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A gorgeous Day in Rodez – an unknown gem of France
Almost every year, we visit my family in Occitanie in France. It is a highly under-rated region. As we get to know it bit by bit every year, we venture further out to explore its beautiful countryside and charming towns. Rodez is little-known small city with great charme and attractions spanning well over 5000 years.
Where is Rodez and why is it a great place to visit?
Our Day in Rodez
First things first: Lunch!
The Cathedral of Rodez
Musee Fenaille
Retail Interlude -and some thoughts on cruelty-free cosmetics
How can you identify cruelty-free brands (other than by obvious certification)?
Buying French cruelty-free scent
Musee Soulages
A few words on Pierre Soulages
The Conques Abbey Window Project
Temporary Exhibition: Yves Klein
And Rodez isn't reduced to Cathedral, two museums and shopping…
How to get to Rodez
Rodez is the capital of the Departement Aveyron Region, a region characterised by high plateaus with river gorges, agriculture and heavenly heavy food. It is also little known outside France so you don't need to worry about streams of tourists here. Quite the contrary! Rodez is a small cathedral city two hours drive from Montpellier and Toulouse in the south. Driving north, you get into the wide opens spaces of the Aubrac plateau. We recently visited on a day trip from Cordes-sur-Ciel and loved the relaxed city pace, two outstanding museums and great food and scenery. Tourist magnets of Carcassonne, Lourdes and the region bordering Provence aside, Occitanie is mostly visited by the French, and remains a true off the beaten path destination.
We set off after an almost ritual Saturday morning coffee and a stroll across the market on Cordes, and drove for an hour and a half through a diverse, relaxed green countryside and quaint villages. Upon reaching the (toll-free) Route National near Carmaux, things became slightly less picturesque, but also a lot faster. Soon we headed for the hill with the Cathedral on top, and parked easily in a street leading to the Cathedral. Around here, most shops and attractions close for lunch.
So we did the same, sat in the shade of the cathedral viewing gargoyles and eating food we had never heard of. When in France, eat first.
We started with Farcous – chard fritters typical to the Aveyron region.
Then a bit of fish. The sea might be 2 hours away, but this seared tuna was fresh and simply excellent
Last not least, the infamous cafe gourmand: a miniature portion of whatever dessert is going together with a strong coffee: superb rice pudding and peach puree
Where can you eat all this for a very reasonable price of 50EURO for two? The Restaurant is called La Gargouille – follow the Gargoyles by the Cathedral and you find it! The restaurant is small-ish and family run and very friendly, though it gets busy at peak times, so bring at least an hour for a leisurely lunch.
We made a reservation (+33 5 65 68 87 16) but it is very casual, no one else seemed to have bothered. This is a rare place where they will offer a vegetarian main course, too. I am pretty much vegetarian although I eat fish and seafood sometimes on holiday, hence the tuna.
Check out my gargoyle collection – as seen from the La Gargouille restaurant next to the Cathedral
It was hard to get up again! Sitting right next to the cathedral and having spent lunch gargoyle-viewing, we looked a the interior of the Cathedral – much lighter and delicate inside than its fortified exterior suggested. You can climb the tower but carrying an extra kg of food or so we didn't bother, as there was some serious shopping, cafe-hopping, and two exceptional museums to pay attention to.
Rodez Cathedral
The airy interior of Rodez Cathedral
The Musee Fenaille is basically a local history museum done very well.
The Aveyronais also have the advantage of being in a zone with a lot of menhirs, or standing stones. You'll find them all over Western Europe – most famously Stonehenge, and most numerously, in Brittany. The Aveyron menhirs are special as they depict human-like figures with faces, armour and accessories, and represent the early depiction of humans in history. Although they have always been around, they've only been investigated in the past century. They date back to the late Neolithic period about 2500-3500 years BC. The purpose they were created for – purely ornamental human portraits, deities, protective figures – remains somewhat unclear.
They are very intriguing! The way the museum is laid out is very clever, too. After the ticket desk (get a combination ticket with the Musee Soulages) you are directed to the Fourth Floor, right to the earliest exhibits and greatest attractions, the menhir-statues, who occupy a light-flooded modern attic. They are small but incredibly captive – small oblong statues with a lot of detail, the earliest depiction of humans ever.
Local farmers knew of their existence for centuries, but they attracted the interest of scholars only a century ago. Since then, about hundred more were found, and the most famous now reside in the museum. Copies now stand where the originals were removed.
The most famous one of a lady, of course. La Dame de Saint Sernin, named after the village where she was found. She's diminutive but fierce-looking with her facial tattooes – not a moustache.
La Dame de Saint Sernin at the Musee Fenailles in Rodez
I really like this one, too. I think this is a male. Just look at his tiny face. I wonder if it served as inspiration for Daft Punks genius "Around the Wold" video?
One of about 12 menhirs at the Musee Fenaille in Rodez
The whole concept of the museum is great – a lovely Renaissance family home with modern extensions here and there, and a nicely spaced local history exhibition starting with the famous menhirs to Auguste Rodins portrait f Madame Fenaille, with some very sympathetic interiors of creaky wooden flooring and elegantly corniced rooms.
The Stone Age Room with the famous menhir-statues of Roguerque
Madame Fenaille and some very good historic flooring
Every trip to France always includes stocking up on cosmetics for me. It's not that I cannot find anything in Germany, but French Pharmacy skincare represents the best value for money.
Things have become a bit harder since I decided not to buy anything where animal testing is involved. Of course, no one tests in Europe, as it is outlawed. However, mandatory testing is still required to sell product in China, although changes are on the horizon, so a lot of large companies do just that. So, firstly, the major cosmetics brands still test, somewhere, and secondly, a lot of smaller brands that may not test are owned by large companies that test. Some small brands, for example Embryolisse, don't invest in cruelty-free certification yet are cruelty-free , and others emphasize on their use of plant extracts but aren't exactly transparent and not cruelty free (That's you, Klorane). I often go to a website that lists cruelty-free. Cruelty-free Kitty is the most comprehensive but is quite US-centric and it is not instantly obvious whether their parent company is cruelty-free.
Anyway, my favourite perfume brands are now no longer an option to me as Frederic Malle is now owned by Estee Lauder, Le Couvent des Minimes by L'Occitane, and Aqua di Parma by LWMH… time to look for new favourites. I found them in Parfum d'Empire, whose sharp "Yuzu" Fou has graced my shelf for some years. After not finding much online, I wrote to them and they confirmed that they do not test on animals and do not retail in China, and they also helpfully told me where their creations are retailed, so off I blazed to a small independent perfumery, where, unless Liberty of London and a tiny basement perfumery of Different Scent in Berlin, they had about six of Parfum d'Empires creations ready to try. I took a load of citrussy notes on all available exposed bits of skin to the menhir,s then left my husband to drink coffee in one of the numerous sidewalk cafes, and bought a new fresh scent.
My new summer scent: Azzemour les Orangers, a heady mix of loads of citrus with neroli and some oriental spices
Apart from that, Rodez has mainly small independent shops – I'd say its not exactly a shopping destination, unless you're looking for something specific and know you can find it here. The shopping area is in the old town, which is very pleasant to wander and frequently stop for a drink.
Modern Art and I are not the best of friends, but if you come across a rusty-looking edifice that looks like a square caterpillar, you wonder what might lie behind its walls, and hearing the museum is a shrine to the "greatest living artist" (in the opinion of France Hollande, and he might be slightly biased), AND it currently houses an exhibition of Yves Klein who managed to create world-famous art using an intense shade of Blue alone, then you walk in to see what it is all about. Or at least this is how I came to look at a lot of monochrome modern art, and, surprise, surprise! I really like it.
Pierre Soulages is a native of Rodez and will turn 100 at Christmas this year. Like his fellow monochrome lover Yves Klein, Soulages has a strong preference for Black. Modern art eejits like me might now go and take a look and find great pleasure in the harmonious strokes and lattices of Black and dark brown with their almost zen-like quality, from small pieces of graphic art to 3m canvases.
Pierre Soulages decided to give his entire collection of own works to the city of Rodez and they gratefully built a new museum to display it. How they came to the rusty bits of metal, called Corten Steel in the engineering world, is a myth to me, but amazingly, the low unobtrusive structure built into a gentle slope in the city park, just metres away from the Cathedral and Old Town, works really well. The architects won the Pritzker Price for it, by the way. They must spend a ton on air conditioning the high bare rooms with floor to ceiling windows, but this is one of the most pleasant museums I've visited.
We sauntered from the Cathedral through the very pleasant park to the main entrance. Right next to the entrance is the reputed restaurant Cafe Bras, should you require a bite before seeing all this lean modern art.
Musee Soulages Entrance and Cafe Bras
Wonderful space purpose-built for the art of Pierre Soulages
If you want the essence of Pierre Soulages art – graphic reduced black and white on a canvas as large as possible
I really like it – surprisingly. It is very calming.
