition last fall in the North Sea, and I saw them throw away as bycatch tons of fish, with eyes popping out from the change in pressure, including some shown in the Snopes website. Scientists know next to nothing about the deep seas, but the fishing industry is right now destroying some of the last pristine environments left on Earth.
Why is it that products and corporations are free to move around at the highest possible efficiency while workers from the third world are not also allowed to move north as each sees fit? http://www.noborder.org/news_index.php
Slashdot Mirror
A Yellowbrick sat tracker for two-way comms using the worldwide Iridium constellation, a Linradio software defined radio receiver plugged to a discone antenna, and a Toughbook with Navigatrix GNU/Linux. Aside from the required GMDSS, GPS, radar and so on, of course. Credentials: a few years as radio operator on ships going around the workd
If you care for such things use Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics to help you sort through the manufacturers. Even if you don't agree with their methods it is a good point of reference
Just one example: GreenFreeze tecnology
"force you"? "make it impossible"? Where is that bullshit coming from? It shows a significant change, that's very different from the absolute phrases used in the summary.
The Yes Men beat them to it already
Bambuser. We did that here on my ship using an Axis wireless camera, the Axis driver that makes it appear as an USB connected device and Flash video encoder. It worked perfectly, provided a website with an always-on stream of our ship. Bambuser does not have well-developed privacy controls, but for a single user you just provide them with your password. Each of you gets an account and stream to each other. Plus, you can check your remote kitchen from your mobile. And it's free.
A purple blob selling junk to little children sounds evil enough to me
Big vessels have to carry GMDSS, which are multi-channel safety and distress systems to be used in case of fire, man overboard or piracy. They have to be able to run for hours on battery power in case of power failure and to be super reliable. An important part of the system is the Sat C terminal, such as the Sailor DT4646E, which are pretty nicely built and sturdy flat screen PCs with 640k RAM, running DOS and a terminal program for Sat C communications from flash memory. They use 3.5" disk drives -- with a proprietary connector and selling for $150. And this is precisely the less reliable part of the terminal, since the floppy is always inside the drive (for saving messages) and the heads are exposed to the salty air and have to be cleaned (and replaced) often. But the things are still running (always on) after may many years.
I remember when Opera was the only browser that could really zoom into a page to compensate for extra high resolutions
AFAIK fowed text was a candidate for the SVG standard but didn't get accepted in the end. Inkscape still supports it, though they will eventually implement it in a wy that complies with the standard.
I use Inkscape extensively for making maps, and it does pretty much everything I need. I export map layers as PDFs from Qgis and import them into Inkscape one by one, then save them as SVG for further processing.
Since Qgis' export to PDF and SVG sucks, it does require quite a bit of editing of the SVG file to reduce the size and get rid of invisible artifacts. But then one of the best things of working with SVG is being able to edit your graphics file with a text editor and doing, say, find and replace on symbols (to replace those nasty Qgis bitmap symbols for SVG ones) or text. Try that with Illustrator files!
Inkscape does not take advantage of multiple cores (yet), but opening a new instance creates a completely separate process so while one Inkscape window is busy thinking you can keep working on the other at full speed.
The sad part is that i haven't been able to find a free, fully-featured XML editor to do more advanced editing of the SVG file. Eventually I had to settle for oXygen, which is not free and kind of taints my workflow.
Why don't you just repackage it with a different name?
I live in one of those third world countries, and I see advertisements everywhere I look. There is a LOT of spending going on here. Only the cellphone market has hijacked a significant chunk of people's income. It's just that people won't click on irrelevant advertising.
It's true lots of great technologies have come out of military research, but it seems a very inefficient way of coming up with new stuff. If the US is going to have such a statist economy, wouldn't it be better to use all those billions on research that is not for world domination?
I also have one of those rotating Dell 19" LCD monitors and a second 17" CRT I had lying around. Unfortunately there is no way to rotate only one monitor when using TwinView (Nvidia), so my LCD remains horizontal...
Compressed air is nothing but an energy storage medium. And this is no side issue, as the race towards smaller and more efficient batteries shows.
