I know – I know, I’m a geek! But this is cool: I overclocked my slug. The NSLU2 as supplied from Linksys actually runs the little MIPS IXP420 CPU at 133 MHz, which is half its rated clock speed. You can fix the NSLU2 to run the processor at the full 266MHz by removing a single resistor. I used a 99-cents nail clipper and snip-snip turned my little toy into a TurboSLUG. The Apache server on the slug now hosts a mirror of my website off of a 1-gig flash memory drive. There are no moving parts, so it does that not only very quietly, but now also at unprecedented speeds!

Very cool: five high-school near-dropouts build a fun, cool-looking, 50MPG, biodiesel sports car:

The star at last week’s Philadelphia Auto Show wasn’t a sports car or an economy car. It was a sports-economy car — one that combines performance and practicality under one hood.

But as CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman reports in this week’s Assignment America, the car that buyers have been waiting decades comes from an unexpected source and runs on soybean bio-diesel fuel to boot.

A car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon would be enough to pique any driver’s interest. So who do we have to thank for it. Ford? GM? Toyota? No — just Victor, David, Cheeseborough, Bruce, and Kosi, five kids from the auto shop program at West Philadelphia High School.
CBS News | Kids Build Soybean-Fueled Car | February 21

My favorite quote from one of the kids, talking about how the oil industry has no interest in supporting fuel-efficiency:

“They’re making billions upon billions of dollars,” he says. “And when this car sells, that’ll go down — to low billions upon billions.”

The NY Times has a story about an odd bit of information from pre-invasion Iraq: apparently German spies in Baghdad provided pretty important information about the Iraqi defenses to the US-led invasion forces.

Two German intelligence agents in Baghdad obtained a copy of Saddam Hussein’s plan to defend the Iraqi capital, which a German official passed on to American commanders a month before the invasion, according to a classified study by the United States military.

In providing the Iraqi document, German intelligence officials offered more significant assistance to the United States than their government has publicly acknowledged. The plan gave the American military an extraordinary window into Iraq’s top-level deliberations, including where and how Mr. Hussein planned to deploy his most loyal troops.
German Intelligence Gave U.S. Iraqi Defense Plan, Report Says, by Michael Gordon, NY Times, Feb. 26, 2006.

Although Germany’s then-chancellor Schröder vigorously argued against the invasion, German troops did perform duties that directly, and controversially, supported the war: they manned AWACS planes and checked for possible effects of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Kuwait. Germany was, and is, a major logistics hub for the US military, and German troops provide security at those facilities. So Germany was hardly neutral in this conflict, despite all the political rhetoric. Of course, now we know that Chancellor Schröder was angling for his Gazprom job, so he may have already been working for his new boss Putin.

Morally, the invasion was wrong, I think. For Germany it would have been better to stay neutral. But that would have created a major confrontation with the US, and no one in the German government then had the stomach for that. So now we’re all so “schockiert” that German spooks supplied plans to the US? I mean, once these guys had the plans for the defense of Baghdad, what were they going to do with them? Return them to Saddam’s guys? “Hey look what I found in my fax machine! I think this belongs to you guys ….” Sure, they went to General Tommy with that. Big deal. At that point, the invasion was going to happen anyway. So making it easier for the Americans to oust Saddam was not an unreasonable moral choice.

This could be it: Insta-biodiesel! A biodiesel microreactor that eliminates the separation time and potentially the need for a dissolved catalyst. Veg-oil and Methanol go in, and biodiesel comes out the other side. No mixing, no heating, no separation and no KOH (or NaOH):

“This could be as important an invention as the mouse for your PC,” said Goran Jovanovic, the OSU professor who developed the biodiesel microreactor. “If we’re successful with this, nobody will ever make biodiesel any other way.”
(…)
“Most people think large-scale, central production of energy is cheaper, because we’ve been raised with that paradigm. But distributed energy production means you can use local resources – farmers can produce all the energy they need from what they grow on their own farms.”

