Central America – Month 1

Before the superman, a zip-line of about a kilometer.

Spatially speaking, Central America is a small place. Yet, it is very dense both in population and ecology. Very narrow and split in half by high mountains, the two sides feature differing climates with differing flora and fauna. The divide is also cultural, with the Pacific side populated mostly by Spanish descendants while the Carribean coast is home to a black population which emigrated there as slaves or free men.

Costa Rica

I have mixed feelings towards Costa Rica. While it has managed to retain its natural appeal, there is no denying that it has been irreversibly spoiled by tourism. Then again, I am part of the problem, going on a rant on how hordes of westerners (otherwise known as gringos) are such a nuisance to my travelling experience would amount to hypocrisy, but I cannot help but feel like a walking wallet in Costa Rica.

Thankfully, there are escape zones in the form of national parks, where for a moment, staring at absolutely majestic trees or spying on a couple of monkeys, you feel like you are witnessing what is most precious around here: Nature.

I started my time in this country by landing in San José, the capital. I only stayed a day and took a bus to Monteverde, where I met with friends from back home for a couple of days of hiking, some ziplining and one bungee jump. Came back to San José where I remained for a few days. Not that the city is great, one afternoon is enough to tour it, there is not a whole lot to do, but I was helping a friend fix his motorcycle and also really liked the hostel I was at (and to which I came back). As a token of appreciation, he took me to the top of Irazù volcano on his bike where, a good hour ahead of the tourist buses, we got to enjoy this gorgeous landscape by ourselves.

More and more I am realizing that there is no such thing as a bad place. Your first impressions are very much governed by how pretty/safe/cheap/culturally rich a city is, that is a fact, but what will make the most difference are the people you will meet. There is fun to be had anywhere on this planet and in San José, I was blessed with the companionship of a motorcycling driving crazy stand-up comedian dutch guy and a swiss-german lady that is still a mystery to me.

So along with those two I headed to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca where for four days we chilled at the beach or in the hostel, listening to the rain on the tin roof and the sounds of the jungle. The motorcyclist still had problems with his machine but having given him all the emotional support I could, I crossed the border over to Costa Rica’s southern neighbor, Panama, in order to go explore an archipelago called Bocas del Toro.

Panama

Everybody knows Panama because of its famous canal, but prior to travelling there, I knewnothing about this country. Very much like Costa Rica when it comes to architecture, cars, fast food joints and big bucks stores my experience in Panama was totally different from my two previous weeks in Costa Rica. Panama sports nature as beautiful as in Costa Rica, but with most Panameans living around their eponymous capital, the countryside feels empty. And with much less tourism going on, you get a break.

Going across the border was an interesting experience. I now know that crossings like the one I did are the norm around here, but for a moment, it was somewhat disorienting. You need a stamp out of the country you were in, you cross a derelict railroad bridge on foot, you get your visa for the country you are going to, you pay the entry fee and you are in. Simple, takes an hour, but there was a catch, I needed to show proof that I intended to travel out of the country. Normally, a plane ticket back home would have done the trick, but since I took a one-way flight, it had to choose between arguing in spanish with the custom agent that my travel insurrance validity period was proof enough or go buy a useless 15$ bus ticket that would take me back across the border into Costa Rica; thankfully, my spanish was convincing enough.

Then, one hour by bus and a boat to take from a “garbage strewn town” (Almirante as described by the Lonely Planet) was all that separated me from my next destination. Well, not quite because Bocas del Toro is many islands, and I was recommended not to stay on the main one but to go to Bastimentos instead, and that was another boat ride away. A great decision it was. Bastimentos might also have a bit of a waste management problem, but Old Bank, the largest village, is right along the idea most have of a laid-back carribean place. Inhabited by black people who speak Guari-guari (a Spanish-english creole), the only road is a cement walkway (a much welcome break from souped-up taxis, old trucs, and general lack of street crossings elsewhere), you get places by taxi-boat and everyone is just genuinely friendly.

