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I love African beer. I really do. Even when bad Nigerian beer knocks me down for a week, I am always back for more.

Maybe it’s the efficiency of drinking from 1/2 liter bottles or the romance of relaxing beer-in-hand while watching Simba sex. Either way, a cold Club, Tusker, or White Cap is the only way to end a day.

That’s why I’ve always noticed how beers are opened in Africa. My preference is for the minimalist method of using one bottle to open another, a trick I use to constant amazement in the lower 48.

However, most African restaurants and bars employ boring commercial bottle openers, plain and unassuming in form and function. You have to really be on the lookout to find creative beer release mechanisms - and recently I was rewarded for my vigilance.

Having a cold beer after Togo’s National Run to the Border Day sprint to the Ghanaian border, I noticed that my server was using a non-standard bottle opener.

A first in my observance, she employed two screws in a wooden peg to pop the bottle cap on my Guinness. What simplicity, ingenuity, practicality!

I was in awe until I had a thought: What if she could use only one screw?

[See more images like this on the AfriGadget Flickr group.]

Wayan Vota is part of Inveneo, a non-profit social enterprise whose mission is to get the tools of ICT into the hands of organizations and people who need them most: those in remote and rural communities in the developing world.

I’d used the Fonic SIM card on the Nokia N95 - my mobile phone I normally use for another line. Fonic also offers USB UMTS modems made by Huawei - however, these external modems often sell for 60,- EUR and above (Fonic sells them for ~ 100,- EUR with a new SIM card). USB modems are nice, also because they connect to any USB device (desktop pc, notebook, netbook) - but they are still too expensive for me. Also, I do have a PCMCIA II slot on my notebook I’ve never really used so far (except for my Harry’s TV card which is still with Harry - ati bwana, diese Lösung hier ist auch für Dich interessant).

So I checked out eBay and found this really great offer where someone had this “Vodafone Mobile Connect HSDPA / UMTS / EDGE datacard” PCMCIA II card in an auction..

…which I managed to secure for just 2,- EUR! :-)

It’s a “Qualcomm 3G CDMA” PCMCIA II card, also known as “Option GT 3G+ EMEA”. Oh, and it also has an extra port for an external antenna, so this may be of particular interest to those who are living far away from the next base station.

Well…don’t be fooled by the Vodafone branding - this card isn’t SIM- or netlocked, and it will just work. Took me about 20 minutes to search for a valid driver package and programme to run it, and 3 minutes to install it.

The problem I had was that these Vodafone (T-Mobile, OEM, etc.) cards aren’t officially supported by Option, which is why I had to find a driver package for this card in the first place.

Option Globetrotter Connect

I’d previously used Vodafone’s 86mb package (Vodafone connect) to get the driver, but even after deinstalling it later on, I think the drivers are still on the system, so I can’t really tell right now if I am currently using the Vodafone drivers or the ones from this hidden Option Globetrotter Connect suite which is much smaller (2,6 mb vs. 86 mb). On the other hand, both software packages have drivers made by Option, so I guess they are all the same (except for Vodafone providing bloatware along with the plain driver package). [Update]: The above mentioned Option Globetrotter Connect suite is all you need. Install it, plug in this card, it will automatically select the drivers and you’re ready to go. Simple as that.

Another interesting alternative, and my initial reason for this blog post, is MWCONN - a really perfect little freeware (WinXP) access tool for mobile internet connections. Perfect, as it provides lot’s of interesting details to the running connection:

The whole setup still needs to be optimized and the speed improved (the network here currently only supports up to 1,8 Mbit/s, not 3,6 or even 7,2 Mbit/s). Also, since it’s based on a PCMCIA card, it will only work via PCMCIA slots (which is one of the reasons I’d thought about going for a used 12″ subnotebook instead of a 10″ netbook). But still - this internet connectivity is better than nothing + it is a dedicated solution that doesn’t require any swapping of SIM cards + carrying an extra cable for the phone as Bluetooth alone is too slow. Also, MWCONN on the other hand also has this *100# prepaid credit balance check built in - which makes sense because there’s no keypad as on a phone to type in such a basic command.