The microreactor, being developed in association with the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI), consists of a series of parallel channels, each smaller than a human hair, through which vegetable oil and alcohol are pumped simultaneously. At such a small scale the chemical reaction that converts the oil into biodiesel is almost instant.

Although the amount of biodiesel produced from a single microreactor is a trickle, the reactors can be connected and stacked in banks to dramatically increase production.
Tiny Microreactor For Biodiesel Production Could Aid Farmers, Nation, by Gregg Kleiner, OSU.

If they make this work, I’ll buy this guy a beer!

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni strong-armed his countrymen into “re-electing” him in Thursday’s election. That means that he gets more opportunities to trample all over his opposition and pour fuel into the brutal conflict with the LRA in Northern Uganda.

While the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is terrorizing the Acholi people, the government seems to be determined to pursue the strategy to defeat the LRA militarily. This strategy has not solved the problem in many years, and the only reason to pursue it is to keep receiving military aid from the United States.

However, most of the “fighters” of the LRA are the 30,000 children abducted from the Acholi people and forced through unspeakable cruelty into committing more unspeakable cruelty. This is essentially a large-scale hostage situation; the LRA is a cultish organization that holds an entire people hostage. This is not a scenario that lend itself to conventional military intervention, yet Museveni insists on fighting fire with fire – all on the backs of the Acholi people.

More info on this conflict on the Uganda-CAN website.

Well maybe that’s finally going to put these idiots at AOL out of business. AOL announced in January that they started giving preference to email senders who subscribe to the pay-per-email Goodmail service. So if you pay up, you can spam the hell out of AOL users.

As part of its e-mail security practices, AOL blocks the display of images and hyperlinks on most high-volume messages, except if senders are on the AOL Enhanced whitelist and maintain very low complaint rates. Beginning today, AOL will also allow senders who have undergone accreditation through Goodmail to display images and hyperlinks by default. Goodmail charges accredited companies a fraction of a cent per message sent.
AOL to Implement E-mail Certification Program. ClickZ News, January 30, 2006

Brilliant. That’ll just increase the incentive for people who want control over their inbox to sign up with a hosting provider, where you can get your own email server for something like $10/year with unlimited accounts. You don’t get a Gig of space with that, but if you get your own domain you also get a lot less spam and don’t need that much space.

The EEF is up in arms over this and they make a very good point:

Email being basically free isn’t a bug. It’s a feature that has driven the digital revolution. It allows groups to scale up from a dozen friends to a hundred people who love knitting to half-a-million concerned citizens without a major bankroll.

Email readers and senders will both lose, because the incentives for Yahoo, AOL, and Goodmail are all wrong. Their service is only valuable if it “saves” you from their spam filters. In turn, they have an incentive to treat more of your email as spam, thereby encouraging people to sign up.
AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail: Taxing Your Email for Fun and Profit, Deep Links, EEF, February 08, 2006

Now MoveOn has started a campaign to get AOL to back down. I say let’s see if this is not going to just put AOL out of business, because people are going to see all this AOL-sanctioned spam in their inbox. If that’s not going to make people think about finding a different email service, what will?

The infamous Holocaust denier David Irwing might have to do hard time in Austria. It was, and is, perfectly illegal in Austria to publicly state that the Holocaust was only a figment of the imagination of six million Jews, three million Soviet POWs, and millions of Poles, Roma, French, Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gays, handicapped people, and some brave Germans who resisted the Nazis. According to the likes of Irving, the Jews made it all up, and the gas chambers were just recreational facilities.

As stupid and offensive as these opinions are, locking Irving up for three years for uttering such nonsense may seem harsh, even to people otherwise thoroughly offended by his views. One might think in a “free marketplace of ideas,” such nonsense will easily fall by the wayside, when faced with the overwhelming, gruesome evidence of what really happened in the Nazi death camps. Even Irving eventually had to acknowledge “I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.” Ooops! Now he’s oh-so-sorry that he insulted the intelligence of half the world, soiled the memory of millions of innocent victims and trampled on the honor of the Jewish people. I think he’s getting off way too easy.