You are still a tourist around here and it seems like their livelihood stems from that industry, but once you say no, the bothering and sales-pitching ends there, the dude sits with you at the table, lights up a joint, offers you some and strikes a conversation over village gossip . It could be their trick after all, because as you get friendly with the locals, you end up going on a tour with them anyway but seriously, what is there not to enjoy about a boat ride in the mangrove while listening to reggae, smoking some more, drinking beers and then going for a swim deep down in a cave with bats flying past you in the dark?

A Frenchman I met back in Costa Rica told me three lies are always told by everyone who sets foot in Bocas del Toro: that you are not going out tonight, that you are going out but only having one beer, and that you are leaving the next day, because you always end up sticking around longer.

Not only did I stay longer, but I ended up going back. The nearest beach from Old Bank was a 30 minutes walk in the jungle mud, but on arrival you were rewarded with you own private spot with no houses, boats, cars, nothing; just sand, palm trees and the odd pelican. The scuba diving was affordable and reefs were gorgeous. The hostel was one cool place and the local bars were frequented by like-minded travellers and locals. You fist bump everyone and within a couple days, they know your face and you know theirs, even the chinese corner store owner becomes nice to you.

I met with my cousin in Panama city, it was his spring break and had only a week to spend. There we saw the canal and climbed up mount Ancon to get a nice view of the city and we both felt that was it. Panama city looks like Miami without the beach (too polluted). Unlike any other central-american city, it is full of skyscrapers and hotels. The wealth disparity is immense between the districts and after short while we concluded that those high-rise luxury apartment building were just residences for fiscal evasion: all the lights are out at 21h00 and given the density the streets should be teeming with life.

So we quickly, we bought bus tickets back to Bocas del Toro where we did more muddy walks around the jungle, got invited to a locals house for beers visited that cave I wrote about a couple of paragraphs ago and did some diving. I could have seriously stayed for longer but my cousin’s time was up. We took a bus across the country to David and bade farewell because my cousin’s time was up. I slept an extra night in David to get some work done during the day and then suffered through another border crossing into Costa Rica.

Costa Rica (again)

I should have made a stop in Corcovado national park to hike Costa Rica’s highest mountain, but climbing up peaks alone is not as fun, so I pressed on to Quepos, the gateway to Manuel Antonio national park.

The place is a bit of a joke. Manuel Antonio is the country’s smallest park yet it is the most visited. The coast line around is peppered with resorts. In the lineup to get inside the park (wtf a lineup?), I overheard people complaining about the waiting. Read you guide next time. The park is more like a beach/zoo combination than a conservation area. Meeting with monkeys is a certainty and they will be a meter away but that is because they’re after your snacks. Homo sapiens sapiens of all coulours and sizes are to be seen everywhere and if you are lucky, you might see a sloth or two through the binoculars of an over-expensive guide. I knew what to expect but even there, it was a disappointment.

They have fairly large trees around these parts…

Having not had enough of the pricey resort packed places apparently, I went to Jacò next. There at least the beach was nice and I was travelling with two girls from Québec, but the town itself was just a strip of surf shops an pricey restaurants. We spent a day hiking in and around Carrara national park, the one place in Costa Rica where the Scarlet Macaw is a common sight. We caught just a glimpse of them but definetly could hear their chicks: these birds are loud and just like Toucans, make a racket of guttural an unpleasant sounds normally assimilated to mammals. I did get to see one from up close in Monteverde because it had been tamed; beautiful creature. Outside the park was el puente de los cododrilos, or crocodile bridge, where, as its name implies, 20 or more of these massive reptiles can be seen basking in the sun or floating around at any given time.

Saving the turtles

While in San José over a few beers, I had the chance to meet with someone working for a sea-turtle grassroots conservation project (soon to be non-profit). His convincing argument was that everyone who got to enjoy a bit of Costa Rica’s nature ought to give back a bit of time to preserve it. Knowing I had all the time in world, I anouced him that within the coming weeks, I would come over to his village and help out for a while. My swiss friend made the same promise and found herself going there from Puerto-Viejo.