The advantage of having this energy stored in a centralised fashion (i.e. in a big gas station, using energy from the power grid) is that you might get higher energy efficiency than with say thousands of small internal combustion engines. But still, given that centralised energy sources are scary (think nuclear power), this technology would allow anyone to compress some air and feed the car or sell it.
Sounds good in theory. Now if we only had some good numbers we could make the necessary calculations to check the actual efficiency of the process...
Picasa won't run on my AMD64 since it's wine. So far, Google Earth is doing perfect.
Congratulations on a great project. Mapping can really empower an isolated village to better understand their place in the country and the world. I'm just back from a trip to what could be called uncharted territories in the southern tip of Panama. I a 1:50,000 map, which was last checked on the field in 1961. Since not a lot of people live here it is not a high priority for the government's mapping agency. The result is that all the names of the rivers on the map are wrong, the villages just don't appear and a lot of what shows as forest has now been cleared. The big mistake I made was not to take a GPS, but in a way it forced me to do things the low-tech way, which is good to learn when you run out of batteries in a place with no electricity and no roads to take your car and plug things in the cigarrette lighter socket. So first thing: get some free satellite pictures, check both Google Earth and Nasa's World Wind (unfortunately you need Windows for these) because you may find better images in one or the other for the part of the world you are interested in. You can also check https://zulu.ssc.nasa.gov/mrsid/mrsid.pl and maybe you can find a MrSID reader for mac to look at the pictures and export tiffs. So print the images out in colour and have several copies because those bubble-jet printouts don't go well together with rainwater. Or laminate them. Then go to the country's mapping agency if there is one and get the most detailed map you can find of the area. It might very well be a 1:250,000 one or worse, but it is better than nothing. Again, more than one copy is a good idea, one to leave intact and one for making notes on. Fold your map. This is more important than you may think, as you can fold your map to have easy access to the part you will repeatedly check and you won't have to open the whole thing in pouring rain and be too obvious about what you are doing if you don't intend to. Take a digital camera with good battery life. Not a lot of options in the "all weather" category for digital cameras, so maybe get a good regular one and keep it protected. Pictures of places and features also keep a record of the time and date you were there and may provide very good information when you forget to note it down. Get plenty large thick zip-loc freezer bags before you go to Africa (might be cheaper in the US) to put your maps and papers and GPS and digital camera in. It is maybe not a good idea to take a laptop or a Palm on the field. Humidity will probably kill it. Take instead a good Moleskine : low tech, no batteries, very reliable. Another option is Rite in the Rain. And several pencils which you can sharpen with a knife. Talk to everybody, double- and triple-check the names of rivers and other features as well as the number of houses and the population of places. Be honest and open about what you are doing. Make sure you make the finished work available to the people in the villages so they can use it.
"There has been no US imperialism since before World War II" tell that to the people who lost a grandpa or a daughter when the US bombed their neighbourhood here in Panama. What a big moron.
If we switched all cars and industry now to biodiesel, can you imagine the increase in demand for monocrop, genetically-modified, high-yield soy or corn? Soy monocrop is already destroying acres and acres of rainforest in Brazil. Argentina is one of the largest soyabean producers in the world, but every year thousands starve. Most of the soy is for export, most of it to feed farm animals in rich countries. Now add biodiesel to that. We are gonna have to learn to live with less and smaller cars ...
No, science doesn't explain everything. There are way too many things so far away from ever being fully described and explained by science that we are better off (and many people have been for a long time) using other methods to understand these "unexplained" things: intuition, art, philosophy or religion. Science is a very useful thing, but let's not get fanatical here. There is no pseudoscience here, even if journalists decide to sue the term "sixth sense". It makes you want to read an article describing pretty boring cientific stuff.
These "weird fish" are brought up in enormous amounts every day by the world's deep-sea bottom trawling fleet, mostly from France, Spain and Russia. I was part of a Greenpeace expedition last fall in the North Sea, and I saw them throw away as bycatch tons of fish, with eyes popping out from the change in pressure, including some shown in the Snopes website. Scientists know next to nothing about the deep seas, but the fishing industry is right now destroying some of the last pristine environments left on Earth.
Why is it that products and corporations are free to move around at the highest possible efficiency while workers from the third world are not also allowed to move north as each sees fit? http://www.noborder.org/news_index.php