Hujambo!

I’ve written a few times about using GPRS with Linux in Kenya. First I was using Safaricom’s “Bambanet” USB device, which was merely a re-branded Huawei e220. A few months after that I sold the Bambanet and was using a Nokia 2630 over Bluetooth wireless. Last month I upgraded to a Nokia 5130 XpressMusic, and then sold it and upgraded to a Nokia 5320 XpressMusic (the 5320 runs Symbian S60, which is way more advanced than the S40 on either of my previous Nokias). The procedure is the same for all Nokia phones when using Bluetooth, but when using the USB cable there are a few show stoppers.
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I’m just kidding, because there is nothing special about going back to school (haha?). We should have started classes over three weeks ago but the information never seems to get to all the right people at the right time. Our students always take a bit of extra time anyways. So we’re starting this week. I almost started today. Here’s the breakdown of classes I’ll be teaching:

• Web development I (HTML)
• Network essentials
• Operating systems II (Unix/Linux)

So at least the course count is down from last semester, where I had five classes for awhile there. I’ve taught the networking class three times already (or is it four?), so there’s no problem there, but teaching anything new is always a bit stressful. The course content isn’t anything difficult (not like teaching Object-oriented programming with C++ last semester), but making my own notes every night gets a bit tedious. I could get notes from the other teachers but I never really like the notes. My colleagues use more of a dictation style of teaching, where as I like to write short points on the board and then talk about them.

In other news, it’s been two years since the first post on this website. Back then it was still called Sara in Kenya. In other, other news, sarainkenya.org expires (goes “bye bye”) on May 14th, so go check it out if you have never seen it. You can browse the May, 2007 archives by clicking here: http://alaninkenya.org/2007/05

Update, May 15, 2009: I have saved a copy of the old sarainkenya.org here: http://thefro.org/sarainkenya.org

I took a few pictures on my phone last month as I was around Tala and Nairobi. I don’t have any pictures of Tala because I’m a bit embarrassed to walk around with a camera. I’m sure it would draw a lot of attention if I were to take some pictures of my favorite cafes, the streets, where I buy my vegetables, the bus station, etc. Everyone knows me and is used to me by now, but I’d still feel uncomfortable. I guess that’s why it’s nice to have a camera on the phone that I can just whip out and take a picture real quick. At least it’s a common thing, because even the local guys do that stuff.

This guy is Jaffeth. He is a tailor who works in Tala market. His little booth sits outside of the barber shop where I get my beard trimmed. I always sit and chat with him about stuff, he’s a lively character and he never asks me for tea or to sponsor anyone, but I make sure if I need any tailoring I bring it to him. I’ve been visiting the kinyozi for a year now ever since I came back to Kenya in March, 2008 without my own beard trimmer. Mine broke while I was in California. I think it’s better this way because I get to sit around and chat to the dudes, talk about the weather, gossip about people walking by, etc. It costs 20 Kenyan shillings to get a beard trim (less than half a US dollar).
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A few days ago I installed the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin on this blog. It presents a “mobile” edition of my website. It looks pretty cool if you’re using an iPhone. If you don’t have an iPhone, don’t sweat… you can tell Firefox to pretend by changing the user agent. Type “about:config” in the address bar, and then find the general.useragent.extra.firefox setting. Take note of the current value and then replace it with this:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0
Now you can browse to my site again and you should see it as if you were on an iPhone. Cool, huh? Thanks to Crowd Favorite for making this plugin for WordPress.

I bought a Nokia 2630 phone a few weeks ago. It has Bluetooth and GPRS, the latter meaning that I can browse the net on the go. The former plus the latter meaning that I can browse the net from my computer via the phone using the Bluetooth. I got it working in a few minutes on my Zenwalk (Slackware) laptop, and now you can too!
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