In Austria and in Germany Holocaust denial is not just a free-speech issue, or an academic debate. After World War II, when Austria and Germany rose from the rubble of the former Axis-powers, much of the identity of both states was founded on the shame and humiliation of having been perpetrators of some of the worst crimes against humanity in Europe’s history. In Britain, the question whether the gas chambers were used for de-lousing or mass-murder may be an academic argument. In Austria and in Germany it rips open still-fresh wounds. Neither Austria nor Germany are in a moral position to give Holocaust deniers a stage or an audience. Not only are these symbols and opinions too painful to be tolerated, but sadly the ground is still also way too fertile in Germany and Austria for the blame-the-Jews message.

Never again! Never forget!

Last night I watched “Team America” and laughed my butt off. They make fun of Osama BinLaden, Kim Il Sung, Hollywood and America. They depict Michael Moore as a suicide bomber who blows up Team America’s headquarters. They don’t depict, or poke fun at, the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). Maybe that’s because Islam’s holy prophet is not very funny. Especially not as funny as Michael Moore. Or North Korea’s weird, pathetic, scary leader. Or America’s obsession with bombing the Middle East into freedom. The movie is done entirely with marionettes and it features elaborate backgrounds and really awful music. It’s quite artful and has great production value. But the movie is offensive in many ways: it’s violent, crude, tasteless, oh-so-politically-incorrect. But it’s very, very funny.

In Europe and America the right to say whatever the fuck is on your mind is widely cherished, if under appreciated. Freedom of speech means the government cannot tell you to shut up just because it does not like what you say. I can say about our so-called president whatever the hell I want. But I cannot go around falsely accusing ANYONE of anything. And, of course, I have the RIGHT to wear a “Harleys suck” T-shirt to that biker bar down the road. But some of those upstanding, flag-wearing patrons there are going to see it as their patriotic duty to shove my first amendment rights up my … constipation avenue.

So, should a Danish newspaper have the RIGHT to piss off roughly a Billion Muslims? Sure. Should they act surprised when the Muslims protest? Hell, no! Should the Danes be surprised that radical Arab nationalists exploit this incident and incite major turmoil? Well, not really. Do the Arab radicals care that they look like fools to the Danes when they burn Danish embassies over a cartoon? Does the First Amendment guarantee my right to endlessly ask stupid questions only to answer them myself? Oh, whatever …

All I am saying is this: if you exercise your Freedom of Speech to sow hatred, hatred and violence you’ll reap. The well-camouflaged point of this rant is that the whole brouhaha over the Mohammad cartoons is NOT about freedom versus religion. It’s really about the culture war between the reasonable, liberal people on this planet and the few idiots, in Denmark, Pakistan or wherever, who think they can force their way-of-life down other people’s throats. Freedom is not the right to bite your thumb at anyone who crosses your path. Freedom is an ideal that requires great care and respect, especially for your brother who has a different point of view than you do. That does not mean you cannot criticize Islam or poke fun at religion. But it means you have to be very conscious of the social context of what you say and understand the potential consequences.

Humor is an important part of free speech, because a good joke can be so much more powerful than a sermon or a lecture. But you better know what your talking about, or that punchline is going to blow up in your face. In Europe, jokes about Muslims generally are about as funny as a baseball bat bearing down on a dark-skinned face. So, those who chose to use their freedom to make racist jokes and poke fun at things they don’t understand, or care about, are squandering a precious privilege. These fools don’t see that the freedom to speak also sometimes requires the wisdom to shut up. Freedom is wasted on the hypocrites. And they are not funny, either.

One year after Togo’s dictator Gnassingbé Eyadema died, his clan is again firmly in charge of this embattled sliver of a country on the Gulf of Benin. In charge, that is, with the blessing and military aid of France, Togo’s former colonial master. For February 20, talks between the opposition and the ruling RPT are scheduled in Ouagadougou, the capital of Togo’s northern neighbor Burkina Faso. But just like the rigged elections last year were merely a sham to legitimize the military coup that put Eyadema’s son in power, these talks are just another attempt to legitimize the status quo: the Gnassingbé clan is in charge of running Togo for the French corporations that exploit the country.

