Month: September 2010

Miscellaneous, Rants

Unlock Your Huawei E160

Safaricom's Huawei E160 USB modem — Safaricom’s Huawei E160 USB modem

I use a Safaricom-branded Huawei E160 USB modem to connect to the Internet over 3G from my apartment in Westlands. It works great but Safaricom has locked the device so it only works on their network—an anti-consumer move they probably learned from the likes of AT&T. We have four different mobile providers in Kenya, each one of which sells their own custom-branded Huawei modems. The other providers are small fries compared to Safaricom, but they love to play catch up so they’ve locked their modems too. Wanna browse on Zain? Buy a Zain modem! Thanks for nothing…

Kenya, Teaching

Hacking on Bioruby

Last week the Regional Student Group of Eastern Africa brought fifteen biologists, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists to ILRI for a three-day hackathon. Students and professionals from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda worked in teams to augment Bioruby (a bioinformatics library for the Ruby programming language) with a wrapper for BepiPred, a tool which predicts the location of linear B-cell epitopes.

Kenya

I Hate Shoes

It was only recently that I realized I hate shoes. It’s probably something I’ve realized before, but I definitely just realized it again. Ever since I got back to Kenya I can count the number of times I’ve worn shoes: one. I have been wearing sandals every single day since I got back from my July visit home.

Maybe it was the California summer that made me remember? You know that dry, hot weather that makes you want to throw on a pair of board shorts, go down to the boardwalk and eat a taco with a cold horchata? Or maybe it was the fact that there are no good pairs of shoes here. Too stylish (can’t pull it off), too ugly (can’t wear ’em), too expensive (refuse to spend that kinda cash on ’em), etc.