From: Abdul Hameed Sherzad
Date: November 21, 2009 4:21:30 AM EST
Subject: A New connection

Hi everyone,

Now at the top of a water tank almost 4 kilometers from the public health hospital tower [where there is a cluster of FabFi antennas].

We just set up a new connection for Hafiz successfully.

[...]

So Hafiz’s uplink reflector is that big antenna which will probably give signals to me and Rahmat because Hafiz’s house is on our direction. If i can get signals from Hafiz’s uplink, i’ll set up my uplink ( which is obviously redundant then) for Zahin, who wants a connection too.

It took us only 3 hours. pretty easy, huh.

Thanks Keith for your help on skype. That was a great help.

we learn new things as we work on more connections.

thanks,

–
~Hameed

I came to MIT as a defense engineer, devoted since childhood to putting the best technologies in the hands of our nation’s servicemen in their pursuit of security for American citizens. I believed, and still do, that American soldiers should carry with them tools that are easy to use, don’t break, on which they can entrust their lives, and are better than everyone else’s. These systems can always be made a little better, improvements measured in ever ­smaller time or weight units, so that defense research lives on the bleeding edge of science and manufacturing capabilities. When I began to share with others the joy of a career in making things and solving problems, I found that many people (especially students) lacked basic understanding of fundamental engineering principles. Once introduced to these ideas, students would rocket into frenzied design­-build­-evaluate-­redesign cycles as they experimentally discovered the world. I also quickly realized that much of the underserved first world and underdeveloped third world lacked access to basic engineering concepts and old ideas from the time man became industrialized. It became clear to me how necessary it is for people to speak openly with each other about ideas and share knowledge. The great divide isn’t to have or have­ not, it’s knowing about the thing at all.

I took leave from defense engineering to travel the world and bring a startling concept where I go. It is a crazy and premature idea that has potential to change the way the world thinks about technology consumers and producers, and even where the riches of the world lie. I ventured out to find the special places and people that share my passions and unending hope in people, finding applications for technology and learning about the social and community needs that go hand in hand with development. Several labs around the world now comprise a limited experiment including dry dusty rural India, a shipping port in Ghana, an Apartheid-­era township in South Africa, coffee­-growing high mountains of Costa Rica, Arctic sheep and reindeer valleys in Norway, and even inner city Boston. It is an exciting modern day version of trekking off into the jungle with crates and crates full of sensitive equipment in Dr. Livingstone style, and it’s very cool. (The multitudinous biting insects and heat are probably still the same.)

In the course of several itinerant years, my focus shifted from the engineering details of energy conversion and mechanisms to the social and individual implications of making complex, high precision devices in primitive places. My master thesis was a partial, mostly technical, description of my experiences building solar and wind energy conversion devices in primitive and remote places in the world. Early on, I mistakenly believed that I was embarking on an engineering project with some broader consideration for energy policies. I was genuinely surprised to discover my greatest impact is to address the crippling lack of world­wide application of technology for peaceful and humanitarian goals.

–
(reprinted and slightly edited from my masters thesis, in answer to a recent journo inquiry)

Everett dog is ready to go and impatiently awaits the humans. We assemble one FabFi antenna at the base of Mt. Wachussetts and Jonathan Ward straps it to his back. Jon and Kerry Lynn set off for the summit. Keith Berkoben and I drive to the first test site 6km from the summit but a ridge occludes the view of the mountain. We drive on to the Sterling Airport, a small airfield with a great, clear view of the Mt. Wachussetts. We assemble the second FabFi antenna and point by eye. By phone we give a bearing to the summit team and they point their antenna by compass. It was almost too easy, just like that both routers were talking to each other. We continue to make measurements after the sun set until the summit team’s battery runs out.

Technical details will be available at the FabFi blog sometime this week.

Full res photos available at (beta) Thalia site: http://fab.thalia.mit.edu/?type=album&id=d1c9624a-c7fe-11de-8bd4-3597f7dac090 (someone please let me know how this works for you!)

hurray! FabFi from Wachussetts Mountain to Sterling Airport, 10.41km.

More info and pics to come (see http://fabfi.fablab.af/blog/)

I was asked about what makes good fab lab spaces and thought that would be a good thing to ask everyone who is actually in a lab. (Despite building many many labs, I never actually get to pick a space, I’m just told to “make the best out of this”…)

So - what would you say are good features of a fab lab space (and bad ones?) What works really well in your lab that you would recommend to others? What do you hate about your lab?

Hi Everyone,

I hope you are all doing good.

Finally we were able to figure out the problem in Sayad’s connection- the ‘Transmission Power’ was 19 where as no other router in our network had any number in that part. ( I checked a few other routers for confirmation before I removed the 19 from those two routers- Sayad). When I brought the above mentioned change, then the two routers started to talk to each other. Now Sayad is up. His internet connection is working now. Another person ( close by) is also connected to Sayad’s router by a cable.

They were so happy ( felt screaming and jumping) when I screamed ‘Google’ at the top of a roof on a balcony.

We are going to start working on another connection after we get two routers from the person who wants to have connection from the Lab. ( Zahin, our basketball friend). That will be in three days.

Thanks,

Hameed (and Rahmat)

That’s a lot of FabFi.

Shembot - #3 is you. Yep, the triple nickel is now high speeeeed.

The sun set over the hindu kush and softened the dusty sky into hues of pastels. The sun was low enough in the sky that it was a distinct fierce red-orange flaming ball racing for the jagged mountain range. I raced up the ladder to the top of the water tower one handed, holding a pile of cat-5 cables and a linksys router in my left hand. All Afghans were keeping one eye on the sun and were licking their dry, parched lips. We wanted to reprogram the router and get back to the roof top at SR’s house before iftar, the evening meal which breaks the ramadan fast.