In a Feb 11 editorial (French) for Le Togolais, Comi M. Toulabor argues that the Togolese opposition ought to refuse to continue to “play nice” and participate in so-called reconciliation talks. The ruling clan is weakened enough by internal conflicts and several scandals, that the opposition ought to seize the moment, boycott the talks in Ouagadougou and go on the offensive. In the past, these talks have served nothing more than to placate the EU observers that the RPT “means well” and and supports democracy. As far as I have seen, all attempts of the opposition to engage the RPT constructively have failed in the past, mainly because there is no actual interest among the RPT cronies for progress or any change in the status quo in Togo. There is only interest in faking reconciliation to the degree that it placates the international community into lifting sanctions.

Reconcilliation in Togo has to happen at the grassroots level, I believe. The only way to undermine the RPTs entrenched cadres across Togo, and their grip on their communities, is to undermine the strategy of ethnic division and strife. This is a long-term strategy that will not yield immediate results. But the strategy of attacking the RPT directly has not made much progress in the last 20 years, either. If the opposition can unite and develop a leadership that is associated with ethnic reconcilliation between Ewe and Kabyé, and the many other groups in Togo, I think the RPT’s support among the Kabyé in particular will wane. Such a strategy will expose the insidious “divide-and-rule” strategy of the RPT, and thus undermine their power inside Togo, and perhaps undermine their support from abroad, too.

However, the biggest obstacle to a free and democratic Togo is not even the Gnassingbé clan. It’s their French puppet masters. The former colonial power in most of West Africa, the French government still very much regards the region as a strategic sphere of influence and for many French corporations, exploiting West Africa is highly profitable. The Gnassingbé clan has played a vital role in this racket in the past 40 years, which has been rewarded with ample military aid from Paris. As long as the French government sees the Gnassingbé clan as essential to their strategic posture in West Africa, it will be VERY difficult for the opposition to get rid of them, as the RPT henchmen are not at all squeamish about using those French guns on their fellow Togolese.

I doubt that there is much hope in pleading with the French to stop supporting the RPT. It’s worked to well for them for 40 years, so they have no incentive in changing the status quo in Togo. There may be more hope in trying to build support for the cause of democracy in Togo in the international community, but barely. The world is preoccupied with Iraq, racist cartoons and a possible bird-flu pandemic (not to talk about the Worldcup and Grammy Awards). Few outside Togo care about what happens (or doesn’t) between Lomé and Dapaong. So it’ll be up to the Togolese to find ways to force the French to drop the RPT. I think it can be done, but it won’t be easy. It’ll take an opposition that has a clear vision for Togo, that is united behind that vision, and that manages to build strong support at the grassroots level across all communities in Togo.

The first step, however, has to be to stop collaborating with the RPT, boycott the Ouaga IV talks, and make a clear, unequivocal statement to the Togolese people that the opposition stands for reconciliation among all Togolese, but not with the RPT.

A politician winning an award for speaking? About himself? That’s pretty impressive …

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) won a Grammy award Wednesday evening in a category rarely made for a politician: the best spoken word.

As the awards were announced at the ceremony in downtown Los Angeles, Obama was finishing his work day in Washington. He accepted the honor with humility and humor.

“While it is rare for a politician to speak for hours on end and be given an actual award, it is very flattering to win a Grammy,” Obama said in a statement. “But, I can assure you I’m not thinking about quitting my day job.”

Obama painstakingly recorded his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” over a combined stretch of about 15 hours in the sound booth.
Sen. Obama wins Grammy for words, Chicago Tribune, February 8, 2006

Barack Obama is a rising star in the Democratic party, and with his oratory talent he made a name for himself during 2004 election. His campaign for one of Illinois’ Senate seats beat first Jack Ryan and then Ryan’s replacement Alan Keyes easily, and Obama received 70 percent of the votes.

