An #openweb organic intellectual,technologist and part of the #OMN
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 4/16/15 7:18 PM
12V Macbook Magsafe2 Laptop Charger, rather than running an inverter and then your standard charger this will allow you to charge directly from your 12V batteries being more effecient and saving you power. Link
12V Universal Laptop Charger, rather than running an inverter and then your standard charger this will allow you to charge directly from your 12V batteries being more effecient and saving you power.
Adjustable output voltage at 15V, 16V, 18V, 19V, 20V, 22V 24V
Support most of the Notebook for HP IBM COMPAQ and SONY (With circle plug) LINK
Published Date 4/1/15 2:55 PM
Basic boat 12v electrics
I see so many people with battery issues thought I would do a basic post.
Battery state is a bit of witchcraft, you can get an idea of charge by using a volt meter after leaving the battery’s for more than 3 hours with out use.
State of Charge (v)
100% 12.7
90% 12.5
80% 12.42
70% 12.32
60% 12.20
50% 12.06
40% 11.9
30% 11.75
20% 11.58
10% 11.31
0 10.5
While the battery’s are on charge or after use you will not get a valid idea.
Try not to take your battery’s lower than 12.00v If your battery’s are low recharge them as soon as possible, the longer you leave them flat the more long term life you lose.
Solar panels will help for long term battery health, give the battery’s a rest for a day to come to full charge every few weeks to care for them.
How to use a volt meter
Every boater needs a volt meter to hand. You don’t need an expensive one though spending a bit more will likely get you more robustness. http://www.ebay.co.uk/bhp/digital-voltmeter
Read the instructions of your volt meter.
To use turn the dial to 20v DC then put the red probe (pin/stick) onto the plus and the black probe onto the negative terminals of the battery. You can scrape the terminals if they are dirty to get a good connection. This should give you a volt reading in the range of 10-15v see my last post for what this tells you.
*** Be careful of placing any metal objects that could connect the + and – on the battery or wires as this could course a fire and will spark alarmingly ***
To get to know your battery’s you should do this often at different times of day for a while, if you care for your battery’s they will care for you.
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Food for thought (DRAFT)
A view and strategy for sustaining the boater lifestyle and community.
NVDA (direct action) with a good PR team works – Sorted office occupations in conjunction with a competent media team, could knock CRT onto the defensive in a week and refocus their agenda within a month. However this is a dangerous strategy because if they are defeated to effectively and to hard then there will be pressure to replace them with something “better”. And better won’t be better for the boaters.
What is needed before this strategy is attempted is the building of grassroots self-management among the boater community so that the space opened up by the knocking back of CRT can be filled with what we want. This would considerably increase the likelihood of “better” being better for boaters.
At the moment there is strong resistance to the building of self-management, the libertarian nature of many boaters, feeds fear and divisions amongst the community. This disempowering is pushed by many people for many different agendas on our own side and their side. Some thought needs to be put into any strategy to mediate this.
What would a medium-term sustainable boater lifestyle look like?
The tragedy of the Commons would have to be addressed, and market solution clearly rejected. How would this be manifested would be a working progress.
A number of roles that CRT are currently pushing as their responsibility would have to be clearly/largely taken over by cooperatively run boater responsibility groups. Primary amongst these will be the enforcement of the 14 day rule, moving towards this would be one of the key ways of building boater self-management. Areas like recycling, community cleanups, carer and repair of the basic infrastructure could be taken over by a mixture of small-scale boater businesses, cooperatives and voluntary groups. To facilitate this becoming a national coordinated response we would have to creatively use open digital structures to federate these solutions.
Above is just the start of a proposed list, the process of public brainstorming could expand and filling the gaps as needed.
In conclusion, life on the cut has a strong community that is weakly bound by bureaucratic structures, there is a good opportunity to build a movement towards a more utopian/practical alternative to mainstream ratrace society. Currently boating is small and marginal, it is outside of the view of traditional power politics with the transition from British Waterways to CRT we are part of a small Conservative experiment in self-management, this experiment like many coming out of traditional politics is a fantasy and will fail, left as it is boating will fall back into the old bureaucracy and thus be devoured by market relationships, our community though strong is fragile and is unlikely survive this transition.