It not all black and white – there is sparing use of some other muted colours
Apart from the large canvases, Soulages is a prolific graphic artist, too
Very reduced colours on mainly black backgrounds
These almost look Japanese
The black / concrete wall perfectly complement the pared-down paintings
I had never heard of St Foy Abbey before, and getting a modern artist to make a stained glass window for a religious building is nothing new, but this little Romanesque church on the Way of Saint James has a unique story.
It was neglected and partially destroyed after the French Revolution. Prosper Merimee (who wrote "Carmen"), in his role as Inspector of French monuments at the time, saved the church and many other historical buildings from demolition in the 1830s and had the church listed. After a lengthy renovation, new stained glass windows were inserted in the 1950s, but soon were criticised for being too colourful for a former Benedictine Abbey. They were eventually replaced by Soulages' pared down designs, manufactured in Germany, and today just over 100 windows of the abbey bear the Soulages design. I wanted to jump back in the car straight away and go admire them, but Conques is actually 40km north and far off a main road. It is definitely on my itinerary next time, as is nearby Laguiole.
One room is dedicated to the drafts for the new windows of Conques Abbey
Stunningly simple designs to replace the windows at St Foy Abbey in Conques
Yves Klein trademark blue canvas – International Klein Blue is actually a defined ultramarine hue
Another large space at the gallery is dedicated to exhibitions by other artists. At the time of our visits, it was Yves Klein, fellow lover of monochromes. He became famous using a hue of ultramarine blue which was named "International Klein Blue" after him, citing that pure blue is traditionally the colour of the Holy Spirit in Christian religion and reminiscent of blue sky and deep sea. There were a lot of plaster replicas coated in the colour (yawn) but the "Anthropometries" look quite pleasing… they were made by asking nude female models to dip into the colour, then press their bodies onto the canvas… staged as a performance with visitors and cocktails. This is how the picture in the background was made (by five very sedentary females, I guess), and also the front one… presumably with the model being dragged over the canvas?
This was just our idea of a bloody good day out in lesser visited France, but this is by far no comprehensive guide to Rodez. I would say you could easily spend a day or two there, and it makes a convenient stop between the Massiv Central and Toulouse or Montpellier.
Traditional shops line the old town
The city centre is 95% old architecture
Including the impressive "House of Armagnac" 16th Century residence
Which today is a residence of sneakers
Just a little something on our walk through town
No name, but a cheerful beautiful facade of a former shoe shop
And with that, I would like to encourage you to walk of the beaten path and find gems where you don't queue to get into an attractions, where you got to look hard to find a fellow tourist, yet who hold gems well worth a trip for. Do you know any? If so, please let me know. I am always on the lookout for new inspiration!
Disclosure: This trip was entirely self funded. I have received no monetary or non-monetary rewards for linking aside from some affiliate links to Booking.com. I will only recommend products I have purchased myself and places that I have stayed in myself, unless otherwise stated. You can trust me for the whole, unbiased truth. More details on my affiliate link policy are here.
If you have no own transport, the easiest way to get to Rodez is by train. The Midi-Pyrenees Rail network of SNCF covers Rodez, making it easily accessible on three railway lines: the Toulouse line (M2) that also stops in Albi, another beautiful city, the line from Millau (M8) and another regional line from Figeac (M7). You can also take an intercity from Paris directly which stops in Orleans and Albi. More info at SNCF or Trainline. Both let you book trains easily in your preferred language for many European rails network wat no extra cost.
There is also a small airport, Rodez-Aveyron (RDZ), with flights within France and to the UK and Ireland.
We went to Rodez on a day trip, so we didn't actually stay here. Let's say that chains, business hotels and apartments dominate the hotel scene in Rodez. If I were to stay, I would chose one of these:
Hotel Mercure: Beautiful old building with funky tile work almost next to the Cathedral. The interior has been given the typical corporate Mercure makeover. But outside there is a buzzing cafe, and the public park with the Musee Soulage in it right opposite.
Hotel du Midi-Logis International: Great Location between the Cathedral and Musee Soulages. It's not going to win prizes for design, but the location is probably the best in town.
Author: Anja
Filed Under: Europe, France
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Small, Obscure and Super Tasty: A Gaillac Organic Winery Tour
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When the Delta was first explored by white men, it was a huge marsh cut by snag filled and tide influenced waterways. The low lands were covered with tules and willows. The valley oak was dominant, but there were also huge sycamore, laurel, willow, elderberry, locust and cottonwood trees covering the land. Large flocks of pelicans, ducks, geese and cranes were common in the lagoons and tule swamps. The rivers were filed with an endless supply of fish and beaver. Muskrat and otter were also bountiful.
Local Indians, in a primitive fashion, farmed the rich soil. They used the tule reeds to construct boats, homes and baskets. The Indians lived a good life, and Mother Nature supplied them with an abundance of fish and game. During the winter months they moved into the foothills away from the waterfront.
By 1850, during the gold rush days, paddlewheel steamers ran between San Francisco and Sacramento, as well as Stockton. Many of those ships were wood-burners using river oak and pine cut in four-foot lengths and collected at the river's edge. Some consumed as much as a cord of wood per hour. Long before the railroads arrived or there were adequate roads in this region of California, the river was used as the primary means of travel.
What made the Delta was its people. It was people that reclaimed the land. They built dikes and levees, dug the channels, created river ports and landings, and defied Mother Nature herself. When the waters swelled over the banks of the rivers to reclaim what was hers, it was the people that rebuilt the levees and started all over again. Early settlers purchased large tracts of land as early as 1855 for $1 an acre throughout the Delta region. By 1878, land values had increased to $5 an acre.
In 1860, Mr. Stone reclaimed the land where Bethel Island is located today. Stone acted under the Swamp and Overflow Act of 1855. The island was originally known as Stone Tract and didn't actually become an island until the late 1890's when Dutch Slough was dredged to the east to meet Sandmound Slough. Taylor Slough was extended south by dredging to meet Dutch Slough, and Piper Slough was extended to meet Sandmound Slough.
In the early days, Stone Tract was known for the rich soil that grew cattle feed and grains and for the dairies that were established there. The land yielded hay grain that was transported to market by barge.
Major William K. Bethell purchased a large tract of land (approximately 3,500 acres) from Mr. Stone. In 1871, Bethell sold part of his holdings to Mr. J. Cheney. Apparently, the name was changed from Stone Tract to Bethel Island in 1898, when the Board of Supervisors sold a strip of land forty-five feet wide for $1 to Frank and Anna Bethell for a road. Why the second "l" was left off no one knows.
The first residents of Bethel Island received their mail and supplies by boat delivery. They were very isolated form the other communities of East Contra Costa County.
Reclamation District 1619 was established in 1915 as part of the Swamplands District #1,102, 107, and 183. These earlier districts had been formed in 1894 to raise funding for levee maintenance. Reclamation District 1619 became the Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District in 1960.
In 1916, William J. Hotchkiss acquired 1,317 acres on Bethel Island to grow potatoes, beans, and sugar beets. About the same time, Judge E. A. Bridgeford purchased property and established a cattle ranch.
A single lane wooden bridge made out of two-by-twelve planks was constructed in the 1920's. The Farrar family cleared a eucalyptus grove and established a recreation area near the bridge. This was Bethel Island's first recreational related enterprise. Many old timers in the area recall picnics, swimming, and Sunday afternoons at Farrar Park.
By the 1940's, hunters and fishermen had established a week-end colony near the old wooden bridge. After World War II, hunting and fishing cottages began to spring up on the periphery of the island. Sportsmen, fishermen, and boat enthusiasts had discovered the peace, quiet and solitude that Bethel Island offered and came in droves. It wasn't until 1946 that Bethel Island got electricity. In 1948, they got telephone service. On August 16, 1946, the first Post Office was established in the rear of the E&E Café with Ethel Boxel as postmistress. Prior to the coming of postal service, residents received their mail in a row of boxes nailed to a fence near the bridge. With the arrival of these services, the population of the island increased to a point where the one –lane bridge had to be replaced. The building of the new bridge marked a turning point in Bethel Island's history. The first post office was built, stores were constructed, and facilities were established to offer complete boat launching, fishing and other recreational activities.
Modern Bethel Island has about 3,000 acres. It is assumed that before reclamation, Stone Tract was about 6,000 acres which could have included land known today as Hotchkiss Tract.
Today Bethel Island is the most densely populated island in the Delta and offers complete services for permanent residents, as well as weekend visitors. The island is often referred to as "the heart of the Delta".


On a scorching hot day at the DSG, Dulwich got themselves back into the title mix with a hard-fought win at home to second-placed Sunbury.