This report in the news raises hope for a comprehensive AIDS cure – in a decade, or so:

A chemical has been identified which could halt the progress of HIV, US scientists say.

Lab tests of the chemical – CSA-54 – at Vanderbilt University show it disables the virus’s ability to infect cells.

It was shown to attack HIV in a new way – targeting the membrane of the virus to stop it locking on to cells.

UK experts said the research was interesting – but warned a great deal more research was needed before its true value could be known.
Chemical ‘blocks HIV infection’, BBC News, 9 February 2006.

I really hope they can make this work.

The three little Danish newspaper pigs published cartoons poking fun at the Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Humor Be Upon Him) and now the Muslims are going to “huff and puff” and burn the Danish flags and boycott Danishes, and all those other goods the Danes export to the rest of the world. Well, congrats to the three little Danish pigs, and all the other “brave freedom fighters” at other European publications for taking such a bold and well-thought-out position on the Christian-Muslim cross-cultural dialog! Muhammad with bomb-turban??!! Gotta love that freedom of speech thing. Let’s go ahead and piss off a few more Muslims, let’s throw some more fuel on the fire. Not enough that Paris was burning recently, what European city will be next? Copenhagen?

And boo-hoo to the oh-so-enraged Muslim world. C’mon, let’s have a little sense of humor here!! I mean, who was it who insulted your Holy Prophet (pbuh)? The DANES! Europe’s humor-central! Or should I say “the joke(ers) of Europe? I mean, these guys didn’t even make decent colonialists!! When The French, the British, the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Germans, the Dutch, the Belgians divided up the world among each other, and extracted the wealth out of India, Arabia, Africa and the Amazon, the Danes colonized … Greenland. And Iceland. Yeah – nice glaciers you guys! Great skiing! But of course those troublemakers were just JOKING! Because they are a FUNNY people!

So now they have done it again. The sharpest minds of the Danish humor elite have come up with this brilliant idea: let’s publishing dumb, offensive and racist “jokes” to incite outrage across the Muslim world in order to expose the absurdity of human existence. Brilliant! Yet more of this entertaining footage of those “humorless” Arabs burning flags and chanting scary-sounding slogans on CNN. Maybe Rasmussen is going to declare a “Humorless Axis” and next year Denmark is going use “joke and awe” to invade Syria, to restore a sense of humor to the Arab world?

Seriously: this story shows how easy it is for the radicals in this crazy world to hijack the discourse and turn it into the tired, old “us and them” bullshit. “Those Arabs can’t take a joke” versus “those Europeans are always picking on us.” It would be funny, if it wasn’t so painful to watch.

In his State of the Union address yesterday, President Bush spent a measly two minutes and 15 seconds on the lack of energy independence of this country. Literally, he spoke of this country’s “addiction” to imported oil, and he pledged to reduce that dependence in the next 15 years. He said this:”Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.” Literally. Most people assumed that meant he wants to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025 with other energy sources. Yet, it turns out his pronouncement has been taken too literally:

WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

Administration backs off Bush’s vow to reduce Mideast oil imports, Wed, Feb. 01, 2006, by Kevin G. Hall, Knight Ridder Newspapers

Maybe, when the White House gives the text of Bush’s speeches to reporters, they should mark the parts that are to be taken literally, so the they don’t confuse everyone.

Last night I stayed up until 2:00 AM tinkering with my SLUG server – a modified Linksys NSLU2 device. V1 ran off of an old, noisy hard drive attached to it via the USB port. Last week I got a 1GB flash drive and I formatted it with an ext3 partition. The plan was to get rid of the hard drive and run the SLUG off of the flash drive.

After several failed attempts to save the configuration and re-unsling to the flash drive, I just went ahead and re-flashed the SLUG with unslung 5.5, using the Windows SerComm Upgrade tool to upload the firmware. After I unslung to the flash drive, the machine booted just fine to the rootfs on the drive. I proceeded to install an FTP server, CUPS (for the attached printer), Apache 2 (incl PHP module) and a small browser.

