The film inspired me to donate some cash. I gave $10 each to The Yes Men, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The Bhopal Medical Appeal.

Having found a potentially good deal, I took the time to write to them. I used the technical questions form on the site. Almost immediately, I received an auto-reply:

Thank you for contacting SolarHome.org Due to the volume of technical questions we have recently recieved we are unable to assist you. Please utilize the following free resources and again we apologize for not being able to help.

The message went on to link to the forum they operate and suggested I ask my question there. Feeling strong rage, I decided to call them and ask why the “contact our tech people” feature still existed on the site, if they did not, in fact, answer questions.

Their supposed “customer service” telephone number kept me on hold for a minute or two and then dropped me onto voicemail.

Next I wanted to email them, until I read this on the contact page:

We read every email we receive and follow up promptly if there is a match. Due to the quantity of inquiries we receive, we’re afraid we cannot answer emails for which there is no match.

WTF? A company that apparently doesn’t want to hear from me. Outrageous.

I’ll choose to give my business to Affordable Solar, Ben’s Discount Supply, or one of the many other solar equipment retailers.

The solution was remarkably simple, I post it here in the hope it might help others. Firstly, I removed the oldest kernel I had installed. I opened Synaptic (System > Administration) and then searched for my current kernel version (2.6.32). I saw I had 4 kernels installed. I then searched for 2.6.32-21, the oldest kernel. I marked these packages for complete removal:

• linux-headers-2.6.32-21
• linux-headers-2.6.32-21-generic
• linux-image-2.6.32-21-generic

Then I removed those and to finish, I marked for re-installation the same packages but the -24 version (the latest kernel that failed to install). Now all is happy once again.

We travelled back and spent the day there on Wednesday. I took some GPS markers, so here’s the location Google maps (GPS coordinates 8.1741, -82.14224). Google have the best mapping data for the area. The point on the map is the likely site of the primary structure. The property includes the whole bay to the north and half of the bay to the south. I’m not sure how far back from the coast it extends, we didn’t reach the fence in our first day’s exploring.

Access

The only practical access to the property is by boat. It is possible to walk in, but the nearest dirt road appears to be 2-3km away. The property to the north is used for cattle farming, so there must be some sort of access. Within this property, the only trail runs east to west near the south end of the property, so overland access from the north would be difficult.

The nearest road accessible port is Boca Chic, about 11km to the north east. The road to Boca Chica is paved all the way from the Panamerican Highway. It’s less than 1hr on the motorbike from David, the third largest city in Panama. David is described as the second best shopping location in Panama, behind Panama City. There’s an airport in David with flights to Panama City and San Jose.

The deal

Frank, the owner of Pacific Bay Resort, also owns this property. The general outline of his proposal is thus. There are some 250 – 300 year old trees on the property. The property is currently unoccupied and so every so often, people will come and steal one of the trees. Frank wants to protect the trees and so he wants somebody to use the land. Before I knew anything about the property, I spoke about my vision to build a lodge as a place to make food and shelter people. Frank liked the idea, and in principle offered me the use of his land, for free, with a legally valid contract, in whatever configuration we decide. He suggested a 5 year term, with the option of 10 renewals.

I’m assuming the contract will include details of how the land is to be cared for. Which trees are to be protected, how much space can be developed, maybe how many structures can be built, and so on. We’ll break down these details later if we proceed.

Resources

There is some bamboo on the property. It’s quite mature and I think some of it is thick enough to be used for construction, if properly cured. There’s a lot of fallen wood and some driftwood on the beach. These could be used for a mixture of fuel and construction.

The soil seems to be rich in clay, and there’s plenty of sand on the beach. They could be combined to make adobe structures or flooring. There are a lot of pebbles on the beach which could be used for all kinds of pathways and floor coverings.

Infrastructure

Currently there is one cleared pathway on the property. The land is fenced around the perimeter and otherwise almost completely untouched. There is a year-round fresh water source on the property, along the southern border. I think the water is about 250m (750 feet) from the probable lodge location, and about 50m (150 feet) lower.