Winning the toss, skipper Dixon duly inserted Sunbury on a firm looking wicket. Newbie Jack Mahoney and Joe Day opened up, looking to make inroads into Sunbury's high-flying batting lineup, whose form has propelled them to a top-2 position in the league.
Unfortunately for Dulwich, some wayward bowling along with some clean hitting from Sunbury's openers soon put paid to this idea. Both openers came out firing, edging good balls away for singles and boundaries and tucking in to anything short or wide, and soon the score had reached 60 off 6 overs. Dixon introduced Swain to the attack to try to bring some control to proceedings, but he too was unable to stem the flow of runs, being launched for boundaries off all parts of the bat.
After 10 overs of carnage, and the score fast approaching 100, Dixon rang the changes, introducing spin from both ends in the shape of Ramakrishnan and Lester. The rewards were immediate, opener Greaves bowled by Gokhul for a rapid 47, before number 3 came and went in the same fashion.
At the other end, Lester was tormenting the other opener Sehmi, who couldn't lay a bat on him for 3 overs in a row, all of his big shots against the seamers apparently forgotten when facing spin. Eventually Lester put him out of his misery, trapped LBW for 37. Number 4 soon joined him back in the pavilion as Dulwich's spin twins began to turn the screw.
With Sunbury's vaunted batting lineup collapsing like a proverbial pack of cards, Dulwich were hoping to skittle the tail and get in for an early tea. With Lester picking up a well-deserved 5th wicket, stumped by Durrani, things were looking good.
However, Sunbury had a sting in the tail, as numbers 9, 10 and 11 set about adding vital runs with some aggressive shot making. Lester had Patel caught for 20, to finish with incredible figures of 6-29, but as he and Ramakrishnan (3-44 off 13) bowled out, Dulwich still needed another wicket.
The returning seamers once again struggled to make any inroads on what was a pretty flat wicket, with Sunbury's last pair adding over 40. Eventually Sunbury declared on 206-9 off 47 – a good comeback from Dulwich, having been staring down a 350+ chase before the spinners were introduced.
After a strong tea and inspiring team talk, the Dulwich openers strode out into the stifling heat to take on the challenge of this season's biggest run chase. Unfortunately Zeeshan was striding back a couple of overs later, gone for 8.
4th XI debutant Durrani joined Scannell at the crease, and the pair set about milking singles and twos off the accurate Sunbury bowling. Durrani survived a leg-side catch scare, and Scannell a couple of edges through slips, but on the whole the batsmen looked comfortable as the score moved up past 70.
Having seen the impact Dulwich's spinners had made at a crucial part of the first innings, the Sunbury captain soon turned to his own legion of slow bowlers, as the score continued to creep up. Durrani eventually fell to a great slip catch off the evergreen Clarke, and with Woodgate departing soon after, Dulwich were wobbling. Enter skipper Dixon, whose calm head and textbook sweep seemed a perfect counter to Sunbury's spinners.
At the other end, Cian had begun to find his range, smashing the bowlers over the top on numerous occasions, and brought up a well-crafted 50 with a blow into the leg side which was dropped by the fielder over the boundary. Oops.
Dixon finally missed a straight one having made a crucial 25, and with Scannell's leg giving him problems, Sunbury felt they were still in the game. Kaffurudeen joined the fray and kept up the attack, smashing the bowling to all parts to bring Dulwich's score above 150, whilst Scannell, who could now hardly move, stood and delivered and the other end.
Having made an exquisite 69, Cian eventually fell to Sehmi, which brought number 7 Lester to the crease with 35 still needed and Dulwich nerves jangling.
Some fine boundary hitting and single-running later, and Dulwich were well within sight of the total. Kaffurudeen and Swain fell before the total was reached, but Mahoney smashed his first ball for four and the game was won. Lester had added a chanceless 20* to his earlier 6 wickets, and a brilliant run chase was completed in just 38 overs.
A great win, and a message to the rest of the league. Next up are Oxted at home.


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At just 10, DJ Big Jeff as he's known today had already developed a keen relationship with the art form music, recalling his premature statement "Without music there is no life". Drawn to the art of Djing at an early age; Jeff started manning the musical selection at family gatherings and house parties to get experience. It was at 15, when his older brother received a set of turntables that Jeff began secretly developing his own style. His passion turned serious when he was dared by his brother and peers to enter a DJ Contest being held at a neighborhood block party; he did and to their surprise he won the competition, amazing onlookers and neighbors in attendance. From there Jeff was on his way, honing his skills as a battle DJ while picking up such accolades as winning the Smirnoff DJ spin-off competition in New York and placing runner-up at an International DJ Competition in Aruba.
Building momentum, he landed two regular DJing gigs: Thursday night's at The Fever in the Bronx and downtown NY hot spot, Club Deco on Sunday nights. Soon after he began compiling and promoting mixtapes to gain exposure and credibility amongst popular DJs such as Kid Capri, DJ Clue, and Ron G, dominating the circuit. DJ Jeff got his first opportunity with The Music House, a store located on Dyckman Street in New York's Washington Heights. He made his professional DJing debut in 1997, when he was called to go on tour with Lil Kim, doing shows in Philadelphia PA, Jacksonville FL, and Houston TX. He opened up in the Astor Arena, which has been his biggest show amongst 50,000 fans. One of his biggest achievements was to DJ at the World Famous Apollo Theatre for the Hip Hop Peace Fest. In 2001, he went on tour with rapper Queen Pen, opening up in Houston TX, Atlanta GA, North and South Carolina. He has also worked in some of New York's most popular and high-profile clubs such as X Bar, Club Aura, and Octagon and the 40/40 Club, where he is currently the resident DJ on Friday nights and streams live via his website, www.DJBigJeff.com. His most memorable show to date has been the Rap It Up Concert for BET in Washington D.C., which informs and raises awareness for HIV/AIDS testing as well as social issues, sexual behavior, and attitudes impacting today's youth. For three years, he's been the official DJ for Red Bull's "Batalla De Los Gallos", where along with Djing he's provided beats as the soundtrack for this Latin MC contest; the only of its' kind that requires MC's to rap in Spanish over Hip-Hop beats. A solid track record and numerous appearances landed him in a position on the Roundtable Show Lenny S., Maya the B, and Big Lite as the official DJ, also with Maya the B's new show on thisis50 radio.
Always looking to outdo himself and peers, DJ Big Jeff has been steadily gracing the Sirius/XM airwaves with show appearances on Fatboy Radio with DJ SNS and DJ Dallas Green The FoxxHole filling in for DJ Mz. Stylez, spinning a fierce New Year's Eve set on Hip Hop Nation Sirius 40 XM 67 and a re-occurring set on Shade45's The Gomez Brothers' show. Adding another accomplishment to his impressive resume, DJ Big Jeff has been officially added to the Fleet DJs coalition. He will take his talents abroad in every aspect, launching a seven day European Tour, gracing stages in Belgium, Paris, Holland and Switzerland to name a few. Once again the time has arrived for Jeff to take it to the next level. If he's not spinning at the clubs he's hitting the streets with Mix-Tapes! In light of his father's passing, Big Jeff is motivated more than ever to embark on every opportunity presented, remain humble, and do right by his family. "This tragedy has strengthened my character and will only make me stronger; I now have my very own angel and I know he's looking down on me smiling." Rest assured DJ Big Jeff is on his grind!


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Understanding the Threats to Our Marine Ecosystems
The Heinrich Böll Foundation published the Ocean Atlas 2017. Get informed now.
by Maggie Koontz, January 4, 2018
The Ocean Atlas is an updated guide on how our lives are currently affecting the ocean and what might happen in the future. It includes the benefits of the ocean and how it helps us, but it also discusses how humans are quickly destroying this natural resource.
The ocean plays an important role in our lives for travel, transport and regulating climate. This atlas highlights some of the work that the ocean does for us that we may not even be aware of and it does that so that people might be educated about this huge body of water.
The true purpose of this atlas is to teach others so that they will be more inclined to protect the ocean whether that is through political activism or intelligent discussion. The ocean is vital for humanity's survival and we must fight to protect it.
In the atlas, you will find sections about different problems that the ocean is facing:
Overfishing: Fisheries are overused and areas of the ocean are being overfished, legally and illegally, which hurts local fishermen and native species.
Fish Farms: Although fish farms were supposed to be the solution to the high demand of seafood, they are harmful to the environment and don't reduce overfishing.
Fertilizer: Run-off that contains fertilizer causes algae to grow on the surface of the water which leads to dead zones in the ocean underneath it because of a lack of sunlight.
Garbage: More than just your everyday trash is being thrown into the ocean which has detrimental effects on marine life.
(Micro)Plastic: A huge amount of plastic ends up in the ocean and over time, it becomes microplastic which is impossible to remove from the ocean and marine life often mistakes it for food.
Loss of Diversity: Native species are being eradicated by loss of habitat and because of invasive species.