The only downside to MWCONN is the missing driver package, so if you’re cheap like me and into buying hardware only via eBay, just go for the Option package above. It really is all you need for WinXP.

Vodafone sucks big times - and so does their branding :-)

Now let me see how it performs with Ubuntu 8.10…read somewhere that it is natively supported there. Which means: plug & play!

[UPDATE]

It just took me 2 minutes to get this thing online via Ubuntu 8.10 - out-of-the-box, that is. Plugged it in, chose the new network management tool, selected mobile broadband and entered the following data for Fonic:

APN: pinternet.interkom.de
primary DNS: 195.182.96.28
secondary DNS: 195.182.96.61

Compared to all the stress I used to have with such toys back in the days, this setup just works.

Verdict: if you own a mobile device with a PCMCIA II slot and want to get online, don’t spend a lot of money on USB devices if you can also have it this way. Works with WinXP SP2 & Ubuntu 8.10.

• Subsidies means higher taxes on those who pay taxes (MPs excluded).
• Favored tax status means the other taxpayers are disadvantaged.
• Capital put into NOCK means other areas are starved OR the funds are borrowed from the money markets.

This new generation of read/write technology using the web and mobile phones creates a situation where ordinary citizen have both awareness and opportunity to take part in an way that wasn’t possible in such great numbers only a few decades ago.

There are really two components; gathering information and then distributing that information in a way that is useful for two types of users. First, the general public. Second, the officials and/or media who can cause something to happen when a bad situation arises.

• MyFairElection - Report your polling station’s
  condition on Election Day. (in partnership with ABC News)
• TwitterVoteReport - Use twitter, SMS, audio call or an iPhone and Android applications to send in reports on Election Day. (in partnership with NPR)
• Video Your Vote - Encourages people to video themselves voting and to upload those to YouTube. (in partnership with PBS)
• VoterSuppression.net - A wiki where users can learn about and enter in reports of voter suppression.
• Our Vote Live - A site documenting the voter assistance work of the Election Protection Coalition that uses a phone call-in system (866-OUR-VOTE).

(if you have more that I haven’t heard of, add the link to the comments below)

Ethan Zuckerman is wondering whether Twitter, or even mobile phones and the web, are the right tools for monitoring an election. He brings up the fact that using old-school technology like radio and TV can be even more useful in places like Ghana, and how that differs with the experience in the USA.

I think there are two things going on here.

First, the cultural use of technology is changing. We’re in that strange twilight zone between mediums where the population is split between overlapping islands of web usage, mobile phones, radio, TV and print.

Second, this cultural usage shift is compounded by having a two-tiered pattern of usage in different parts of the world. Ethan is absolutely right that one of the best tools in Africa is still the radio. However, that doesn’t translate to the US, where the country is too large for any one radio station to really hold sway. Many in the US tune into “national” radio personalities and shows, who have no “local” footprint. Calling in with your voting precinct’s flaws from Kooskia, Idaho wouldn’t make sense.

Thus the use of the internet, and mobile phone. We’re at a point where we’re trying to raise awareness, interactivity and reach. What happens when we get mass public awareness of a tool, married with an efficient and useful way to get aggregate data in local communities?

One item that isn’t up for debate is this. At this time you need to marry up the coverage and awareness power of traditional media (radio, TV and print) with the simple tools and platforms that use the web and mobile phones correctly to gather and disseminate information. What I find most encouraging is that most of the initiatives listed above are using the new tools and they are partnered with major media organizations that can muscle this out to a national audience.

(Side note: We were asked by a number of people if Ushahidi could be used for this. In short, yes - but the new alpha release of the software wasn’t ready until last week. Too late to play with here.)

Also read the PBS Mediashift article covering these services in greater depth.