On my way out of Jacò back to San José, I sent this organization an e-mail stating that if they had a working internet connection, I would be glad to volunteer. Their answer took a while to come, but it was positive.

ASTOP (Associacion Salvemos Las Tortugas de Parismina) is the name of organisation and their goal is basically to protect their beach, a nesting ground for three species of sea turtles (Leatherback, Green and Hawksbill), from being poached. This practice used to be common place as those animals provided both a source of food and income (sea turtle eggs are thougt to have aphrodisiac properties), but now being critically endangered, there is an ongoing conservation effort to protect what little remains of their once widespread populations.

Volunteering over there consists mostly of patrolling the beaches at night and gathering eggs to bring them to a guarded hatchery to prevent them from being poached. As I write those lines, I have already been on one patrol, but since this write-up is already very lengthy, I will leave this for a separate post.

March 11, 2013March 9, 2016

The obsolete computer parts sarcophagus (or coffee table if you prefer)

A close up of the finished table with its lighting on.

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to computer parts. Over the years, I have collected a fair amount of equipment with the hope than one day, some of it might come handy. Well, a GeForce 3 from 2002 is not like wood scraps or loose electric cables, the more time passes, the more it becomes useless. Standards evolve and with them connectivity; there is just no way this type of video card will fit in a modern computer (now that everyone uses laptops too). I have had a need for small servers for some projects and an old PII with linux on it would have made a perfect candidate, but then again, the power consumption of those machines are just not worth it. A small embedded computer or shared hosting would pay itself back in no time.

One day, I came across this project through Make and thought it would be a perfect way to give purpose to all that junk, especially that like the inventor of the first table, some of it was from my first machines and while it was now devoid of computational value, still retained sentimentality. Electronic circuits have a mesmerizing power for the knowledgeable and the profane likewise. While staring at an A7N8X for hours will not give the non-engineers any further understanding on how bits are turned into pretty pictures on a monitor, it could nonetheless spark educative discussions on the general role that it plays into this process and at least help dissipate the “black box” effect of modern personal computers. So I proceeded to file the link in my ideas folder, knowing I was then lacking the woodworking skills and tools required for this type of project, and at the time not really thinking I would ever come to have my own computerpartscoffeetable.

cad_plan — A CAD plan of the table. Save a few millimeters, the end result is the exact same.

Coming back from some time in Europe and having only worked with my brain for over a year (except for this project), the time felt right for a physical challenge. Drawing inspiration from this other computer parts table, I opened FreeCAD, got drawing and in an evening came up with a design of my own: something less imposing, with more modern lines, all without sacrificing the “sarcophagus” effect.

This is not a how-to so I will spare the building details but for those that are interested, feel free to download the CAD file, leave a comment or write me. Basically, the table is build around a frame of particle board which also serves as the bed for the parts. At both ends of the frame are two dark walnut glue-ups with some chamfering all finished with several coats danish oil. Frankly I was not expecting the end-result to be so stunning, the images do not do it justice. The panes of glass fit in a grove carved in the leg members and with the top glass being 10mm (3/8), this makes one solid and stiff piece of furniture. It takes two fully gown men to move it around.

The table is lit up from two led strips at a 45 degree so they can illuminate both the top and their respective side. Powering the strip is the actual only functional circuit of the whole display: a switching power supply I built for the occasion (also something that had been sitting on a shelf for a couple of years).

Money-wise, the project was a bit on the expensive side. I did maximize reuse and recycling, but as every woodworker will confirm, precious wood will cost you, in fact a lot more that what is normally found in hardware stores. Add to the total the price of thick custom cut glass panels and the addition is somewhere around 400$. A coffee table at Ikea is a tenth of that price, but the commonalities ends with function: there is nothing like the quality, craftsmanship, the beauty of a solid piece of wood furniture.

Since I am travelling again and did the finishing touches the day before my departure, I cannot provide a picture with a few happy people around some empties. For now, it is quietly sitting in my workshop under a protective blanket, patiently awaiting my return for merry moments with friends or a lazy coffee the Sunday morning after.