Climate Change: The ocean helps control climate change by absorbing a lot of carbon dioxide, but there are some negative effects such as acidification and increased temperature.
Sea Level is Rising: Because the water is becoming warmer, the sea levels are rising as the ice melts.
Coastal Cities: Much of the population lives on the coast and these cities face a variety of threats such as the rising sea levels and natural disasters.
Acidic Water: The more carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs, the more acidic it becomes, resulting in a change of pH and the death of marine life.
Exploitation: Very little of the ocean is protected and this has led to a loss of biodiversity and lower populations.
Ownership: There is a lot of conflict among countries about owning certain parts of the ocean for resources, but this only fosters exploitation.
Greed: Countries are eager to find resources that the ocean has because it is cheaper and easier than looking on land, but the mining in the ocean destroys habitats.
Renewable Energy: The ocean and its surrounding area could be used as a source of renewable energy, but many still choose the damaging nonrenewable energy sources.
Tourism: Tourism via cruise ship pollutes the ocean and places a burden on the native people of the coastal cities that are visited.
International Shipping: Anything can be transported over the ocean nowadays, but since laws aren't that strict, companies are essentially using slave labor and often have horrible conditions on the ship.
Cohabitation: To live sustainably with the ocean, compromises must be made for the sake of the environment.
Activism: The ocean doesn't have a voice, but we do. Use it.
If you are working on environmental issue, or would like to take part in the political discussion or even start something yourself, check out the full Ocean Atlas here.
Originally published June 8, 2017
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Inspect, Upgrade and Install Home Electrical Panels.
You need more power to meet your energy demands. As we become more reliant on electronics and electrical appliances our need for more power has also increased. Adding an addition to your home, new electrical appliances or upgraded heating and cooling units can create a large enough additional power demand to warrant a main circuit breaker box upgrade. We are experts at evaluating power demands and correctly sizing your new main electrical service in the most efficient way possible. Upgrading the electrical panel in your home doesn't affect the wiring inside your home; it just gives your system the ability to have more power to distribute in an efficient way.
WARNING NOTICE! If you are renovating a home older than 1980, they will need to be replaced. These are dangerous panels because their defective design allows power to flow even when the breakers are switched off. Zinsco electrical panels also are known to overheat, melting the breaker switches, causing burn scorch marks, or even catching fire. Replace them with a new electrical panel immediately.
There should be a meter box on the outside of your home. This is where the main power line from the electric provider company links to your home's electrical system. The main power line runs directly to the "breaker box", which is usually painted gray and located in a garage, utility room or basement. Inside the breaker box, the electrical panel looks like rows of switches. These switches distribute power to smaller branch lines. Some of the switches are doubled or tripled together because they are on larger circuits to power appliances such as HVAC systems and stoves that require more electricity. The breaker switches should be labeled with the locations of the outlets and the appliances connected. That label map should correspond to the numbers on the breaker switches. On each switch, there is a number for how many amps the branch circuit can carry until the breaker is tripped to turn off power to the line. In addition, there is a main power breaker that in extreme cases, such as a lightning strike, turns off power to the entire electrical system.
If your home is more than 25 years old, it could have a serious heart defect in its electrical system that needs to be repaired. Some electrical panels installed before 1990 are now known to have safety problems because of bad design flaws. Most electrical panels installed in the past 25 years are regarded safe, but they still may break without causing smoke or fires. If you think your home has one of the defective electrical panels described below, call Arrow immediately.
These breaker boxes have weak breaker switches in them, and the older they are the harder they are to reset. More dangerously, the Pushmatic panels do not feature a main breaker switch to stop power into the panel. Replace these electrical panels with a modern panel from Arrow.
The oldest electrical panel in existance is actually called a fuse box, which can only handle 30-60 amps of power. Modern homes require at least 200 amps of power. A fuse box operates by the fuse literally breaking whenever there is a power overload, which requires to fuse to be replaced. Now most fuses cannot even be purchased or obtained. Fuse boxes are a huge fire and electrocution risk. Immediately contact Arrow to remove a fuse box and install an electrical panel with a breaker box. If a fuse box is still in your home, the wiring in the home may not be up to modern electrical code standards. Arrow can do an assessment and determine how to re-wire the home properly.


Personally, I love the feeling of finding a really satisfying audiobook. I struggle, though, to find that right combination of having a narrator whose voice I actually enjoy coupled with a story that I find absorbing enough to keep my attention and yet not so complicated that I have to be hitting the rewind button every few minutes.
When I do find that combination, I feel like I've hit the jackpot. Ding ding ding! Now I can be doing my beloved "reading" (or is it reading without the quotes?) while driving, showering, scrubbing out our disgusting refrigerator, putting in yet another load of laundry…whatever it may be! For me, a really good audiobook has me sitting in the car a little bit longer and heading towards boring chores with a little bit of a spring in my step.
All of the audiobooks I listen to are from the library and I generally use the OverDrive app. I've also occassionally used CDs from the library, although then I'm limited to listening in the car. I used to try to search for specific books and just hope that the narrator might be good, but lately I've had success searching by the narrator instead, since I find many voices difficult to listen to and once I find someone I like it's a lot easier to go from there. I also have had more success with middle grade books, perhaps because kids won't put up with bad readers and the trend for adults listening to audiobooks is more recent?
I'm writing this in advance of my baby coming (although she is past her due date), but by the time this publishes she will be here. That means that I'm particularly hoping you all can help me build on this list. I love the idea of the two of us getting to listen to an excellent audiobook during our hours of snuggling together ahead. Please help a sleep-deprived new mom out and give me your suggestions!
Mindy Kaling's Why Not Me?
Since you liked Guernsey, I think you will love The Chilbury Ladies'Choir. WW2 historical fiction with multiple narrators, very well done! All the Henry books are great. Cant go wrong with Neil Patrick Harris. I really enjoyed Elizabeth is Missing, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, A Man Called Ove (my favorite!), Garden Spells. I could go on so let me know if you want more recs. Congrats on the little one !
I've read a few of those, but think I'd enjoy a listen, too! The others I'm requesting right now and am so excited about. Thanks so much for taking the time to share! I'd always enjoy more!
Yes, that one was the last one I cut off my list! I really enjoyed it and am waiting for the sequel to come off of holds. The narrator also reads the Flavia books if you haven't listened to those yet. Thank you so much!
Oh my I can now NOT have an audiobook in my reading rotation. I love the narrator for The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, it's helped me read several of the books this year since I'm so far behind in the series.
Juliet Stevenson and Nadia May (aka Wanda McCaddon), Simon Vance, John Lee along with my first narrator crush, Ralph Cosham are a few outstanding narrators also.
I love Alexander McCall Smith and have been meaning to listen to that series! I will be checking out all of those narrators, too. Thank you so much!


Hackett, S (2017) Migration policies and manifestations of urban belonging: examples from Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. In: Urban Belonging: History and the Power of Place, 13 - 14 January 2017, Institute of Historical Research, London, UK.
This paper revealed how cities have used local migration policies to produce their own forms of urban belonging, community and identity across the post-1960s period.


Our stainless steel commercial grade hands-free sinks with sanitary construction are ideal for food processing plants and other places where hand sanitation is crucial. Sinks are available with 1 to 8 stations. Individual knee pedals allows for hands-free operation of faucet. Includes soap dispensers that are filled from a single common tank. Sinks are ready to install with faucets and soap dispensers included. An optional in-line water heater is available on all models for warm water hand washing.
Overall Height: 46 - 3/4 in.
Basin Width ID: 10 - 3/4 in.
Basin Depth ID: 6 - 7/8 in.


text:
Blurblogs
trent's blurblog
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For 10 Years D&D Suffered From an Unplayable Initiative System. Blame the Game's Wargaming Roots by David Hartlage
Tuesday May 19th, 2020 at 8:46 PM
DMDavid
While every version of Dungeons & Dragons has a rule for who goes first in a fight, no other rule shows as much of the game's evolution from what the original books call rules for "wargames campaigns" into what the latest Player's Handbook calls a roleplaying game about storytelling.
Before you old grognards rush to the comments to correct my opening line, technically the original books lacked any way to decide who goes first. For that rule, co-creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson supposed gamers would refer to Gary's earlier Chainmail miniatures rules. In practice, players rarely saw those old rules. The way to play D&D spread gamer-to-gamer from Dave and Gary's local groups and from the conventions they attended. D&D campaigns originally ran by word-of-mouth and house rules.
Gygax waited five years to present an initiative system in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide (1979). Two things made those official rules terrible.
Nobody understood the system.
Any reasonable interpretation of the system proved too slow and complicated for play.
Some grognards insist they played the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons initiative system by the book. No they didn't. Grognardia blogger James Maliszewski writes, "Initiative in AD&D, particularly when combined with the equally obscure rules regarding surprise, was one of those areas where, in my experience, most players back in the day simply ignored the official rules and adopted a variety of house rules. I know I did."
