Category: this is south africa

Donate to VWS

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After the last 24 hours, with seemingly the whole of the Cape peninsular ablaze, the amazing work of the Volunteer Wildfire Services (VWS) has been highlighted once again. They’ve now been out fighting the huge fires for well over 24 hours, battling high winds, smoke and temperatures in excess of 40ºC today.

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The VWS rely on donations from the public and businesses to meet their annual running costs, and if you want to help them out with a once-off donation, here are the details you need:

Bank Deposits or EFT Payments can be made to:
Volunteer Wildfire Services
Nedbank
Branch: Foreshore
Branch Code: 108309
Account Number: 1083321226

If you make a donation, please use your name as a unique reference as well as sending us an email so we can thank you for your valued contribution.
Email: finance@vws.org.za

Alternatively, you can make a credit card donation via their Givengain page – again, they ask that you drop them an email if you do that to “keep track of incoming funding for the auditors”.

There are other longer term ways to support the VWS, including adding them as a beneficiary on your Woolworths MySchool card or pledging money each month, via their pledge page (which also has their equipment wishlist on it).

Good cause alert: please give what you can.

World’s Biggest Windmill

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Not really, but still – nice story: they’ve put a couple of VAWTs on the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Well, they couldn’t really put them on the Eiffel Tower anywhere else, could they?

If you’ve ever seen the Eiffel Tower in real life, you’ll know that it’s not small. Here it is with its head in the clouds in the height of summer, 2012 with the boy wonder in the foreground, and a handy indicator of where the turbines have been fitted just above the 2eme étage:

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Amazingly, despite their hugely elevated position, they’re not even at the height of the wind turbines in Caledon just up the road from Cape Town. Suddenly, Gustav’s big project doesn’t seem quite so huge. Or maybe wind turbines are just generally horribly invasive. Hey, you decide.

The 10,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity they’ll produce each year is about enough to self-sustain the commercial section on the tower’s first floor, but not much else.

Look, it’s something. And I do understand that this is really all just about visibility. To be honest, short of putting a set of huge blades on the top of the tower itself, it’s probably about as good as it’s going to get. Especially in a country which produces around 80% of its electricity from nuclear. But while wind is good because it’s renewable, it’s may not be quite as green as you think. Here’s an interesting “back-of-the-envelope calculation” by Popular Science magazine on which are the nastiest forms of electricity generation if you happen to be, say… a bird (as one of the endangered Blue Cranes near Caledon might self-identify, for example).

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You can read more here, but the gist of it is that Coal is downright evil (we knew this), solar plants fry birds:

Rewire reports that during the test, operators fired up a third of the 110-megawatt facility’s mirrors, concentrating sunlight on a spot 1,200 feet off the ground. Over a six-hour period, biologists counted 130 “streamers,” or trails of smoke and water left behind as birds ignited and plummeted to their deaths. Rewire’s anonymous source said that at least one of the birds “turned white hot and vaporized completely.”

and we already knew that wind turbines kill birds and bats.

Sadly, despite our current (no pun intended) electricity woes, it seems like nuclear isn’t the er… cleanest option for SA either (although not necessarily for environmental reasons).

So we have the choice of evil coal (which we’re going to use), the horribly inefficient and not-ever-so-nice-after-all solar and wind, or the allegedly dangerously corrupt nuclear.

Or we could do fracking… Now there’s a good idea.

More Parisian flickritude

Setting Suns

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Passenger joins a long line of artists who have filmed a video in and around Cape Town while touring out here (see Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Kasabian et al.).

Says Mike:

hello everyone ,
the whispers world tour came to an end on sunday so i thought i’d post a little video that we made over the last few days in CAPE TOWN. i can’t quite believe how beautiful that city is .
SOUTH AFRICA has undoubtedly been one of the highlights and fantastic way to end this adventure !!!!
the whispers tour took me and some of my best friends around the world and i’ll never forget seeing such beautiful things with such incredible people .
the song is called “setting suns” and it felt like a fitting sentiment .
as always , please feel free to hit the share button if you like what you see 🙂
thank you all so so much .
mike xxxx

I know that music people have their stage personae and that we can’t believe everything we see or hear from them, but Mike Rosenberg really does seem to be a very nice, gentle, down-to-earth kinda guy who demonstrates only a mild hint of creepiness when staring into the middle distance on the video.

The video features dolphins, penguins, gannets and seals, Camps Bay, cable cars and er… the setting sun (just one of it, despite the song title) – plus some bonus scenes from the Kirstenbosch concert.

TIL about cellphone jammers

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There were seventeen different kinds of uproar last week at the State of the Nation address when journalists sent to cover the debacle event noticed that they were unable to use mobile communication to file their reports on JZ’s evasiveness and parliament’s generally appalling misbehaviour.

They blamed a device found near the media gallery:

scramb

…which obviously, no-one knows who put there. Although my money is on the man with the pointy shoes.

And yes, it turns out that this is what a (military strength) cellphone jammer looks like. But how does a cellphone jammer work? Well, given the high tech world we live in, it’s actually surprisingly crude.

Basically, it’s the airwave version of a Denial-of-Service Attack in that it doesn’t do anything other than flood the frequency which cellphones use to talk to the nearest tower with signal, thus preventing any mobile device from accessing the network. I’m guessing that it’s like the illegal version of what happens when you try to send a tweet from a concert. (Which you shouldn’t be doing anyway, you went there for the music, right?) Simply too many signals competing to try and latch onto one tower – except in this case, the vast majority of them are artificially generated.

Cellphones use two different frequencies to send and receive information, but if even one of them is jammed, then the device is fooled into thinking that it can’t get through at all. But fancy jammers like this one can block lots of different frequencies at the same time – just in case you think you have some alternative means of accessing the network.

If your cellphone is being jammed, the likelihood is that you won’t find it suspicious – it’ll just be like you’re in an area with no signal – we’ve all been there:

Yeah, I think we got cut off
Yeah, I got crap reception in my house
I have to stand in a certain spot in my kitchen or it cuts out

Such a Twat, The Streets

It was only because there were large numbers of people in a small area struggling to get any reception on Thursday that it became obvious that something a bit sinister was going on.

Depending on how strong the jammer jamming your phone is, you might only have to walk a few steps away to regain a signal. But with a big one like the one above, and with everyone in a defined space (the Parliament building), the only way to #bringbackthesignal was for somebody to switch the big box (which no-one knows who put there) off.

Once that brief hiccup was dealt with, we could get on with the rest of the circus, and deal with the hangover and recriminations of media freedom denied for weeks and months to come.