Rustic Retreat
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Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.
Subscribe to our new main project Rustic Retreat on the projects own website.
Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.
So called “environmentalists” often claim that burning wood is “evil” but mostly forget in their argument, that domestic energy has to be produced somehow for humankind to survive. There is nothing evil about burning wood, quite the opposite in fact, wood can be a renewable energy source, when used properly. Simply put: To keep it sustainable, it's important not to burn more wood than nature is able to reproduce (i.e. grow trees) and to increase the amount of usable energy that can be harvested.
In order to avoid disastrous deforestation, which happened on the Easter-Islands, is currently happening on Haiti and will become more obvious in India and Africa in the near future, it's imperative to help these people now, by putting a stop to burning wood in open fires or simple stoves and not to implicitly deem them evil because, as of now, they simply have no other choice but to burn wood.
The expression security = usability-1 can be interpreted in many ways. Either things become far too complicated, so that regular users just don't want to be bothered with them or the amount of energy it takes to complete a security-related task is just insane.
To wipe a 1TB (1024GB) disk with random data or prep a disk for encryption, it takes a little more than 4 days (97 hours) when utilizing /dev/urandom. Who would want to wait 4 days for a supporting task like this to finish? Just considering the energy it takes, to keep the whole system up and running, only to write random data to a disk, clearly demands higher random data bitrates without sacrificing quality. Hardware-RNG's are good alternative but not always available, so you might want to give /dev/frandom a try.