Not even Gygax played with all his exceptions and complications. "We used only initiative [rolls] and casting times for determination of who went first in a round. The rest was generally ignored. We played to have fun, and in the throws of a hot melee, rules were mostly forgotten."
With Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the D&D story grows complicated, because original or basic D&D soldiered on with workable initiative systems. My next tale will circle back to D&D, but this one focuses on AD&D, the game Gygax treated as his own. (See Basic and Advanced—the time Dungeons & Dragons split into two games.)
Some of the blame for AD&D's terrible initiative system falls back on Chainmail and Gygax's love for its wargaming legacy.
Chainmail lets players enact battles with toy soldiers typically representing 20 fighters. The rules suggest playing on a tabletop covered in sand sculpted into hills and valleys. In Chainmail each turn represents about a minute, long enough for infantry to charge through a volley of arrows and cut down a group of archers. A clash of arms might start and resolve in the same turn. At that scale, who strikes first typically amounts to who strikes from farthest away, so archers attack, then soldiers with polearms, and finally sword swingers. Beyond that, a high roll on a die settled who moved first.
In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the 1-minute turns from Chainmail became 1-minute melee rounds. Such long turns made sense for a wargame that filled one turn with a decisive clash of arms between groups of 20 soldiers, but less sense for single characters trading blows.
Even though most D&D players imagined brief turns with just enough time to attack and dodge, Gygax stayed loyal to Chainmail's long turns. In the Dungeon Master's Guide (1979), Gygax defended the time scale. "The system assumes much activity during the course of each round. During a one-minute melee round many attacks are made, but some are mere feints, while some are blocked or parried." Gygax cited the epic sword duel that ended The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) as his model for AD&D's lengthy rounds. He never explained why archers only managed a shot or two per minute.
Broadly, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons held to Chainmail's system for deciding who goes first. Gygax also chose an option from the old wargame where players declared their actions before a round, and then had to stick to plan as best they could. "If you are a stickler, you may require all participants to write their actions on paper."
Why would Gygax insist on such cumbersome declarations?
In a D&D round, every character and creature acts in the same few seconds, but to resolve the actions we divide that mayhem into turns. This compromise knots time in ridiculous ways. For example, with fifth edition's 6-second rounds, one character can end their 6-second turn next to a character about to start their turn and therefor 6 seconds in the past. If they pass a relay baton, the baton jumps 6 seconds back in time. If enough characters share the same 6 seconds running with the baton, the object outraces a jet. Now expand that absurdity across AD&D's 1-minute round.
Years before D&D, wargamers like Gygax had wrestled with such problems. They couldn't resolve all actions simultaneously, but players could choose actions at once. Declaring plans in advance, and then letting a referee sort out the chaos yielded some of the real uncertainty of an actual battle. Wargamers loved that. Plus, no referee would let players declare that they would start their turn by taking a relay baton from someone currently across the room.
Especially when players chose to pretend that a turn took about 10 seconds, the Chainmail system for initiative worked well enough. In basic D&D, turns really lasted 10 seconds, so no one needed to pretend. Many tables kept that system for AD&D.
But nobody played the advanced system as written. Blame that on a wargamer's urge for precision. Despite spending paragraphs arguing for 1-minute rounds, Gygax seemed to realize that a minute represented a lot of fighting. So he split a round into 10 segments lasting as long as modern D&D's 6-second rounds. Then he piled on intricate—sometimes contradictory—rules that determined when you acted based on weapon weights and lengths, spell casting times, surprise rolls, and so on. In an interview, Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison observed, "The initiative and surprise rules with the weapon speed factors was incomprehensible."
In a minute-long turn filled with feints, parries, and maneuvering, none of that precision made sense. On page 61, Gygax seemed to say as much. "Because of the relatively long period of time, weapon length and relative speed factors are not usually a consideration." Then he wrote a system that considered everything.
Some of the blame for this baroque system may rest on the wargaming hobby's spirit of collaboration.
Even before D&D, Gygax had proved a zealous collaborator on wargames. Aside from teaming with other designers, he wrote a flood of articles proposing variants and additions to existing games. In the early years of D&D, Gygax brought the same spirit. He published rules and ideas from the gamers in his circle, and figured that players could use what suited their game. In the Blackmoor supplement, he wrote, "All of it is, of course, optional, for the premise of the whole game system is flexibility and personalization within the broad framework of the rules."
I doubt all the rules filigree in AD&D came from Gygax. At his table, he ignored rules for things like weapon speed factors. Still, Gygax published such ideas from friends and fellow gamers. For example, he disliked psionics, but he bowed to his friends and included the system in AD&D. (See Gary Gygax Loved Science Fantasy, So Why Did He Want Psionics Out of D&D?.)
Weapon speed factors fit AD&D as badly as anything. In theory, a fighter could swing a lighter weapon like a dagger more quickly. Did this speed enable extra attacks? Not usually. Instead, light weapons could strike first. But that contradicted Chainmail's observation that a fighter with a spear had to miss before an attacker with a dagger could come close enough to attack. Gygax patched that by telling players to skip the usual initiative rules after a charge.
AD&D's initiative system resembles a jumble of ideas cobbled together in a rush to get a long-delayed Dungeon Master's Guide to press. The system piled complexities, and then exceptions, and still failed to add realism. In the end, AD&D owed some success to the way D&D's haphazard rules trained players to ignore any text that missed the mark.
In creating D&D, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax faced a unique challenge because no one had designed a roleplaying game before. The designers of every roleplaying game to follow D&D copied much of the original's work. Without another model, Gygax relied on the design tools from wargames. His initiative system may be gone, but ultimately Gary's finest and most lasting contribution to D&D came from the lore he created for spells, monsters, and especially adventures.
Next: Part 2: "It's probably so different that even if it's better, people would not like it."
True experts don't think they are. by Jessica Hagy
Sunday July 28th, 2019 at 10:05 PM
The post True experts don't think they are. appeared first on Indexed.
How to Build a Low-tech Website? by kris de decker
Thursday October 11th, 2018 at 11:47 PM
LOW-TECH MAGAZINE
1 Comment and 4 Shares
Low-tech Magazine was born in 2007 and has seen minimal changes ever since. Because a website redesign was long overdue — and because we try to practice what we preach — we decided to build a low-tech, self-hosted, and solar-powered version of Low-tech Magazine. The new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.
First prototype of the solar powered server that runs the new website.
Read this article on the solar powered website.
Why a Low-tech Website?
We were told that the Internet would "dematerialise" society and decrease energy use. Contrary to this projection, it has become a large and rapidly growing consumer of energy itself. According to the latest estimates, the entire network already consumes 10% of global electricity production, with data traffic doubling roughly every two years.
In order to offset the negative consequences associated with high energy consumption, renewable energy has been proposed as a means to lower emissions from powering data centers. For example, Greenpeace's yearly ClickClean report ranks major Internet companies based on their use of renewable power sources.
However, running data centers on renewable power sources is not enough to address the growing energy use of the Internet. To start with, the Internet already uses three times more energy than all wind and solar power sources worldwide can provide. Furthermore, manufacturing, and regularly replacing, renewable power plants also requires energy, meaning that if data traffic keeps growing, so will the use of fossil fuels.
Running data centers on renewable power sources is not enough to address the growing energy use of the Internet.
Finally, solar and wind power are not always available, which means that an Internet running on renewable power sources would require infrastructure for energy storage and/or transmission that is also dependent on fossil fuels for its manufacture and replacement. Powering websites with renewable energy is not a bad idea, however the trend towards growing energy use must also be addressed.
"Fatter" Websites
To start with, content is becoming increasingly resource-intensive. This has a lot to do with the growing importance of video, but a similar trend can be observed among websites.
The size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the 500,000 most popular domains) increased from 0.45 megabytes (MB) in 2010 to 1.7 megabytes in June 2018. For mobile websites, the average "page weight" rose tenfold from 0.15 MB in 2011 to 1.6 MB in 2018. Using different measurement methods, other sources report average page sizes of up to 2.9 MB in 2018.
The growth in data traffic surpasses the advances in energy efficiency (the energy required to transfer 1 megabyte of data over the Internet), resulting in more and more energy use. "Heavier" or "larger" websites not only increase energy use in the network infrastructure, but they also shorten the lifetime of computers — larger websites require more powerful computers to access them. This means that more computers need to be manufactured, which is a very energy-intensive process.
Being always online doesn't combine well with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, which are not always available.
A second reason for growing Internet energy consumption is that we spend more and more time on-line. Before the arrival of portable computing devices and wireless network access, we were only connected to the network when we had access to a desktop computer in the office, at home, or in the library. We now live in a world in which no matter where we are, we are always on-line, including, at times, via more than one device simultaneously.