Step, step, awkward let-go-and-grab-the-next-rail, step, step, let-go-and-grab, step, step… cripes this is a tall tower. The ladder is steep and I have to climb slightly askew, turned to a side so my knees and shins don’t crash in to the rungs.

Finally at the top of the tower I find Keith, Talwar, and H sitting at the very top surrounded by a forest of bigger FabFis. The big ones make it difficult to walk around on the ledge so most have been banished to the very top of the tower. Talwar looks like a kitten suddenly caught in mid-play in a tangle of a large amount of blue ethernet cable.

“This … FF24 … “, I somewhat say between breaths of air - now that I’m not rowing I’m pathetically out of shape. “… has old .bin. Needs new FF2.0 <gasp>…. must… <gasp> <gasp> before iftar… <gasp>”.

Keith nods. “Yeah, I understand. Sundown soon… say no more.” and takes the router from me and starts to look around for a short net cable. I pathetically manage to hand him a cable I brought for this purpose, then sit down cross legged and start repairing the longer cable I brought up. It’s a little funny that the best IT / net / computer tech support equipment in Jbad is at the top of the tower.

I just manage to line up the multicolored cable in the correct order when Keith starts yelling - “Amy! Amy! AmyAmyAmy! H JUST CAUGHT A KITE!”

What? Did he say “caught a kite?” I try to figure out what that might rhyme with, what he must have meant. But by then my head has turned all the way around and indeed H is standing 5 stories up on the top of a concrete water tower flying a simple diamond-shaped red kite. From my perspective he is a silhouette, standing in front of an red-orange sun and the thin paper of the kite is backlit. It’s a boy in salwar kameez lunging and tugging and gesturing at his kite with the entirety of Jalalabad at his feet and the tall mountains anchoring the pastel layered sky. The moment is out of a movie and it is spellbinding.

And I’m here in the scene. I feel the cooling breeze in the rapidly darkening sky and hear the toots of the rickshaws and barks and yells and general traffic and people far below. H hands me the kite string carefully. It’s like fishing line, thin and slippery. There’s a lot of it but the end of it is frayed so it definitely broke or was cut in a kite fight. The kite literally flew by… and H reached out and caught it… and started to fly it. I start to giggle while I’m flying it, this simple nearly translucent red kite, it’s really a lot of fun.

I’m pretty tired and don’t know how long I can remain somewhat lucid.

Ok, router reprogram done, cable repaired, bundle bundle, run down ladder. Run back up ladder - forgot power brick. Run down ladder. Hand off the bundle to SR and H who tries to zip off back to SR’s house, but not before throwing up some cookies. That wasn’t slang, I really mean they were worried about us not eating and drinking and got some cookies and threw them up on to the top of the tower from the ledge. I had returned to help Talwar with his tangle of blue cable and plop, plop,…pause…plop. THOSE ARE FOR YOU MY FRIENDS! GOOD NIGHT!

What can you do but giggle more and marvel? The sun has pretty much completely slipped behind the mountain now and the sky is just fierce layers of purples blues and reds. Cookies (with heart shaped cut outs filled with jam) arc through the darkening sky and land around me. This is weird, right?

The place I’ve been calling Mudville, vaguely in the eastern part of Jalalabad, is known as Base Eckmunblahblah. It means “military logistics area” and is owned by the Department of Defense. I’ve forgotten the word exactly - today’s new vocabulary includes reshwat (bribe), tofa (gift), bakshish (tip, alms, reward, gift-for-something-you-did-or-’cause-you’re-poor) - but just like the name implies, the residential population are considered squatters and not welcome to rebuild.

It’s the kind of story that just makes you sigh because what else can you do? Long long ago the land was government owned military use land, then during the time of the war - during the mujahadeen times, the folks that seized power gave the land to people who promptly built houses. The recipients were already wealthy people and continue to be even wealthier now. These recipients don’t have the cleanest hands but no one will talk about that stuff outright. But now you get why I was learning the subtle differences among gifts, bribes, and tips.

After the legitimate government was restored, there is a stalemate because the military / government can’t or won’t bulldoze these large, expensive houses and the residents have no reason or desire to move. They didn’t pay for the land and don’t have deeds for land rights, so they also can’t sell their biggest asset. But as far as they are concerned, they were given the land and have every right to be there.

We see a cross section of people in the lab and I ask them about the flooding and damage. No one seems too broken up about “those people with the ruined houses” because they refer to them as “They are rich people. They have big SUVs. <shrug>”. There are complaints about them exploiting the situation - “Even if they have 1 or 10 million dollars they will stand there on the street and say to the UN or USAID, ‘I am a poor person and I have no house. You must help me.’”

But what about the people I see who’ve hung up sheets and mats and who’ve thrown their soaked bedding on to the street?, I ask. And I show them pictures. More shrugging. Those are only the kids. I’m aware that the pictures tell the story and I’m just not seeing. The windows alone in those houses cost over $100 and some of the debris is super ornate mirrored tile. There are beds and mattresses, not simple carpet and floor cushions. They are rich people, they can fend for themselves. One groped for the right words, then said a fat chicken will not lay eggs, that is they are so wealthy they need for everything to be given to them, they will not rebuild on their own.

The municipality sent out 500 workers again today to help remove the mud and debris. “Since the elections there is no government”, one of the residents told me when I asked him what he would do, “there is no organization, no plan. No one can make a decision.” People have sent their families to live in other houses or with relatives while they wait for foreign donations and help. Waiting is a past time here. “You people must help us, you must give to me.”