To live on the space we’d need some kind of sewage system, some source of electrical energy (most likely solar) and structures in which to live. I think the sewage will be fairly straightforward, we can start with simple pit toilets and drains. I think the most challenging, and likely the most costly, will be the solar system.

Structures

I really like the bamboo hooch idea. I think they could be great here. Some of the bamboo on the property looks like it would be big enough to build hooches. We could also build some adobe structures, but I think it might be overkill in a tropical climate.

I like the idea of using something like hennessy hammocks, especially to start with. They’re economical to purchase, fast to install, we have plenty of trees, and they don’t require flat or soft ground. Over time I can see the hammock berths becoming more luxurious with maybe pebble floors, improved roofing, expanded bug protection, etc.

The things that I’m most focused on right now are ways to build stairs, using what we have available, and flooring. I can see lots of options for walls and roofs, but I’m not as familiar with how to create clean, smooth, waterproof, durable floors. Given the slope we want to climb, I’m also thinking about different options to put in steps.

We didn’t take any new pictures on Wednesday, so I have no new photos to share. However, I’m very interested to hear about your ideas. I think I’ll write a series of posts on the different aspects of the project as I think about them. I’ll be grateful for any links, suggestions or other feedback you would like to share. Muchas gracias.

At dinner on night two, once most of our group had left, we got a chance to chat with Frank, the Panamanian born, American brought up, owner of the resort. I talked a little about my vision to build a lodge and his eyes lit up. Then he told me that he has another property, 30 acres, a 10 minute boat ride away. He said he’s having problems with people stealing trees from the property. He wants to protect the wildlife there.

He offered me the use of his land, 30 acres of beach-front, untouched, incredibly beautiful Panamanian coast line. He said if we don’t cut down any trees and don’t build too many structures, he’s happy to let us use the land for free. He had a good feeling about me.

Amazing! The next morning we took a boat ride over to the property to take a look. We left to see the World Cup Final (not my idea!) and then back to Boquete. Now we’re heading back down there to spend a few days looking a the place. No internet there (yet!) so I’ll be offline for a little while. But here’s a few pictures to whet your appetite …

I’ll update my picture (people seem shocked when they see it after meeting me in person!), and modify the menu using the new menu editor. I’ll try to make navigating a little easier. If you haven’t already tried it, I recommend the new version of WordPress.

I found this post by Barak Korren. Barak wrote a short nautilus script in python to allow the easy deletion of a thumbnail in Nautilus. Here’s a step by step guide to getting it working.

Download this file and put it into your ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory. The script is by Barak, I uploaded a plain text version here to make it easier to download. Make the script executable, you can run chmod +x ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/delete_thumbnails.py in a terminal to do this. Now go to that directory in Nautilus, and you’re in business.

To test, right click on a file with a thumbnail. You should see a new menu, Scripts, under which you’ll see “delete_thumbnails.py”. Click that option and the thumbnail will be deleted. Press F5 to reload the folder in nautilus, and you should see a new thumbnail generated.

Thanks for a such a handy script Barak.

In the last couple of days, I discovered gwrite. It’s a very simple WYSIWYG HTML editor. It has the potential to be exactly what I want, but it’s very young software and still has a few usability bugs. I’ve reported them to the program’s author, so maybe it’ll improve in time. I might even look at the source code and see if I can provide some patches myself.

But, that’s not the point of this post. This post is about lyx, which is a seriously cool application I’ve just discovered. It’s a “writing tool”, not a word processor. It’s a tool designed for scientific and other authors to simply write text. It’s based on an underlying technology called L^AT_EX. As I understand it, and I’m completely new to this whole thing, LaTeX allows an author to just write. The layout of chapters, titles, indentations, bullet points, and all that jazz, is handled by LaTeX macros. What does that mean? Well, I think it means I just write, then lyx, LaTeX and TeX make it look beautiful.