Now my SLUGsite lives at yovo.dyndns.info and I plan to use it to supplement my regular website with the extra space. Also, running CUPS on that little box, I can now print to a color ink jet printer attached to the device and turn off one of the desktop computers in the basement that used to run just to make the printers available on the network.

Last week I finally got to watch this strange movie “Grizzly Man” about Tim Treadwell, the ultimate bear nut. Treadwell spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park in Alaska literally among huge grizzly bears. In October 2003 Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie were killed and eaten in their camp in the park by one of the grizzly bears.

In the last five summers with the bears he took cameras along and filmed the bears, foxes and himself in the rough, beautiful Alaskan wilderness. The bears were so habituated to him that he got truly amazing footage standing just feet away from the grizzly bears. Werner Herzog, the famous German movie director, got access to the more than one hundred hours of Treadwell’s footage. He decided to use this material to create a documentary, as “in this material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty and depth.” Herzog says. He added interviews with people who knew Treadwell, or who were knowledgeable about the bears in Alaska and wove all this into a fascinating tale “of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil.”

It is easy to dismiss Treadwell as a nutcase. He was a recovering addict who went native among the bears and increasingly cast the world of the humans as an adversary. He renounced the complexities of the human life for the simplicity and perceived perfection and harmony of the wilderness. Although Treadwell’s naive view of nature and the wilderness he was immersing himself in stands in stark contrast to Herzog’s view of a chaotic and merciless universe, Herzog does not judge Treadwell. “What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears, and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a saviour.”

This is the tension that carries this film. It’s a compelling story of the desperate search of a human for a connection to life, nature through wilderness, through bears. Treadwell’s search for this connection is deeply human. To varying degrees, we all have this desire for this connection, I know I do. Did Treadwell take this desire and turn it into a quest that gave his life meaning? Or maybe it was just another escape from reality, just another self-destructive addiction, that eventualy killed him in an overdose, of sorts?

Lately I have found myself staring at this. It’s mesmerizing and it makes me wonder about the quality we call “random” (as opposed to the mathematical concept). I think our brain is just really wired to try very hard to extract meaning out of visual stimuli and it is very hard to get it not to try, even when you turn off the ominous soundtrack:

Flickeur (pronounced like Voyeur) randomly retrieves images from Flickr.com and creates an infinite film with a style that can vary between stream-of-consciousness, documentary or video clip. All the blends, motions, zooms or timeleaps are completely random. Flickeur works like a looped magnetic tape where incoming images will merge with older materials and be influenced by the older recordings’ magnetic memory.

Careful with the Flickeur. You might just find yourself staring at it for hours … until it eats up all your computer’s memory and the poor thing goes belly-up.

After the panel discussion about biodiesel on Friday, I returned to CCCC in Pittsboro on Saturday morning for girl Mark’s biodiesel 101 class. The class was packed and Mark commented on how great the interest in biodiesel is in NC compared to other parts of the country. In the class we had a good cross-section of biodieselers from around the state: truckers, farm workers, students and engineer-types. Some were just biodiesel hobbyists who want to make a little biodiesel for their VW or Mercedes and some were business owners, who want to reduce operation cost for their diesel equipment by making their own fuel.

The class was great. Mark quickly established her authority in all things biodiesel and diesel technology by covering all the biodiesel basics and answering many very specific questions on Saturday morning. The class was a regular crash course in biodiesel making – no-frills and all nuts-and-bolts, mono-and-diglycerides, dewatering-and-titration. We spent some time in the classroom, more time in the lab, and on Sunday we took a field trip to the Piedmont Biofuels farm. We got to see their setup – the 500 gallon, double-jacketed, water heated mothership. Finally we spent several hours in the auto shop at CCCC and put together four appleseed reactors.
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This weekend was fun. Friday after work, I drove down to Pittsboro in Chatham County for a 2-hour discussion forum on biodiesel. And Saturday and Sunday the program was all-biodiesel, all-day, at girl Mark’s workshop at Chatham County Community College.

