Paul Wheaton of permies.com made a nice video about so-called energy efficient light bulbs.
PC Olive Oil
I was at a local market last Sunday and bought some politically correct olive oil.
We have this bit of very seriously contaminated land in Amsterdam, the ‘Westergasfabriek’. It was formally a natural gas processing plant, and they’ve all but given up on trying to clean the ground. They’ve decided it’s just too contaminated, and since much of the contamination is underwater (well below sea level), trying to clean it up will only spread it. What do you do when you have a piece of land like that in the middle of the city? You build a park on it and call it a recreation area! That’s what we now have, and one Sunday a month they have an open air market there. It’s been growing in recent months, and now it’s quite large. It’s always this strange mix of mostly hand crafts, mixed in with cheap plastic crap from China that sort of looks like a hand crafts.
Recently there’s been quite a lot of growth in stands offering food, quite a lot of it hand made or direct from the farmers, and it’s quite possible to get a nice lunch there now. Or, if you do what I do, you can get a free lunch by working your way through all the free samples the different stands offer.
Anyway, I found myself trying to quietly grab a dried out piece of bread dunked in olive oil at the Groene Griek (the green Greek) stand, and I was caught. Behind the bread and olive oil there was an eager sales woman, ready to talk with the people taking samples.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch!
“It comes from a Greek farmer you know!”, she said pointing to it. “We put the picture of the farmer on the front of each bottle. You know farmers in Greece are having a hard time right now, and it’s important to help them. You know there’s a euro crisis, and they’re having a hard time selling their products for a fair price. When you buy their olive oil, we try to give them a fair price”.
“You see this one is Maria. It’s an organic family farm, and at first they didn’t know who to put on the label. They decided on the older woman. She’s 72 years old.”
“If someone like you doesn’t buy oil like this in a market in this way, it won’t get sold as Greek Olive Oil. There’s no direct market for Greek olive oil, and instead it gets mixed together with olive oil from other European countries, labelled as Spanish or Italian, and sold in supermarkets”.
“The big bottle is a recycled wine bottle you know. It saves a lot of energy to recycle a wine bottle over melting the glass and remolding it. It can just be washed and reused”.
I had to admit after tasting it, it was some of the best olive oil I’ve had in a long time. They had some other kinds, but I decided on a wine bottle of Maria. It was reasonably priced, and even though I didn’t plan on buying anything that day, I’m glad I bought this. I wonder if that sales person realized how effectively she was pushing all of my buttons that day… She probably did.
Seedy Penpals
Mel and her friend Carl Legge are organizing Seedy Penpals. The basic idea is to match you up with someone for a seed exchange. The details are laid out here. Importantly, this is mostly for people in Europe, but if you live other places she might be able to put you in touch with something similar happening locally. I think she’d like to hear about similar initiatives in other places, so she can find ways of cooperating.
One of the best things about this is Mel is in Amsterdam! Woohoo — another garden blogger in Amsterdam! That makes two of us. Amsterdam doesn’t seem like such a lonely place anymore.
Actually Mel has been around a while, I just never noticed her before. It’s not like we’re welcoming a new blogger, but I still hope you stop by and say hi to her and Carl anyway.
Raspberry Pi
Click pictures to enlarge
This is not a post about the kind of raspberry pie you make from your garden, but rather a computer with almost the same name.
I come from an information technology background, with particular emphasis on open source software. One of the important things IT and plant breeding/seed saving have in common, is you don’t need to go to school for a degree in order to learn them. The other important thing is many of the same battles are being fought over intellectual property rights and freedom to use and share.
I often think if the two worlds of seed saving and free software could unite forces, we’d be much stronger fighting our battles together. Right to food and right to information technology are not as unrelated as you might think.
In that spirit, I thought I’d write a bit about this new computer, the Raspberry Pi. In March orders were hitting 700 per second. Now demand has come down, production is up and they are in stock again. There’s no longer a restriction on the number one person can buy.