"Always-on" Internet access is accompanied by a cloud computing model – allowing more energy efficient user devices at the expense of increased energy use in data centers. Increasingly, activities that could perfectly happen off-line – such as writing a document, filling in a spreadsheet, or storing data – are now requiring continuous network access. This does not combine well with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power, which are not always available.
Low-tech Web Design
Our new web design addresses both these issues. Thanks to a low-tech web design, we managed to decrease the average page size of the blog by a factor of five compared to the old design – all while making the website visually more attractive (and mobile-friendly). Secondly, our new website runs 100% on solar power, not just in words, but in reality: it has its own energy storage and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather.
The Internet is not an autonomous being. Its growing energy use is the consequence of actual decisions made by software developers, web designers, marketing departments, publishers and internet users. With a lightweight, off-the-grid solar-powered website, we want to show that other decisions can be made.
With 36 of roughly 100 articles now online, the average page weight on the solar powered website is roughly five times below that of the previous design.
To start with, the new website design reverses the trend towards increasingly larger page sizes. With 36 of roughly 100 articles now online, the average page weight on the solar powered website is 0.77 MB — roughly five times below that of the previous design, and less than half the average page size of the 500,000 most popular blogs in June 2018.
A web page speed test from the old and the new Low-tech Magazine. Page size has decreased more than sixfold, number of requests has decreased fivefold, and download speed has increased tenfold. Note that we did not design the website for speed, but for low energy use. It would be faster still if the server would be placed in a data center and/or in a more central location in the Internet infrastructure.
Source: Pingdom.
Static Site
One of the fundamental choices we made was to build a static website. Most of today's websites use server side programming languages that generate the website on the fly by querying a database. This means that every time someone visits a web page, it is generated on demand.
On the other hand, a static website is generated once and exists as a simple set of documents on the server's hard disc. It's always there -- not just when someone visits the page. Static websites are thus based on file storage whereas dynamic websites depend on recurrent computation. Static websites consequently require less processing power and thus less energy.
The choice for a static site enables the possibility of serving the site in an economic manner from our home office in Barcelona. Doing the same with a database-driven website would be nearly impossible, because it would require too much energy. It would also be a big security risk. Although a web server with a static site can be hacked, there are significantly less attack routes and the damage is more easily repaired.
Dithered Images
The main challenge was to reduce page size without making the website less attractive. Because images take up most of the bandwidth, it would be easy to obtain very small page sizes and lower energy use by eliminating images, reducing their number, or making them much smaller. However, visuals are an important part of Low-tech Magazine's appeal, and the website would not be the same without them.
By dithering, we can make images ten times less resource-intensive, even though they are displayed much larger than on the old website.
Instead, we chose to apply an obsolete image compression technique called "dithering". The number of colours in an image, combined with its file format and resolution, contributes to the size of an image. Thus, instead of using full-colour high-resolution images, we chose to convert all images to black and white, with four levels of grey in-between.
These black-and-white images are then coloured according to the pertaining content category via the browser's native image manipulation capacities. Compressed through this dithering plugin, images featured in the articles add much less load to the content: compared to the old website, the images are roughly ten times less resource-intensive.
Default typeface / No logo
All resources loaded, including typefaces and logos, are an additional request to the server, requiring storage space and energy use. Therefore, our new website does not load a custom typeface and removes the font-family declaration, meaning that visitors will see the default typeface of their browser.
We use a similar approach for the logo. In fact, Low-tech Magazine never had a real logo, just a banner image of a spear held as a low-tech weapon against prevailing high-tech claims.
Instead of a designed logotype, which would require the production and distribution of custom typefaces and imagery, Low-tech Magazine's new identity consists of a single typographic move: to use the left-facing arrow in place of the hypen in the blog's name: LOW←TECH MAGAZINE.
No Third-Party Tracking, No Advertising Services, No Cookies
Web analysis software such as Google Analytics records what happens on a website — which pages are most viewed, where visitors come from, and so on. These services are popular because few people host their own website. However, exchanging these data between the server and the computer of the webmaster generates extra data traffic and thus energy use.
With a self-hosted server, we can make and view these measurements on the same machine: every web server generates logs of what happens on the computer. These (anonymous) logs are only viewed by us and are not used to profile visitors.
With a self-hosted server, there is no need for third-party tracking and cookies.
Low-tech Magazine has been running Google Adsense advertisements since the beginning in 2007. Although these are an important financial resource to maintain the blog, they have two important downsides. The first is energy use: advertising services raise data traffic and thus energy use.
Secondly, Google collects information from the blog's visitors, which forces us to craft extensive privacy statements and cookie warnings — which also consume data, and annoy visitors. Therefore, we replace Adsense by other financing options (read more below). We use no cookies at all.
How often will the website be off-line?
Quite a few web hosting companies claim that their servers are running on renewable energy. However, even when they actually generate solar power on-site, and do not merely "offset" fossil fuel power use by planting trees or the like, their websites are always on-line.
This means that either they have a giant battery storage system on-site (which makes their power system unsustainable), or that they are relying on grid power when there is a shortage of solar power (which means that they do not really run on 100% solar power).
The 50W solar PV panel. On top of it is a 10W panel powering a lighting system.
In contrast, this website runs on an off-the-grid solar power system with its own energy storage, and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather. Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels.
How often the website will be off-line remains to be seen. The web server is now powered by a new 50 Wp solar panel and a two year old 12V 7Ah lead-acid battery. Because the solar panel is shaded during the morning, it receives direct sunlight for only 4 to 6 hours per day. Under optimal conditions, the solar panel thus generates 6 hours x 50 watt = 300 Wh of electricity.
The web server uses between 1 and 2.5 watts of power (depending on the number of visitors), meaning that it requires between 24 Wh and 60 Wh of electricity per day. Under optimal conditions, we should thus have sufficient energy to keep the web server running for 24 hours per day. Excess energy production can be used for household applications.
We expect to keep the website on-line during one or two days of bad weather, after which it will go off-line.
However, during cloudy days, especially in winter, daily energy production could be as low as 4 hours x 10 watts = 40 watt-hours per day, while the server requires beteen 24 and 60 Wh per day. The battery storage is roughly 40 Wh, taking into account 30% of charging and discharging losses and 33% depth-or-discharge (the solar charge controller shuts the system down when battery voltage drops to 12V).
Consequently, the solar powered server will remain on-line during one or two days of bad weather, but not for longer. However, these are estimations, and we may add a second 7 Ah battery in autumn if this is necessary. We aim for an "uptime" of 90%, meaning that the website will be off-line for an average of 35 days per year.
First prototype with lead-acid battery (12V 7Ah) on the left, and Li-Po UPS battery (3,7V 6600mA) on the right. The lead-acid battery provides the bulk of the energy storage, while the Li-Po battery allows the server to shut down without damaging the hardware (it will be replaced by a much smaller Li-Po battery).
When is the best time to visit?
The accessibility of this website depends on the weather in Barcelona, Spain, where the solar-powered web server is located. To help visitors "plan" their visits to Low-tech Magazine, we provide them with several clues.
A battery meter provides crucial information because it may tell the visitor that the blog is about to go down -- or that it's "safe" to read it. The design features a background colour that indicates the capacity of the solar-charged battery that powers the website server. A decreasing height indicates that night has fallen or that the weather is bad.
In addition to the battery level, other information about the website server is visible with a statistics dashboard. This includes contextual information of the server's location: time, current sky conditions, upcoming forecast, and the duration since the server last shut down due to insufficient power.
SERVER. The website runs on an Olimex A20 computer. This machine has 2 Ghz of processing power, 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage. The server draws 1 - 2.5 watts of power.
INTERNET CONNECTION. The server is connected to a 100 MBps fibre internet connection. For now, the router is powered by grid electricity and requires 10 watts of power. We are investigating how to replace the energy-hungry router with a more efficient one that can be solar-powered, too.
SOLAR PV SYSTEM. The server runs on a 50 Wp solar panel and one 12V 7Ah lead-acid battery (energy storage capacity will be doubled at the end of this month). The system is managed by a 20A solar charge controller.
What happens to the old website?
The solar powered Low-tech Magazine is a work in progress. For now, the grid-powered Low-tech Magazine remains on-line. Readers will be encouraged to visit the solar powered website if it is available. What happens later, is not yet clear. There are several possibilities, but much will depend on the experience with the solar powered server.
Until we decide how to integrate the old and the new website, making and reading comments will only be possible on the grid-powered Low-tech Magazine, which is still hosted at TypePad. If you want to send a comment related to the solar powered web server itself, you can do so by commenting on this page or by sending an e-mail to solar (at) lowtechmagazine (dot) com.
On the one hand, we're looking for ideas and feedback to further improve the website and reduce its energy use. We will document the project extensively so that others can build low-tech websites too.