The challenge for us is can we use the opening of this failing experiment to build something more interesting, to sustain our lifestyles and traditions to strengthen our communities and freedoms. And to raise our eyes a little bit can we be a small change in the larger world.
UPDATE: the has been a long comment thread on #failbook which will add as another post
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 3/29/15 11:10 PM
The way forward for aggregation is to break away from the current failed strategies, and to make it “ethical”.
This will need the technology that Dave Winer is pushing, amongst others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
We need a clear separation of display formatting and content. In other words, content is published and formatted on the home site and displayed there, but it is aggregated to other sites as metadata. The content is still loaded from the home site, but the formatting is “hinting”, not finished formatting – the finished look and feel is defined by the aggregating site – the content (and hinted formatting) is loaded from the home site.
Thus the content is viewed from both the aggregating site AND the home site. Any edits or comments are published to and loaded from the home site. How they are displayed is up to the viewing site.
*** some temporary dynamic caching can be implemented to make scaling work, as needed ***
It’s simple technology that makes aggregation real rather than stealing. How does current “bad aggregation” work? A number of ways:
1) Content is simply republished onto a new server. Comments and views are separated – the content is “stolen” from the host publisher site. This is the favourite parasitic strategy for the dotcons like huffingtion post etc.
2) Headlines or excerpts are republished with a link back to the full article on the host site. Kinda OK but limited.
3) A silo is created and people are encouraged to publish their stores directly there, as done by projects such as Oximity. This is the most common and worst outcome.
How would what I am proposing be different? The outcome of this simple technology would be a widespread explosion of different sites full of content with radically different looks, feels, interfaces etc.
Content would spread organically. It would be placed in niche sites and good content pushed to the top sites to much larger distribution than you can get on any platform at the moment.
In my opinion, all current distribution is broken, we have to reboot.
Tools to use
Use RSS as the basis of the network to get 98% coverage of content from the project launch. And to give an easy output for other projects to build on. Existing CMS’s like wordpress etc can then be used as sources and with plugins can become full members of the network.
Published Date 3/1/15 12:43 AM
My test wind mill, works, made from PVC piping a a small electric motor and a quadcopter blade for the rotor. Puts out 2-3v in a small wind.
Testing the aluminium scaffolding pole tower with rope, 3m in hight, with the boat hight thats just less than 5m.
Cutting notches in the fencing post holder to anchor it in place.
Happy volunteer helper.
The windmill is up with some more help, still using a rope as a break till am happy it will stay up for the night.
Using cheap ratchet straps to hold it in place, I dont think these will survive the sun come spring so will have to be replaced with wire.
Testing on Walthamstow Marshes.
Published Date 2/27/15 1:37 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality is being regulated.
Net neutrality is a good thing the open web works because of it. But legislating around net neutrality is dangerous as it opens up the actuality existing open web to the power of lobbyists. Historically the web has been shaped by undefined “traditions” built on open industrial protocols. This “open web” is starting to become thin with the enclosures of the dotcoms.
We are now resorting to “regulation” which takes this nieve working “open” inside the bureaucracy, historical experiences of this is a bit scary. I understand we need to bite the bullet and do, but with our current politicians toss a coin into the air and hope it lands on its side…
The are some good people working on this lets hope it doesn’t go wrong, the out come will be in the small details…
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 2/23/15 3:24 PM
The are a lot of “insane” people in activism and counter-culture, its what makes it exciting, dynamic and affective. However with everything its a question of balance, lets look at how a movement stagnates, fails or growes and blossems.
A short off the top of head list
NGO’ists push limited bureaucratic thinking over everything, they get into bed with anything that can be shaped to their mind set and is fashionably fundable. They take up mind space and squander resources. The vast majority of “institutional” money goes into this.
Encryptionists – service the paranoid fuckists, they have a strong tendencies to reduce usability and create dangerous fantasises of security and anonymity. The are a lot of these as this has been a dominate way of thinking for the last 5-10 years.
Traditional media panderers have there uses for a companion, but soon start to misshape the movement to mainstream agenda’s – hard not to have this outcome.
Horizontal dotcom’sts try to use our movement to jump start their dotcom, fine if its built with the #4opens, if its not then distraction if failur and disaster if people use it – so bad outcome both ways.
