Calroc

Wealth in an Age of Ecological Turmoil

2009-05-18T22:40:00.000-07:00

The times they are a changing. We want to live abundant lives, but the current crop of consumer products and their attendant manufacturing and distribution bases are destroying our Mother Earth. How can we justify wealth-seeking in a time when the material badges of that wealth are themselves anti-life?

Local Sustainable "Consumption"
The first piece of the puzzle of reconciling wealth and abundance with sustainable practices is your commitment to "source" your material goods and services from local sustainable producers.

Buying from local sustainable producers saves resources and prevents destruction of the Earth's bounty. If the producers then also buy locally the effect of your spending choice is multiplied.

Ideally, everyone involved in the production of your consumer products would be using sustainable methods and materials. The physical buildings and other infrastructure would be constructed and maintained in sustainable ways, with sustainable materials.

By factoring in our social requirements to our purchasing decisions we can easily signal the business world to adapt themselves to supporting a healthy and long-term life. Most of them already want to, they just need the economic gateways opened up for them by our ready dollars.

Spiritual Wealth
The very nature of wealth is changing. Old fashioned ideas of wealth based primarily on status symbols and ability to command the productive capacity of your fellows are rapidly failing.

Material items don't improve your happiness once you've reached a certain "norm". Your need for personal growth can't be fed by any increase in trinkets. The solution to existential malaise takes the form of moving beyond yourself, of trying to be a better person, a greater human being.

So we find ourselves talking about spiritual wealth, and here we have a plethora of sound advice and guides. Reach out to your fellow earthlings and serve them, engender episodes of warmth and human compassion in daily life. Let your existence become a poem of service and kindness. This is a sure path to true wealth.

Imagine that you're an eco-entrepreneur. Perhaps you bake bread with local ingredients. In comes a new customer and, with a smile on her face, she buys some of your bread. Now, granted there's an equitable exchange going on there, but can't you imagine that you'd feel a bit like that person had done you a good turn?

When you patronize responsible businesses that are competing with irresponsible ones you are, in no small measure, serving the whole world. You still need to do more than shop responsibly to be a good person, but it is a simple way to bring spiritual values into your life.

If we make the decision to buy goods and services that are created in harmony with the systems of the Earth, and if we go beyond material abundance to the true wealth of the spirit, then the drive to live well can be harnessed in a healthy manner and become, not part of the problem, but part of the solution.

Scrollback on Screen

2009-05-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

Hit ctrl-a [ and you're in scroll "cut and paste" mode, ESC to return to normal mode.

Honda's next-generation thin film solar cells

2008-10-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

From a flash Honda "press piece" that shows off information and photos of their new thin film solar panel technology:

Honda's next-generation thin film solar cells achieve approximately a 50 percent reduction in the amount of energy consumed during the manufacturing process.

Bucky Lays it Out. Get Busy!

2008-07-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

Here it is. Bucky himself laying out the option. I'm writing this in 2008. That means we've had the power to achieve a working realistic "Utopia" for twenty-three years.

And since progress is exponential, we must be almost falling over ourselves with solutions by now. And we are. I'll post about them soon, but two of them are Permaculture and John and Nancy Todd's Living Machines.

Bucky was an engineer, when he made this proclamation it was on the basis of hard-headed scientific reasoning, informed by an unmatched apprehension of the world conditions and world resources at the time. Remember that he traveled the world, by invitation, some 80-odd times. Especially remarkable for a man who was born before the invention of the airplane, even before the Poles of the Earth had been reached by human explorers.

Xerblin Images

2008-06-27T18:48:00.001-07:00

Currently a screenshot, the cool logo and a graph of the python module dependencies. This is a link to a Picasa Web Album.

Xerblin

Betelgeuse

2008-06-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

And now, for no reason, Betelgeuse.

pronounced /ˈbiːtəldʒuːz/ or /ˈbɛtəldʒuːz/" - wikipedia.org entry for Betelgeuse

Code Review, Public Code too for that matter, for Xerblin

2008-06-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

Plunge. I put the Xerblin code into public svn on Google Code. I have a new laptop and a stable internet connection now, so rather than work off my local repository (and try to keep the two machines, new and old, synced) I'm going to just bite the bullet and let the gcode repo be the repo.

I also set up an instance of GvR's Rietveld, a Google App for code review, for Xerblin. You can check it out at http://xerblincodereview.appspot.com/ but it won't make much sense unless you read up on it first. I'm going to invite some friends to review the Xerblin code base in the run up to a 1.0 release. :]

FoNC has a Wiki Now

2008-06-05T13:48:00.001-07:00

http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/

Some Backstory on IDLE Python IDE

2008-06-05T12:37:00.001-07:00

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/idle-dev/2008-June/thread.html

Re: [Idle-dev] Fix for long delays

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 9:07 AM, Bruce Sherwood <Bruce_Sherwood@*.edu> wrote:
> Dave Scherer suggested that I join this discussion, as I represent a
> constituency of literally thousands of college students who use IDLE in

...

> There are very good reasons to want novice programmers who are
> writing computational physics programs to be writing and running full
> programs at all times, not to be working at the statement level in the
> interactive shell. Interacting in the shell can of course be very useful for
> expert programmers, but this kind of interaction with a programming language
> weakens for our students the concept that a program is a complete sequence
> of operations, performed sequentially. It may sound strange, but this is not
> a trivial concept to many newcomers.

...

Remember? Remember learning that concept? I vaguely do. Wow.

