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Hitchwiki everywhere

"Aard Dictionary is a multiplatform dictionary and offline Wikipedia reader. It runs on desktop computers, notebooks and netbooks with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as well as Nokia Internet Tablets (N800 and N810) and anywhere Python, PyGTK and ICU are available.

Wanted: Wireless Researcher for project in Dharamsala, India

In 2005 I spent some time ICT volunteering for Geekcorp Mali.  And in 2001 I traveled in India and had a great time in the North.  Now, a ICT volunteer is actually needed in Dharamsala.  Contact me if you have the skills, time and you feel like an amazing experience:
AirJaldi, a nonprofit dedicated to harnessing the capabilities of the internet for the benefit of rural communities in developing countries, is looking for a highly-motivated and experienced person to take a central role in carrying out an innovative research project aimed at de

Underscores to dashes in MediaWiki (not yet)

It's clear that dashes (-) are better than underscores (_) for search engine optimization. So people have looked for ways to make MediaWiki use -. Wikihow is one of the few MediaWiki sites that behaves this way, but unfortunately even they don't seem to be running an extension for this. I tried my luck at changing the MediaWiki core (Title.php) but I'll leave this for now.

Back in A'dam

My unlimited MetroCard was still valid for a day and a half so I left it to the poor soul who was robbed from all of his belongings in Lower Manhattan - he was also staying at my host's place in Williamsburg. I had a good flight to Dublin, where I had a very pleasant stay with Dublin's superhost. The guy has been hosting more than 1000 people. Now I'm back in Amsterdam, and it feels good to be among friends. It was just a bit annoying to find out that a "1 zone" tram ride in Amsterdam costs 2,60 euro these days. I boycotted that and walked instead - with about 25 kg of extra weight.

Logos for wikis

I'd like to see some logos for the following wikis: Healthywiki, Visawiki and Wikifurniture. Let me know if you think you can make something nice, or even better, you can directly upload it to the wiki. And yeah, anything is better than nothing at all.

Silly with rsnapshot

A bit silly. I tried setting up rsnapshot to make snapshots of the entire filesystem on my server. This apparently led to a fatal exception in the Linux kernel, probably when rsyncing /dev and especially /proc. It took a bit of time before it was fixed, but everything is working fine again. I'll make sure to first try silly things such as backup / localhost on my laptop.

A beautiful day in Trashy Harlem

Trash in Harlem

Status update on 2009-07-01 at 7:50

"The recent figure I just got was over 92% of all soy grown in the Amazon is for animal consumption, not human."
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Status update on 2009-06-30 at 18:31

Let's see if the wordpress ping.fm plugin is working properly at guaka.org
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migrated guaka.org

Hopefully no one noticed my blog has moved to another server.  After almost two years of excellent (and free) service on Callum's server it's now at hetzner.de, a company offering excellent value for money and that is running on green power.  I've been using hetzner for a lot of sites that I've worked on in the past 6 months and right now I'm considering giving up my Slicehost for a new offer by Hetzner.

Some questions and answers

> Hope you are doing fine... At the outset, I am V Kumara Swamy, a journalist > with The Telegraph, Calcutta, India... I am doing a story on the concept of > couch surfing and your friend Thomas Goorden recommended your name while > responding to my queries on the same.

How I got hold of my bag

The Bulgarian border guards didn't speak English.  They also didn't understood why I was sent back.  It gave me some courage to at least get my backpack back.  When I saw 2 more people on the Turkish side I decided to walk back and give it a try.  The baksheesh border cop was human enough to walk with me to the gathering of Turkish truckers dealing with bureaucracy.  I hadn't taken Ahmet's phone number, I just knew his truck was yellow.  There seemed to be 100s of trucks.  And I couldn't recognize Ahmet among the truckers.  The baksheesh cop said (in Turkish and body language) that my truck

Three days ago in Damascus

Whenever I set an alarm, I don't actually need it.  At 5:30 I woke up, took some food from Cocina Robino, walked to the traffic lights at the Jan van Galenstraat and smiled.  After about 15 minutes a painter with an Native American name listening to good old Gabber stopped for me.

1.5 GB in my Aspire One

Thanks to Matt, who studied electric engineering, I now have 1 GB extra in my Acer Aspire One. Now I can finally run Firefox (and Firefbug) on my little work horsey. In the past week I hitchhiked a bit, and the longest waiting time was 20 minutes. The on-ramps were especially good and a French hitchhiker told me about a spot at the end of the Jan van Galenstraat in Amsterdam which worked like a charm.

Trash and Cash

In the past 2 weeks I've set up two new wikis. Trashwiki is a wiki about dumpster diving and anything else that's related to trash. There's already a tiny community, and I guess we'll soon have 100 articles.  We did copy some stuff from Wikipedia to get started, but do feel free to remove the dry encyclopedic stuff. After that I decided I needed some money.  Or cash.  So Cashwiki is a wiki about money.

1000 articles in Hitchwiki!

Today we reached the milestone of 1000 articles at Hitchwiki.org!  It took less than 3 years to get there.  Already before I found the then called "Hitchhiker's guide to Hitchhiking" I was sure that a wiki for hitchhikers was a good idea.  So I'm very happy that I moved the project to Wikia.com in December 2005. At some point I had been thinking to move it to hitchhikers.couchsurfing.com, but fortunately MrTweek was around.

Alta - Helsinki - Tallinn - Riga

Sorry about all the detail.  The last post has been a while now and I want to write it down while it's fresh. I can always rewrite it later when I'll work on my book. We tried leaving Alta for Tromso, but after 2,5 hours of a lot of cars and none stopping we decided to just head south.  It took another 1,5 hour before someone stopped. For the shortest ride of our trip, 2 km only, but it was encouraging, especially thanks to the strawberries we got from the young woman who picked us up.

Muy muy muy Alta (en el norte)

We didn't leave Stockholm the time we expected. It happened a couple of days later. And even on that Sunday we were very late, I got stung by a bee in the last moment. We went to a hitch spot I found on Hitchbase, which was rather bad actually. We got a ride after a long while and ended up in Uppsala. But we didn't want to stay there, so we hitched out while it was getting dark.

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