Insecure and nasty lifestyles are endemic and are attracted like fly’s to any successful grassroots project and they are feed by the felandering of the Traditional media panderist – this can easily tip into being a movement death spiral.
Hidden careerist are good for movement building as tend to be the competent ones, but start to drift to NGO and media philanders to build their careerer rather than the grassroots movement.
Paranoid fuckwists are the bedroock of most grassroots campines and in small doses help hold things together, get to many of them in places of responsibility and you have out of control infighting.
Dogmatic liberals are lovely people, but a strong force for blocking sustainable alternatives, its imposable to meditate the breakdowns with a few of these at the core of any counter-culture.
On this subject it helps to be a bit “mad” to stay in grassroot movement for any leaghnth of time
The hand’s off NGO’s the is a long (hidden) history of healthy NGO/atavism synergy
The user focused KISS per2per’ists are working on the uphill project of (re)booting the #openweb.
Traditional media outreach’sts are promoting grassroots media and technology by linking it into traditional media narratives to build the world rather than misshape it.
Horizontal dotcom’s are working on “open” federated sustainability rather than closed client server “solutions”
Lifestyles are though opening up in the campaigning lifestyle flow and learning to let go and build healthy connected lives.
Open careerist, are bootstrapping the campaign while bootstrapping themselves, they take the open energy like a trosion horse into the belly of the traditional beast. Some one has to do this…
Secure organising crew is everyone job to keep it calrm and focus, and help out with the very real “offline” security and communication that activism needs.
Liberal liberals the calm and the balance of “common sense” that’s needed to keep things from going horribly wrong.
Activism is a dynamic and crazy place full of “insane” people doing fantastic things, its a balancing act to hold it all together, to much of the top and not anufe off the bottom and it quickly slides into something few people wont to be involved in – then disappears with little trace.
Did an updated version
Published Date 2/18/15 11:39 PM
DRAFT
In the last few posts I have looked at a failed organising strategy realmedia gathering, outlined a positive way out of this failer, the focused unconfrunce. But for wider understanding I think the content so far is lacking some background, lets look at an old post http://hamishcampbell.com/en/home/-/blogs/the-21st-centery here I outline how we ACTURLY organise alternatives rather than how we pretend/think/do, this is important for a good outcome.
Grassroots as it’s very nature is small, we grow from this smallness like grass, savannah and wide plans, we have loots of entwined grass’s making up the whole. From this distributed and federated ecosystem we compete with the monolithic traditional corporate media.
The link above highlights the ways we organise, only 3 have rarely good outcomes:
Open affinity group
Opaque affinity group
Invisible affinity group
The top is the best, the bottom for its limitations still works, the top is the hardiest to hold in place, the middle the longest lived, the bottom the easy fast/transitory root to social change.
With this understanding in mind, how are the all important affinity groups formed?
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination http://www.labofii.net/ spend most of their time forming such groups
Good squats form them, most successful direct action grows them like weeds.
The can come from workshops like LOII which lead to direct action, or from repeated direct actions. They can come from long term working relationships, affinity springs from people interacting around and in places of action, try to do something together and you will know who you have affinity with.
How would we use this knowledge to kick start the (re)growth of alt-media?
* We don’t organises speaker events with top down platform speakers – this is deadening.
* We don’t organise passive workshops were knowledge is thought one to many.
You seed events, with questions and processes then grow DIY
What we do do is get people to do practical things together were ever possible, most useful outcome happen from chopping vegetables in the kitchen than at a big hall event.
We have go rounds at the beginning, middle and end of every workshop were feasible. This is to bring confidence, but most impotently to allow each other to hear each’s voice/sense and sensibility repeatedly over the weekend.
The practical workshops are were the afererty is formed into connections then networks.
Cross fertilisation is needed for grassroots growth this like pixie dust can be liberally sprinkled by thouse who have an art (hart) for it over the weekend.
The weekend will plant seeds, some will grow some will fall on fallow ground, the ones that sprout should be watered with publiserty, conections and funding.
The event should be rinesed and repeted in different areas/diffrent groupings and lifestyes etc.
The whole organic network is then held together by a the 4 open on the web. Do not fall into the trap of failbook at this point.
This is the first time I have seen tredtional media talking about this http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/01/26/why-do-managers-hate-agile/