Both events were organized by the tireless folks at Piedmont Biofuels Coop. Friday’s discussion brought together a crowd of 75 – from curious biodiesel novices to seasoned brewers and activists from all over North Carolina. Biodiesel coops and biofuels-related organizations from all over the state were represented: Burlington Biodiesel, Blue Ridge Biofuels out of Asheboro, Cape Fear Biofuels from Wilmington, Appstate Biodiesel Boone, Bull City Biodiesel (yours truly :)) and Carolina Biodiesel (Mark’s new baby – still under the wings of the Forest Foundation) as well as the folks from Pritchard’s Mountain, from the Human Kindness Foundation and from Guilford Tech. Last, and most importantly, Piedmont Biofuels, the organizers of the event were well-represented.

The discussion covered a lot of ground, from from production issues to pricing and economics, to organizational questions. One suggestion that seemed to get some traction was the idea of forming a state-wide biodiesel council the coops could join. That would allow each member coop to honor memberships reciprocity. A brief discussion touched on the question of a tax holiday for biofuels in North Carolina. On Sunday in a smaller group, Lyle elaborated on some of his experiences, and frustrations, lobbying in Raleigh for this issue of a tax holiday for biofuels.
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The SLUG’s alive! Friday I bought another Linksys NSLU2 and spent most of the weekend hacking it. I re-flashed it with the uNSLUng v5.5 beta firmware, configured a thttpd web server, a CUPS print server and a set up an automated torrent downloader.

The little Linksys box is sold as a home-network NAS device for external USB drives. It does that quite well: the first one I bought runs on the OEM firmware and reliably makes my 300GB main storage drive available on our little home network. When I read more about this clever $90-device, it became clear that I could replace two of the full-size PCs that normally run 24/7 in our basement to make printers available and run other processes.

So, I hooked up an old backup harddrive, and dug into the Linux system of my SLUG. The nslu2-linux.org site is extremely helpful and provides how-tos and documentation. I am not much of a Linux hacker, but this is a great opportunity to figure out some of this stuff. After some RTFM moments I got the web server and print server going. The only thing that bothers me about this setup is the noisy damn harddrive. I’ll see if I’ll get a new, quieter drive, or maybe run this setup off of a flash drive. In any case, I’ll have to redo the whole thing, since the uNSLUng process does move parts of the OS to the USB device and the additional packages are also installed on the USB device.

The reason is that the “quiet computer” aspect of this project is half the fascination. With a flash drive, or two, plugged into the SLUG, this is a quiet, low-power computer, smaller than a CD box-set and more powerful than my old Pentium I laptop. The processor is a 130 MHz ARM on an Intel board, which is apparently what Linksys usually does. The small built-in RAM disk can be supplemented with external storage, and when you add a paging file, this little box can be thoroughly souped up.

Finally, if you really want a “high-performance SLUG” you can overclock the CPU, or rather de-underclock it. The little box comes throttled down, and following the instructions, you can pop off a transistor and restore it to its full 266 MHz glory. That’ll be a project for another three-day weekend …

WOW – deep-fried nerd alert! Are you ready for the grease PC? The guys at Tom’s Hardware posted the report of some Germans who had the – uh – intriguing brainstorm to take a high-performance PC, rip out all the fans and dip the whole thing in 8 gallons of canola oil, to see what would happen:

Common sense dictates that submerging your high-end PC in cooking oil is not a good idea. But, of course, engineering feats and science breakthroughs were made possible by those who dared to explore the realms of the non-conventional. Members of the Munich-based THG lab are only too happy to confirm this fact. And not only did we find that our AMD Athlon FX-55 and GeForce 6800 Ultra equipped system didn’t short out when we filled the sealed shut PC case with cooking oil–but the non-conductive properties of the liquid coupled created a totally cool and quiet high-end PC, devoid of the noise pollution of fans. The PC case – or should we say tank – also offered a new and novel way to display and show off your PC components.
Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil, by Frank Völkel, Tom’s Hardware, 9 Jan 2006

Oh boy – German engineering, oder was? They should really use recycled fryer oil instead of virgin oil. Makes more environmental sense.