Making sure everything is going to fit together.

Gluing up the boards together. These boards were then sawed in half to make the leg assembly members.

May 20, 2012August 3, 2014

Coffee tables with reclaimed wood and wine bottles

My friend’s apartment in Toulouse, France, was really lacking furniture so I challenged myself to find a design I could build with whatever materials I could reclaim from the garbage, a budget of 10€ and nothing for tools but a saw, some sanding paper, a drill (or the kind of stuff not-so-manual people keep in their toolboxes).

While browsing instructables, I came upon what I felt was the most promising design, the Ten Green coffee table by Zero-Waste. It is built with easy to come by materials (wine bottles and wood), but what I found problematic was the hardware used for the tensioning system, which for the three levels of tables would have costed me at least 50€. While it certainly looks great, it was totally over my budget so upon realization of that fact at the hardware store, I got my brain to work and stated walking up and down the alleys for inspiration and quickly came to figure out a more economical solution with nothing but screw eyes and strings.

The wood: a pallet

Finding wine bottles is trivial (especially in France), but cheap wood is another story. There were plenty of discarded pallets in the streets, but it took me a while to find a suitable one. It had to be large enough, clean (ie: mostly free of dirt, cement and/or paint) and built with decent quality wood which for pallets is very uncommon. I forgot to take a picture of the whole pallet so this one does not quite do it justice. It was a pain to carry across the city, back-breaking work cutting it and immensely tedious to sand the pieces manually but I managed to build my two tables out of it.

Apart from the physical hardships of working without power tools processing the pallet into decent looking surfaces was a piece of cake. I cut up the pallet in even size planks (which numbered 30) and then sanded them down to remove some coarseness (they use very low grade timber). I then assembled them into levels and drilled the four corners of the bottom levels with a hole large enough for the neck of a bottle to fit in.

The wine bottles: Cabernet-Sauvigon, Shiraz, etc.

The part most will enjoyed the most. Be careful though, wine bottles vary in shape between brands so you should buy bottles in four. If you want bottles very quickly ask a nearby restaurant if he can put them away for you and come pick them up after a service.

Assembly

A detailed view of how the rope is kept under tension

With two levels done, I screwed eyes at the eight inside corners of the table, inserted the wine bottles and layed the table upside down to build the tensioning system. Starting from a bottom eye, I routed the string in the upper eye and then to the opposite corner and down again; Tied both ends and repeated for the other side. To prevent the ends of the strings from fraying, I dipped them in melted candle wax. Then, all there there was left to do was to put a long enough (to give torque) wood screw with an unthreaded shank between the two strings where they met in the middle of the table and turn to tighten the rope. Once I felt there was enough tension I simply drove the screw in the surface above to lock the whole system in place. Make sure the string is able to withstand a fair amount of tension because you need some if the bottles are to be kept tightly sandwiched between the two levels.

Assembling a two (or more) level table was a matter of simply repeating the process. The two level table ended up being more stable because the wood was just thick enough for the neck of the upper level bottles to lock itself inside the dip of the bottle below. The necks will make nice feet but If you want more adherence on the floor or want to protect it, you can put back corks into you bottles. Also, you are by no means limited to wine bottles, it could be beer bottles (on a good night with a few friends, you can get enough for a full shelving unit), or hard liquor bottles (but they take more time to accumulate in quantity).

I had to build a jig to make straight cuts

November 11, 2011March 2, 2014

Partitioning an Ipod to FAT32 and ext3

I recently inherited my sister’s “defective” (but fixed for 5$) 120GB Classic Ipod and managed to partition it the way I wanted. It was not a trivial process so I tought I’d share my experience with the web so others can benefit from it.

