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Cooking up a tasty meal… of information (and data)

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“To cook…. yes, it’s to cook,” laughed Onno Widodo Purbo, who calls himself “an independent ICT writer who dreams to see a knowledge-based society in Indonesia.”

Dr. Purbo showed every sign of enjoying his joke tremendously.

But in a little while, things were up and running. It was about information, not steamed rice or sambal.

As participants at the PANALL2009 camp finished lunch, the diminitive former academic turned tech-campaigner mounted the stairs and began his strange demo.

By the time he finished, everyone was astounded by the simplicity of the technology he used. And it’s power.

In short, what he was doing was to take a wok — the versatile round-bottomed cooking vessel originating in China — added on a wifi pen drive, and manage to create rough-and-ready and cheap tool to extend the wireless capacity of your computer. In this way, one could link up dozens of others while sharing a single fat pipe to the Net.

This makes Net access a whole new ball game, specially in resource-poor, talent-rich countries where most can’t afford the luxury of the internet.

Purbo, a PhD, counts among his current priorities “spreading knowledge — through many workshops, demos, seminars in Indonesia — on low cost Internet access using wokbolic, neighbourhood network, open source software, internet telephony etc.”

To know more about his work, search for the terms “wokbolic” or “wajanbolic” (the “wajan” is the Indonesian term for the “wok”). The second part of the name, of course, refers to the parabolic reflector, which is what it is, even if of an unusual kind.

Some of the papers he has written are in Indonesian, but there’s enough images to guide one around.

See this Bahasa Indonesia note which gives a detailed design and step-by-step guide on how to create a “wokbolic and bazooka” antenna for 3G.

Caution: PVC tubing and aluminium tape is to be used to create this low-cost weapon against information-poverty.

Measurements have to be precise too, explains Dr Purbo, as he talks in fractions… so as to get the exact size and shape to reflect the wireless link and connect computers, almost magically it would seem.

By using this ingenuity, Purbo makes a USB wifi stick — which could link computers a few metres away — to connect over hundreds of metres. Someone was asking about using such a tool “in series” — as kind of repeater stations.

Yes, that’s possible too! This author of a thousand articles, and over 40 books, should know!

An http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-45872-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html earlier article on Dr Purbo.

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Tags: wifi, low-cost, technologies, indonesia, wokbolic, wajanbolic

Getting another chance, with Second Life

Second Life? What’s that?

I too plead guilty of only having heard vaguely of this space-in-cyberspace, till before the PANALL2009 event. In hindsight, we found that it was indeed useful, and even before the meet got together, it actually got some of the discussions going.

“HatHead’s” “photo” of a Second Life meet-up underway, before we actually got down to Penang.

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Co-ordinating an online ‘lecture’ (as Second Life helped PANALL to do earlier this month and in late May) must have been a logistical challenge. There were some timezone complications to contend with, apart from getting people familiar with the idea and how it worked. In India, it was just before dawn when the meet-ups happened. But why complain?

I made it for two such events. It was useful to virtually meet Arun Mehta and tune into his ideas once again, though I’ve known for quite some time. It was also an opportunity to encounter Jeremy Malcolm (whom I know virtually) from Consumer International before we meet up in real-life.

Unfortunately, GNU/Linux might not work too well with Second Life (or the other way around). Meaning, it was not possible to view the slides being shown as the speakers made their presentations.

“Online lectures can otherwise tend to get boring. So having avatars and the like does make the event more colourful,” Arun Mehta said, as we spoke when we met up. In hindsight, it’s a fairly useful tool which can be meet-before-you-actually-meet; before encountering it, I though this space didn’t have anything useful in it! This article on The Wikipedia points to criticism and controversy over Second Life.

But tools are what you make of them!

(Phet Sayo, before one Second Life meetup, showed how one could get an avatar to dance. Interesting! Just that I couldn’t get — on time — the instructions on how to stop it from doing so. A hard reboot later, I lost the audio channel, and couldn’t hear what was going on. But all it took was a restart into Second Life.

So do you believe in cyber-reincarnation?

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Tags: SecondLife, panall2009, pre-events