Google Alert - permaculture

2008-06-05T03:58:00.001-07:00

Google News Alert for: permaculture

Veganism is a consumer activity
Infoshop News - USA
On a permaculture farm in many climates, for example, integrating chickens into the farm enhances rather than diminishes the food supply. ...
See all stories on this topic

"The Urban Homestead" author Eric Knutzen talks city gardening and ...
Los Angeles Times - CA,USA
Overall we're guided by permaculture, which can be a difficult thing to explain. Permaculture came out of Australia, from the work of Bill Mollison and ...
See all stories on this topic

Google Blogs Alert for: permaculture

General Homesteading : some permaculture questions
As far as permaculture gardening ... fruit trees are pretty permanent! Berries, and perennials like rhubarb and asparagus are also long lived. In my zone 6 garden I often over winter garlic, onions, and potatoes, leaving some to start ...
The Homestead.org Forum : General... - http://forums.homestead.org/

General Homesteading : some permaculture questions
on permaculture: i am a certified permaculture instructor and can say that once established, permaculture gardens are very low maintenance. the initial preparation and establishment requires a fair bit of labor, but tilling is not a ...
The Homestead.org Forum : General... - http://forums.homestead.org/

Permaculture
By edisme
Download this video! Full Screenvideo link. Details the rise and rise of the "Permaculture Concept" as espoused by Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton.
OpposingDigits Vlog - http://opposingdigits.com/vlog

General Homesteading : some permaculture questions
Author: smwon Subject: some permaculture questions Posted: 04 June 2008 at 1:40pm. Originally posted by nomadx hey i'm new. interested in homesteading and a sustainable lifestyle, ie don't have to constantly buy things to survive. while ...
The Homestead.org Forum - http://forums.homestead.org/

This once a day Google Alert is brought to you by Google.

Permaculture Google News Alert to ThisBlog, Neat

2008-06-05T03:26:00.000-07:00

I managed to connect a Google news alert to this blog, At least I think I did. We'll know tomorrow when a daily digest of news involving permaculture shows up or otherwise here.

I made the google alert go to my gmail account.
I set up a post-by-email address for this blog.
I set up a forwarding fllter in my gmail account to send emails from the news alert service to the blogger post-by-email dummy address.

Ta-da! Maybe.

We'll see tomorrow. G'night.

Hello there World...

2008-06-05T03:18:00.001-07:00

Nice,

This is a test email to blag yay.

See my nifty sig? Who knew Mr. Wells had written history. It's
awesome too. (And, yes, I know about "

Using Git as a versioned data store in Python

2008-06-04T02:31:00.000-07:00

From this:
http://www.pythonware.com/daily/2991901146691564289/

you find this, which is now 404:
http://www.newartisans.com/blog_files/git.versioned.data.store.php

but then there's this:
http://www.newartisans.com/blog_files/git.from.bottom.up.php

2008-05-15

John Wiegley: Using Git as a versioned data store in Python ["... while most people do simply use Git as a version control system, it remains true that it can be used for other tasks as well. For example, if you ever need to store mutating data in a series of snapshots, Git may be just what you need. It's fast, efficient, and offers a large array of command-line tools for examining and mutating the resulting data store. To support this kind of usage – for the upcoming purpose of maintaining issue tracking data in a Git repository – I've created a Python class that wraps Git as a basic shelve object."]

Python 2.5 and Tcl/Tk 8.5 DSL Extension

2008-03-17T16:04:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with Damn Small Linux (DSL) as a host OS for my Xerblin project and so far I'm impressed. It's a cute system: Knoppix base with a full-fledged but tiny desktop system and a fairly sophisticated facility for customization via "Extensions" (and other means.)

In order to run Xerblin (which depends on Tkinter), I'm creating an extension for DSL that includes Python 2.5 as well as Tcl/Tk 8.5 (there is already a Python 2.5 extension but it doesn't include Tkinter support.) It's proving to be very straightforward, in part because both the folks responsible for Tcl/Tk and the folks responsible for Python have done a great job on their respective build processes, and in part because the DSL extension creation process is undemanding.

Compiling and Installing Python and Tcl/Tk
Briefly, I created a couple of "destination" directories in the /opt directory, one for Python and one for Tcl/Tk:


mkdir /opt/tcltk-8.5
mkdir /opt/python2.5

Then, having downloaded the source code for each from their respective websites, I did the configure; make; make install dance and specified the proper "destination" directories

Tcl:

tar xzvf tcl8.5.1-src.tar.gz
cd tcl8.5.1/unix
./configure --prefix=/opt/tcltk-8.5 --exec-prefix=/opt/tcltk-8.5
make && make install

Tk (note the --with-tcl option, that was one thing that had to be there to tell Tk where to find the Tcl libs):

tar xzvf tk8.5.1-src.tar.gz
cd tk8.5.1/unix
./configure \
  --with-tcl=/opt/tcltk-8.5/lib \
  --prefix=/opt/tcltk-8.5 \
  --exec-prefix=/opt/tcltk-8.5
make && make install

Python:

tar xzvf Python-2.5.2.tgz
cd Python-2.5.2
./configure --prefix=/opt/python2.5 --exec-prefix=/opt/python2.5
make && make install

Note, before you can compile Python and have it find Tcl/Tk and build Tkinter you must tell it where Tcl/Tk are, and to do this you must edit Python's setup.py file. I'll flesh this out later...

Symlinks to /opt/bin
Stripping out unneeded cruft
Making the extensions proper
Running ldconfig