My music library is far from being 120GB so even if I feed the Ipod all my tunes, I’d still have a lot of free space on it. Granted, you can mount the Ipod as a mass storage device and stuff the rest with anything, but here’s the catch: Ipods will only format to FAT32 or HFS+ file systems if you use iTunes. As a consequence, if you pick HFS+, you will not be able to use them on windows and some *nix (if they lack the HFS+ support module) and if you choose FAT32, backup solutions such as backtintime will not work (they need a journaling file system).

So I took to partitioning my Ipod with two different partition using a different file system for each, FAT32 and EXT3. I tough it would be a simple task, but turns out that it wasn’t. Just formatting the Ipod and letting gtkpod rebuild it did not cut it; the device would stutter, only play the first few seconds of each track and give off artifacts while displaying the CD covers. And when plugged in iTunes, the software would report the device as corrupted and offer me to reset it. I thought that gtkpod must be missing on something so I should use iTunes instead yo rebuild it, but iTunes would still ask me to reset my iPod. Here is what worked after a fair amount of tinkering:

Reset the iPod with iTunes (on a different computer since this tutorial assumes you are using a *nix).
Plug it on Linux and run the following command on the user partition. My Ipod is a 6th generation classic, there is no partition for the firmware, it sits somewhere on the MCU flash, but it appears that older Ipod use a firmware partition so leave it alone. Paying attention to that particularity, here is the commands you need to run:
1. Unmount the plugged int Ipod with umount /dev/sdXY Where X is the device letter of your Ipod and Y is the partition number.
2. dd if=/dev/sdXY of=ipod.bk bs=512M Where X is the user partition of you Ipod and Y is the partition number. This will effectively copy 512MB of raw bytes from you Ipod partition and save it to the ipod.bk file.
Next, take your Ipod and format it the way you want using fdisk. If you have a firmware partition, do not destroy it! Keep the following points in mind:
1. Use a Master Boot Record (MBR)
2. All partitions should be primary
Finally: dd of=/dev/sdXY if=ipod.bk bs=512M Where X is the user partition of you Ipod and Y is the partition number. This is going to copy back that 512MB file we extracted earlier from the Ipod, setting that partition the way it was before the repartitioning.

Voilà! Plug your Ipod in, upload music with you favorite app and do backups with your file system of choice. Mine is happily working with that setup: Ipod stuff on FAT32 and backintime on EXT3.

The quirk I got with this technique was that both iTunes and the Ipod report the full size of the internal hard drive as being available for music while in reality its not; it looks like the firmware keeps a record of the empty space withing the files of the user partition (why it is not computing it is anyone’s guess). You should probably be careful not to fill it up to a point where the two partitions would overlap (although that should not happen if the firmware is paying attention but then again, not tested).

Enjoy!

September 14, 2011December 16, 2011

Climate change (again)

Posted here: http://climaterealityproject.org/2011/08/26/what-climate-change-deniers-and-carbon-dioxide-have-in-common

Friends!

I think we let ourselves carried over by the first’s commenters’s misconception about CO2. The debate (if there is to be one) should be about the post and in there, it’s indicated verbatim that CO2 isn’t toxic to humans and that it’s the greenhouse effect that is potentially harmful for the earth as a closed system.

Climate change is in my opinion part of a bigger issue: one of resource management. The earth can certainly afford a bit fossil fuel burning and resource usage as anyway, it will one day be engulfed by the heat of the sun as it expands towards its red giant state.

However, the alarming rate at which we are conducting those activities will very likely make us fall prey to Malthus’ law (population grows until ressources are all consummed, famine occurs and then population resorbs massively) very soon instead of us as a species living to see ourselves getting cooked by our star.

Technology (not policy) has certainly helped us averting that for while, but it won’t last forever if we keep consuming and growing like we are right now. As Carol Pullitzer clumsily suggested, it is not cars and industries that pollute and use resources, it’s humans; feel free to have you own conclusions about that, hers (birth control) is perfectly sound even if it is nowadays synonym with totalitarian policy.

And that is all simply because the earth is a closed system, and that you cannot have infinite physical growth (economy of growth, yay!) inside a closed system. The earth is a balancing act, and we shall see return of pendulum sooner than expected if we keep going down that route.