It currently costs about US$35, and it comes without a case like the above picture. It’s very small, as you can see comparing it to the pen. In my case, I splurged almost more than I care to admit for the plastic case you see below. I actually spent more money on the case than the original computer itself…
The case is really nice. I don’t remember the name of the company, but it was an amazon.co.uk reseller, and the expensive part was having it shipped to me here in Amsterdam. There are loads of cases available on ebay, but most of those also involve shipping costs from the UK.
If you want to save money on the case, you can always print out you own, with the help of this pdf file.
Not only does it come without a case, but there’s no power supply, operating system, keyboard, mouse, monitor, memory or hard disk.
Okay, so why can such a small computer that comes without a case be so interesting?
Well if you go to a store a buy a similar configuration, you can easily spend ten times as much. But beyond the cost of the computer itself, many of these missing items I listed above can be found at little or no cost, often from old discarded computer parts. Remember the one laptop per child/$100 laptop programs? Many comparisons can be made with this. The important thing about the Raspberry Pi is it’s available now, and anyone anywhere in the world can buy one.
It’s always been a bit of an issue that while computers tend to get cheaper over time, we get pushed up to more expensive models because manufacturers discontinue the less profitable ones. The Raspberry Pi is an attempt to address this problem, and make a cheap computer available.
The speed of this computer is not spectacular, but it has a very high performance graphics processor. I can imagine future versions will probably be faster, and in any case if you’re used to the Linux operating system, the performance for normal Internet surfing, emailing, downloading and so on is very acceptable.
The computer is being manufactured by a UK charity. I don’t think all the individual parts are necessarily locally sourced, but it’s assembled in the UK.
The computer is powered by a standard micro-USB connector, the identical connector used on many mobile phones and other small electronics now. It is technically possible to power it off a USB port from another computer, but the designers say you shouldn’t do this. It happily runs off a powered USB hub, that can also increase the number of attached USB devices. Needless to say, if you have a smart phone, you probably already own a suitable power supply for this computer. The designers say it should run quite happily off 4 AA batteries fitted with a voltage regulator, and for example it should be very easy to power it off a solar panel. If you’re like me and like to leave your computer on sometimes, if you are sensible about what you connect to it and run, it shouldn’t take much more power than a mobile phone.
It takes a standard USB keyboard and mouse. It has a composite video and audio out, and so it’s possible to connect it to many old TVs or monitors. In Europe we have a scart connection on older TVs, and a cheap adaptor is available to connect it to a scart. It also has an HDMI (digital video) connector for modern computer monitors and TVs. It does not have a VGA connector! The designers said this would have been a technical hurdle, and added considerably to the expense. There are HDMI to VGA converters, but these are quite pricey. There’s no reason you can’t use a touch screen (then you don’t need a keyboard or mouse, and the screen can potentially be powered off the Raspberry Pi itself via the USB), but those are still a little pricey too.
What kept me from using the Raspberry Pi the day it arrived, was the HDMI monitor connection. Many computers a few years old like mine, have a digital video port (DVI or DV, I think), with a cable that connects to a HDMI monitor. The Raspberry Pi has an HDMI port, and so you need an HDMI to HDMI cable. This is pretty common and inexpensive, but many people might not have it lying around their house.
It comes with a jack for a standard wired Internet connection, but should support wireless network via USB (at the expense of some power drain).
The standard OS is Linux, but I understand Android has been ported to it, or at least is being worked on. Since the architecture is open, it’s quite likely more software will be ported to it. The computer is booted off a standard SD card, and depending on the OS and size of the card, there may be extra space on the card for storage. Otherwise, you can use a USB key or other external disk.
Have I convinced you yet?
If there are other Raspberry Pi users out there, I’d love to hear from you!
Monsanto loses in Mexico
In a small victory in the ongoing fight against GMOs, beekeepers in Mexico dependent on selling GMO free honey to European customers, have won a suspension in the planting of GMO soy. Now the fight continues to make this ban permanent
It goes to show how many of these fights come down to what we as consumers are willing to buy, and how linked together our world has become.
Cynthia, a long time reader and commenter here just sent me this link.