So, all excited, I decided to install lyx. This is where I hit a problem. I was prompted to download 438MB of data and use 745MB of disk space. That’s outrageously huge for a single program. I was blown away, it makes installing lyx many times larger than OpenOffice. I was strongly intrigued by what took up so much space, so I had a little sniff. It turns out that more than 70% of the download size and almost 60% of the disk space is used by documentation. Mostly, documentation for underlying applications which I didn’t specifically choose to install, they’re required to make lyx work.

Being on a slow internet connection, I decided waiting the day or two for 438MB to download was just too much. There must be another way. A little research later, I found my solution in a program called equivs. Equivs is a pair of tools to create shadow or dummy debs. In my case, this meant creating a dummy package to make apt think that I had already installed the massive collection of documentation that was necessary to install lyx. Thus I was able to install lyx by downloading only 117MB of data and using only 302MB of disk space. Still astronomically huge, but less than half of what I was originally facing.

And so, onto the point of this post. How does one do that? If you want a simple answer, here it is. Step 1, install this file. Step 2, install lyx as normal. Bingo, jobsagoodun.

For those who are interested, I’ll explain the process on Ubuntu 10.04. Install equivs in the usual way (sudo apt-get install equivs will do the trick). Now create a new directory, I called it equivs-texlive-dummy-docs. In that directory, run equivs-control texlive-dummy-docs.ctl. Now edit the newly created file. Mine looked like this. Next run equivs-build texlive-dummy-docs.ctl. This command creates a new file called texlive-dummy-docs_1.0_all.deb. That file can be installed with sudo dpkg -i texlive-dummy-docs_1.0_all.deb.

It took me a few hours to put all this together. Hopefully if you’re facing the same challenge, you can install one file and be done.

Update: I discovered that all these packages are installed because apt is configured to install recommended packages by default. I tried installing lyx without any of the recommended packages using sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends lyx, but previewing documents from lyx didn’t work. Instead I reverted to my equivs texlive-dummy-docs package. If you feel passionately about this topic, as I do, please chime in on this bug.

They asked for an ID card. I offered my UK driving license. That was fine, except their computer would only accept numbers in the “identification document number” spot. So instead, I gave them my passport, where the document number is only digits. I probably could have pushed the issue with my driving license, maybe they would have just entered the numerical part or something, but the passport seemed easier, and I was in a hurry.

The transaction was painless. I showed no phone and they only looked at the photo page of my passport, but wouldn’t have seen it at all if I’d pushed the driving license. It seems that prepaid SIMS are finally available in Costa Rica…

Now if only I could get service inside my house…

For those wishing to visit, I’ll posting directions. All are welcome. Our accommodation is basic. We have tents, tent hammocks, hammocks, and other places to sleep. We invite you to come and experience this beautiful part of the world.

We’re just outside the town of San Isidro. From other places in Costa Rica, take a bus to San Isidro. The bus from San Jose takes 3-4 hours and is run by a company called Musoc.

From San Isidro, there is a local bus that will bring you to our driveway. Take the bus for Pedegroso and San Ramon. Ask the bus driver to get off just after the road for Arizona, at Pupleria El Dorado. Our driveway is 100m before the pulperia, on the left side of the road. When following our driveway, keep to the right hand side for our house. Follow the driveway down the hill, past a small finca (farm house) and around to the left. You’ll see 4 houses in amongst trees. Ours is the one in the middle, painted yellow with green trim.

I believe a taxi from San Isidro costs about 2’500 colones (approximately $5 USD). You can tell the taxi you want the road to San Ramon, just after the road for Arizona. Then follow the directions above to find our driveway. If the gate is open, a taxi can drive right down to the house. If the gate is locked, there is space for a person to squeeze through the fence, next to the gate.

If you arrive and we’re not home, please make yourselves as comfortable as you can and we hope to see you soon.