On the other hand, we're hoping for people to support this project with a financial contribution. Advertising services, which have maintained Low-tech Magazine since its start in 2007, are not compatible with our lightweight web design. Therefore, we are searching for other ways to finance the website:
We will soon offer print-on-demand copies of the blog. These publications will allow you to read Low-tech Magazine on paper, on the beach, in the sun, or whenever and where ever you want.
You can support us through PayPal, Patreon and LiberaPay.
We remain open to advertisements, but these can only take the form of a static banner image that links to the website of the advertiser. We do not accept advertisers who are incompatible with our mission.
The solar powered server is a project by Kris De Decker, Roel Roscam Abbing, and Marie Otsuka.
solar.lowtechmagazine.com
Related article: How to build a low-tech internet.
1 public comment
Dithering while Rome burns. Seriously tho I love this.
Critical Path by Jim Wright (noreply@blogger.com)
Saturday September 1st, 2018 at 10:04 PM
Stonekettle Station
Why is John Kerry going down to Antarctica just a week after the election to discuss climate change and then you have energy beams coming out of Antarctica splitting hurricanes?
-- Owen Shroyer, Infowars
We are under attack.
America is under attack.
From weather weapons and energy beams wielded by John Kerry, if you believe Alex Jones.
It's true. Quite literally. But not in the manner described by hysterical conspiracy theorists. And nothing so simple or as silly or as easily countered.
America is under attack. It's true. We are under attack in a war that very few Americans, most especially including those in charge, or those pushing conspiracies, understand. Worse, it's not just that we don't understand this war, it's that so very many Americans are even capable of understanding this conflict.
And thus America is ill-equipped to fight off this assault.
A study published today in Research and Practice, describes how Russian operators have weaponized health communication.
Specifically the authors, David A. Broniatowski, PhD; Amelia M. Jamison, MAA, MPH; SiHua Qi, SM; Lulwah AlKulaib, SM; Tao Chen, PhD; Adrian Benton, MS; Sandra C. Quinn, PhD; and Mark Dredze, PhD, show how information warfare pushed by social media automation (i.e. "bots) and directed by troll accounts, can use wedge issues like the conspiracy theories surrounding vaccinations to sow measurable chaos and division in the American population.
I have some significant experience in this field.
This is what I used to do for a living.
In the beginning I was a technical cryptologist. A codebreaker specializing in electronic signals. Back in those ancient days of the early 1980s, the world was a very different place. As now, America faced myriad threats, but most of those took a backseat to the Soviet Union.
Over the years, the politics and the enemies changed, the tools evolved, but for most of the 20th Century intelligence work remained pretty much the same.
All that changed in the last 20 years.
And the most profound change in intelligence work is volume. Volume of information.
You see, back when I first joined the Intelligence world, bandwidth was a scarce commodity. Communication channels from out on the pointy end of the stick where I was back to certain three-letter agencies in Washington – and then on to the decision-makers and perhaps the public – was limited.
Extremely limited.
Limited in a fashion most of you who are reading this from your smartphones are unlikely to understand.
Let me give you an example: We often reported via encrypted satellite text-based messaging systems that operated at 75 baud.
No, that's not a typo. 75 baud.
What's a baud?
Unless you've worked with old electronic communications systems, you're likely unfamiliar with that term, baud. It's a measurement of information rate, a unit of transmission speed that describes signal state changes per second in an analog shift-key teletype system.
Right. Huh indeed.
Let me put it in modern terms: a baud is equivalent to one bit per second.
You, of course, looking at your 4G smartphone, you are much more familiar with megabits or even gigabits per second. Millions, billions, of bits of information per second. Every second.
But back in day, information moved at a much slower rate.
Depending on the character-set/encoding system used, it takes anywhere from 5 bits (Baudot code) to 21 bits (Unicode) to make one character, i.e. a letter or number or other special character such as a period or question mark. The very symbols you are reading right now. Back then, our systems generally used 8-bit character sets (ASCII). Meaning that it took eight state changes, eight bauds, to send one character. Now, if you're running at 75 baud, each bit (the smallest unit of information in the system) is then 13.3 milliseconds in length, or about 13 one-thousandths of a second to transmit. Multiply that times eight and you find that it takes a little over a tenth of a second to transmit one character – and in practicality, longer, because we were pushing those bits through high-level encryption systems, and through multiple levels of bi-directional transmission error-checking.
Now, what all that technical gibberish means in practical terms is that sending data was slow.
Very slow.
In the amount it took to send one character back then, you could have reloaded this webpage on your smartphone half a dozen times over. Or more.
In the last decade of the 20th Century, and the first two decades of this one, communication speed and the amount of data that we can send reliably – even from a satellite cell phone in the warzone, far out on the pointy end of the stick – has increased by several orders of magnitude, i.e. hundreds of thousands of times. In some cases, millions.
Volume.
Volume of information.
And that's not necessarily a good thing. Not when it comes to quality and reliability of information.
Not when it comes to fact and truth.
You see, back in the day, every bit was precious. So, when we gathered information, sometimes at great risk to ourselves, that raw intelligence was examined on site by analysts, specialists in that particular target. If it was deemed worthy of further examination, then it was formatted into electronic reports. And those reports had a very specific structure, they were very lean, using only the characters necessary to relay the information and no more. Before the reports were transmitted, they were examined by a very experienced senior NCO – who was typically also an analyst. Then, in many cases, the information was checked one final time by an officer. The report was sent up-echelon to a regional processing center, where it was again examined by a team of analysts and combined with other information (a process that was in those days known as "fusion"), and then that report was examined at multiple levels and forwarded up the chain of command to one of those aforementioned three-letter agencies back in Washington, where it was combined with yet more information and turned into national intelligence assessments for those in the White House and Congress.
We had plenty of people, what we didn't have was bandwidth and computing power.
So, it was imperative that every bit sent was as accurate and as reliable as possible, so as to make the absolute best use of our resources.
And the side effect of this painstaking process was that the final intelligence product was of very high quality and presented to the president by those were were very, very familiar with the targets and who specialized in explaining this information to politicians in a fashion they could understand.
Now, don't get me wrong here, how that information was interpreted and used by politicians at the top end of the chain of command is a different matter – and likewise when that information was declassified (in some cases) and pushed out to the general public. And it wasn't just the intelligence community, news organizations labored under those same technological restrictions and the same biased-interpretation by the politicians and the public. Which had similar impact on the information they presented and how it entered the public consciousness.
That said, the information that arrived at the consumer was often as accurate and as reliable as is humanly possible.
All of that changed with the advent of dramatically increased bandwidth and processing power.
Over the last few decades the information cycle has become highly compressed, increasingly so.
And as the volume of raw information increases exponentially, at the same time the ability of both the news media and the intelligence community to analyze it and filter out the noise has dramatically decreased.
It has become utterly impossible to examine each piece of information in the detail we once did.
And as such, it is utterly impossible to ensure the quality and reliable and accuracy of that information.
Now, here's the important part, so pay attention: Our society, both the decision-makers who run it and the citizens who daily live in it, is habituated to having information processed, analyzed, and presented in a fashion where they can have reasonable confidence in that information.
And that information thus directly shapes our worldview.
Up until recently, the average politician, the average citizen, didn't have to be an information analyst, didn't have to have critical information processing skills, because the information system for the most part did that on the front end. The consumer very rarely received raw information about the world outside of their own immediate sphere of observation.
Almost everything you knew about the greater world was filtered through information processing systems by experts.
That is no longer true in any fashion.
And yet, we operate as if it still is.
You can see this most clearly in the older generation, many of which still believe that "they couldn't print it if it wasn't true."
This is bad enough in the general population, but it is a disaster of unmeasurable scale when government, and society itself, begins to operate on this unstable foundation.
The massive increase in information volume means that all of us are daily bombarded with a firehose of raw information, unprocessed, unfiltered.
And the vast, vast majority of you are ill-equipped to handle this in any fashion.
Most of the world lacks the training, the tools, and the support to filter bad information from good, to determine the validity of intelligence. And so, increasingly, we live in a world of malleable reality, one where politicians and media personalities tell you with a straight face "truths are not truths" and "there are facts and alternative facts."
This problem became millions of times worse with the advent of social media.
And this situation, this world of alternative facts and shifting truth and bottomless raw unfiltered information piped directly into the minds of the population without error-checking and expert interpretation creates new and unique vulnerabilities that can be exploited on a massive, global, scale in a fashion that has never been done before.
Information warfare.
More powerful, more far-reaching, more scalable, more destructive to the very fabric of our society than any nuclear bomb.
This form of warfare is incredibly powerful, far more so than any other weapon – because it reaches directly into your mind and shapes how you see the world.
Information warfare is infinitely scalable, it can target a single individual, or the entire global population, it can target a single decision-maker, a government, a population, or alter the course of history.
