Month: March 2012

Published Date 3/28/12 8:22 PM

This is a new 32W panel which is more than my older 25W panel, and runs a bigger laptop

Rugged folding 32.2W solar panel. 18 to 20VDC open circuit voltage. Current 2.4A in full sun. Cigarette socket connector. 16″ X 10″ folded; 14″ X 44″ unfolded. 1 1/2 inches thick folded. 6 pound 4 oz weight. Eyelets at each corner and at panel middle to allow mounting or suspension with rope or bungee cords. Very durable and rugged. Ripstop camouflage nylon enclosure. Take this panel anywhere. No glass. Advantages over thin film: open circuit voltage 18-22VDC (thin film tends to be 15 to 16VDC, as panel heats in sun or if in hot climates voltage for thin film panels drops and you may not charge efficiently or at all). Also thin panels are much less efficient. Substantially larger area for comparable outputs.

This is a 7AH lead acid battery, it is used as a voltage buffer and as a reservoir of power. The cables are a 240v inverter, AA battery charger, Volt meter.

This is a much bigger laptop (14.1″ and i5 proceser) than my usual solar setup, we can eather charger OR power but not both at the same time.

Published Date 3/28/12 8:16 PM

1. What do you propose to do?

Simple automated hyper-local advertising to sustain open projects – the new digital sweetshop window.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different?

There are many automated advertising projects, but none for video that are as embedded in the communities they come from. It’s craigslist for video, google adwords for the alternative.

3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work.

visionOntv creates and trains highly productive hyper-local video news communities, e.g Merseyside Street Reporters Network. These will be the exemplars. Then we expand to sites already embedding our media players and partner with aggregating hubs, followed by local blogs and business websites. The adverts follow the content.

4. Why will it work?

Simplicity and automation: to make an ad, you add an image, title and link to a webpage. You can then choose tags. If the tags are in wide demand they will cost an amount of money, which will initially be very low. These are then served in between content based on user/video geo-location, content tag, and user tags. The viewer will therefore have a close relationship with the ads. The project is built from the bottom up, and has a psychological understanding of peoples’ sense of belonging.

5. Who is working on it?

6. What part of the project have you already built?

visionOntv has 18,000 videos aggregated already, with much of the metadata required. As for local news, Merseyside Street Reporters Network is currently aggregating nearly 500 videos from a single UK city. There is therefore an existing database of curated and tagged geo-located films to hang noticeboard posts off. Beginning with these nodes which we control, we can test solutions to UI / security / spam etc issues. We can also rapidly show a practical outcome.

7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires?

As a distributed project, it has very low running costs. It is a network for income-generation. The key thing is to push the network out and sustain it through the growth phase. We will use flattr as a partial funding model to help with this.

Published Date 3/10/12 10:16 PM

Am testing out a load of solar gear in my back garden, have a old 17AH lead acid battery from a UPS, trying to find out if it will hold a charge. You have to keep batteries topped up with power otherwise they deteriorate over time.

UPDATE: it did not hold a charge I had to go out and buy a new battery from maplins, which works fine.

UPDATE2: I damaged the new battery so have to replace that, by charging it with out a charge controller, was using a volt meter to keep an eye on its level manually, but it only took one time forgetting and leaving it out in the sun to damage the battery – get a charge controller as human beings are prone to fail (:

Published Date 3/8/12 9:13 PM

Have you always wondered why IMC sites have the horrendous go away this site is dangerous message in most web browsers. Its because of this:

—– START Explanation from ****, **** —–

Security is a two-way street. When I go to a web site I have to prove to the web site that it’s really me before the web site gives me access to anything private or restricted (such as access to my email). The most common way that is done is via a login in which I provide a username and a password. Because I supply the correct password, the server knows it really is me, because I’m the only one who knows my password.

But how do I know that the server I’m going to really is the server I want to go to? Just because I type https://docs.indymedia.org/ into my browser, doesn’t mean that the server really is the Indymedia server that I think it is. Any number of things can happen via the Internet between my computer and the server I’m connecting to that might fool my computer into thinking I’m connecting to docs.indymedia.org when in fact I’m connecting to someone else’s server specifically setup to look like the Indymedia server. If that were to happen, I might type in my username and password on this stranger’s server that is acting like docs.indymedia.org, essentially handing over my identity to a stranger.

The purpose of security certificates is to ensure that the site I’m connecting to really is the one run by Indymedia.

Unfortunately, the technology for setting up this system is fundamentally flawed. It works like this:

* most major browsers, even free/open source ones like Firefox, are pre-configured to trust a pre-defined set of for-profit corporations to verify the identity of all web sites on the Internet.

* web site maintainers are expected to pay $75 or so to these corporations in exchange for a digital certificate verifying that we are who we say we are.

* once this digital certificate is installed on the web server, browsers will access the secure web site without any errors.

If you don’t pay $75 for the certificate, then most people will get a security error. There’s a word for a setup like this. It’s called a “racket.”

Rather than play this racket, Indymedia uses cacert.org to sign it’s security certificates. cacert is a nonprofit organization that signs certificates for free. cacert is not pre-installed on most browsers, however, you can install it by following the directions here: http://wiki.cacert.org/BrowserClients If you install the cacert certificate, your browser will automatically trust all indymedia web sites that have been signed by cacert, so you will no longer get any error messages when you access them. However, in addition, your browser will trust *all* web sites signed by cacert (which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how cautious you are).

—– END Explanation —–

So, this addresses the “problem” that many of us experienced for many years. Its actually a nice opportunity for political education!

However, my understanding is that since last summer, even this explanation won’t completely address the problem with the global site… I consulted with a few people offlist before responding to this because I didn’t want to add to the confusion. It appears that our security certificate for the global server has explicitly been revoked – see: https://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-tech/2011-June/0602-g4.html It appears that this may have taken place in conjunction with the conflicts in the UK group. So, even if you import the cacert certificate to your browser (following the instructions below), you may still get a problem connecting to the site. I’m not sure if this means that we can never again have a viable certificate through cacert or whether we have to purchase one from the racket that **** refers to?

Hope this is helpful, ****