I have two good friends who work at the maternity hospital here in
Lilongwe: Deb Lewis and Joanne Jorissen. Both of them are selfless,
dedicated people with some amazing stories. They work at Bottom
Hospital, which is a great name for a maternity hospital. That is, until
you learn that it was named in relation to top hospital, which [...]
This Saturday will be the first official meetup for bloggers in Malawi.
If you have a blog and live in Malawi (or are just passing through)
please come! Pass on the word. We will be having lunch at Mama Mia’s in
Old Town Mall at 12:30pm. A map is available here:
Map to Mama Mia’s in Lilongwe
Here are the [...]
One of the nice features of VNC is that you can reverse a connection. If you are behind a firewall (or a router doing NAT) that doesn’t allow incoming connections, VNC allows you to connect to a “listening server”. As soon as a connection is established to the listening server, the “listener” gets a regular [...]
A weekend in the life of a Lilongwe-er:
Friday night we met some friends to go out for Ethiopian food. The Queen of Sheba restaurant is just an extension of the owner’s house. There are no signs, and like all of the nicer homes in Lilongwe, the house is behind an 8 foot barbed wire wall. [...]
Have you ever seen Super Size Me? It is a hilarious and effective attempt to examine and change the eating habits of a nation. In Malawi, the government is not encouraging a switch from Big Macs to brussel sprouts (there is not a single McDonald’s in Malawi - rejoice!), but nsima to rice and potatoes. [...]
A lot of interesting stuff is happening in Tunisia (which is a great place to visit BTW) during the World Summit on the Information Society there. I expect that a lot of interesting announcements will be made - I will share the best here on Hacktivate.
One thing that is supposed to be unveiled though, [...]
After reading The Nation’s article about how people are coping with the famine a friend of mine, Stacia replied with a letter to the editor. I thought her response was fascinating:
Thank you for your story in the 12 November 2005 edition of The Malawi Nation by George Ntonya “Hunger takes toll in Salima”.
I empathize with [...]
Hacktivate has been following the famine situation here in Malawi for months now. Check out my famine tag for a list of all of the stories. One of the things I have been trying to stress is that it is a very complicated situation. Well the next two posts aim to make things even more [...]
Recently Amazon launched a new service they call the Mechanical Turk. It is a very interesting scheme that allows humans to get paid for work that computers cannot do. When I tried it out yesterday, I was given the name of a business, its address and 5 different photographs that were taken near the business. [...]
The Hippo Roller looks like a pretty simple idea that could have a great impact on Malawians:
The innovative design allows water to be placed inside the “wheel” rather than carried above the wheel. The 90kg (200 pound) weight of water is borne on the ground resulting in an effective weight of just 10kg (22 [...]