For example: The president of this country watches a certain news/talk/infotainment show. Every day. Without fail. And that show, the information presented there, directly shapes how he sees the world. You can watch this happen daily in real-time. Those who control that show, has direct and immediate influence on the president, and thus on the country, and thus on a global scale. It is a astounding national security vulnerability. One our enemies are well, well aware of and one, a vulnerability that our own counter-intelligence people cannot plug due to the very nature of their own Commander-in-Chief.
This is unprecedented in our history.
Over time, Information Warfare has had many names and been implemented in many, many ways – sometimes hilariously unsuccessful, sometimes horrifyingly effective, often somewhere in between. Deception warfare, communications warfare, electronic warfare, psychological warfare, perception management, information operations, active measures, marketing, whatever you call it, this form of weaponized intelligence really came into its own with the advent of social media and the 24/7 news cycle.
And unlike convention weapons, information warfare can be wielded by a handful of operators, working from a modest office with no more infrastructure than a smartphone and a social media account.
Weaponized information.
Active measures.
This was my specialty. Over time, as the intelligence community changed, as technology evolved, my own career changed with it, I went from being a junior technician specializing in electronic signals to an information warfare officer, one of the first in my field to be specifically designated as such. And one of the first to go to war specifically as such. Now I'm not going to discuss the details of my own military career any further, because those specifics are still highly classified. Suffice it to say, this is a field with which I am intimately familiar. And one at which I was very, very good.
And from that experience, I will tell you this:
An educated population trained from early age in critical thinking, whose worldview is based on fact, validated evidence, and science, is the single strongest defense – the only true defense -- against this form of assault.
But, we don't live in that world.
We can't put the genie back in the bottle. And we lack that defense, deliberately so. Because just as our own enemies benefit from an population incapable of critical thought, so do those who seek political power within our own nation.
A population skilled in critical thought is the best defense against information warfare waged by our enemies, but it is also the best defense against tyranny, against the corruption of political and religious power.
But, again, we don't live in that world.
And as such, given the state of America, the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory was an easy target.
It's not the only one, or the easiest one, or the wedge issue most vulnerable to manipulation, or the one most likely to be pushed from a low-grade irritant into a full-on pitched battle among the population and thus one that directly influences the decision-makers in charge of our government.
It is simply an easy target. One of many. Low hanging fruit. An obvious point of exploitation.
It's not the conspiracy theory itself that is the point of vulnerability, it's the conditions, the worldview, that lead to such persistently wrong-headed beliefs.
You see, it is religious nuts, the fanatical partisan, conspiracy theorists, the uneducated, the deliberately ignorant and the purposely contrarily obtuse who are the perfect targets for Information Warfare.
These are the perfect suckers, easily manipulated and turned into unwitting tools of the enemy.
All you have to do is tell them what they want to hear.
And in America's case, this target is uniquely vulnerable, uniquely fertile, because they have been conditioned by centuries of first religious nonsense given equal footing with science and then decades of conspiracy theory "infotainment" media treated as fact for profit.
If you want to know how we got here, all you have to do is look for the "Infowars" bumper-sticker proudly and unashamedly displayed on the car ahead of you in traffic.
It's not just Alex Jones.
Or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Michael Savage and all the others who sell conspiracy theory as fact.
It's not just Jerry Falwell and Ken Hamm and Joel Osteen and all the other holy joes who push their religious fraud as truth.
It's not just the politicians who lie to you every day for their own profit and power.
It's a population that utterly lacks the ability to process information in any reliable fashion, lacks intellectual rigor, lacks intellectual curiosity, and worse, lacks any desire to acquire such.
This is the population described by Orwell in his novel 1984.
Truth is not truth.
Understand something here, those on the other side, the operators working for Russia, they don't really care one way or the other if you vaccinate your kids.
Although an unvaccinated population is vulnerable to other kinds of warfare as well, and if campaigns like this one increase that vulnerability, well, then Russia gets more bang for its ruble and its biological weapons become just that more effective. In the military, we call this a force multiplier.
The goal is here division, to sow discord in the target population, start a fight in the target country and keep that fight going, break down unity, create distrust at all levels of the target society.
This particular point of attack is one of hundreds.
If you watch social media for this sort of thing, you very quickly see dozens of other points of vulnerability in the population. And if you go looking, and you know what to look for, you very quickly find evidence of similar manipulation on those fronts.
Information Warfare can, and is, used as a primary warfare area, as powerful or more so than any bomb. I've done it myself in combat. But when used in this manner, as the Russians are using it against us right now, it is a warfare support function. An enhancer. A force multiplier, one that makes other weapons, both kinetic and political, work better.
You don't need to hack election machines, if you can hack the voter.
You don't need to hack democracy if you can hack the citizen.
You don't need to physically destroy the United States if you can make Americans distrust the fundamental institutions of their own republic.
If you show that the election machines are vulnerable before the election and you do so in a manner that is purposely detectable – that you know will be detected and thus reported hysterically to the population by the target's own media -- then you don't have to hack the actual elections themselves.
You only have to show that you can.
Couple that to amplification of voter disenfranchisement, enhanced by the aforementioned division, and you directly influence the population into believing that democracy cannot be trusted. That the fundamental fabric of the Republic is unsound. And the voters will stay home, or vote in a manner that creates division, or will not trust any results of the election and thus be prone to riot and protest and resistance against the resulting government.
You don't have to destroy America, when Americans are willing to do it for you.
Now, the most effective countermeasure in this particular example should be obvious.
Secure the election.
By whatever means necessary secure the election, paper ballots, secure isolated non-networked machines, validated public audits, whatever methodology of validation and integrity is most provable to the population.
Instead of closing voting stations, open more. Get citizens to polls. Make it easier for the population to vote, not harder.
End by law those institutions which disenfranchise voters, i.e. gerrymandering, certain types of primaries, and so on.
In other words, do what is necessary to demonstrate to all citizens that the fundamental institution of the Republic is sound and that democracy can be trusted and that their vote counts.
Or course, the only way to do that is to actually make democracy trustworthy and make every vote count.
Instead, ironically, those in charge have done exactly the opposite.
Because this is the natural tendency of those in power.
And that tendency, that weakness of our republic, is precisely the vulnerability this line of attack is designed to exploit.
Russian information warfare didn't create this vulnerability, it simply takes advantage of it so long as we do nothing to counter it.
This particular attack, the one outlined in the study linked to above, is insignificant when looked at in isolation. It is simply a target of opportunity. One of many. But when looked at as part of the larger whole, it is an assault in a much larger and far more significant war. One that we are losing.
Russian doesn't have to destroy America with bombs and missiles.
All they have to do is make us weaker and weaker while they grow stronger.
All they have to do is exploit the vulnerabilities we give them.
All they have to do is take advantage of the deliberately ignorant and the gleefully stupid.
History will do the rest.
And there is no greater student of history than a Russian like Vladimir Putin.
Information is not knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein
Merry snot season. by Jessica Hagy
Tuesday January 3rd, 2017 at 11:47 AM
The post Merry snot season. appeared first on Indexed.
The Vegan Book of Permaculture by Meghan
Wednesday February 25th, 2015 at 11:32 PM
Veganic Agriculture Network
Graham Burnett has published a new book called the Vegan Book of Permaculture. This book combines ethical vegan recipes with permaculture principles for ecological living and gardening.
"Long time permaculture practitioner and activist Graham Burnett has written a very practical guide to living lightly using permaculture design within the ethical constraints and opportunities of a vegan diet. Based on lived experience rather than ideology, the strong focus on food, complete with recipes, helps vegans and omnivores alike make better use of the diversity of plant based ingredients in cool temperate climates. For vegans wanting to reduce their ecological footprint, maintain nutritional balance and increase their autonomy and resilience in a rapidly changing world, this book is the ideal introduction to permaculture living and land use."
- David Holmgren, Co-originator of the Permaculture concept
More information and reviews are available on Graham's website.
Graham is also the author of numerous other publications, including Permaculture: A Beginner's Guide, which is available in French, Spanish and Croatian.
It's great to see a book combining these two important ideas.
Next Page of Stories


AppsFlyer, the leading global mobile marketing attribution analytics company, announced today the results of its State of In-App Spending report, with details from in-app purchase (IAP) behaviors of more than 100 million mobile app users across over 1,000 apps.
The report reveals that Asian users spend 40% more on in-app purchases than the rest of the world, although North Americans spend the single highest amount — in shopping apps. In addition, the report shows that iOS users spend nearly 2.5 times as much as Android users — $1.08 to $0.43 in monthly IAP per user, per app. Not only do they spend more, but iOS users are about 50% more likely to spend any money in apps than Android users.
Further, the study finds that only 5.2% of users spend money on in-app purchases, but that the average paying user spends $9.60 in monthly transactions per app with purchase activity — more than 20 times the average spend of all users combined.


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