I’m just heading off to the airport to go to Maker Faire Bay Area in San Mateo, CA – if you’re coming, we’ll be giving talks, doing Q&A sessions and generally making ourselves available to chat to you. Please come and say hello.

I had mail from Matt at Challenge Africa, a UK charity (Reg: 1130522) which is raising money for two schools in Africa, one in Kenya and one in Tanzania. They’re raffling off a Raspberry Pi as part of their fundraising effort, so if you haven’t been lucky enough to get your hands on one yet, it’s worth entering for the chance to win and the opportunity to help a very good cause. Either Eben or I will be drawing the winning ticket (we’re having a bit of a fight about who gets to do it) – I’ll see what I can do about getting the winner’s Raspberry Pi signed, too, and adding some other Raspberry Pi goodies to the winner’s bundle.

The money raised from the raffle will go towards:

PROJECT 1
St Lazarus School, Kibera Slums, Kenya:
This tiny school accepts 130 children who would not be accepted at any other facility due to their families’ inability to fund even the most basic requirements for standard school entry: uniform and text books.

The kids and teachers from St Lazarus with friends from Challenge Africa and a big cheque

Challenge Africa aims to:
1. Fund and refurbish (particularly the roof) of several mud classrooms.

2. Launch another year’s lunch programme for 130 primary school children. Huge leaps have been made in the basic health of the children as a direct result of previous Challenge group funding.

3. Subject to funds: Fund an entire year’s running costs (teacher salaries, maintenance, food programme, books and materials) to give the school time to find additional and more reliable funding partners. The school is in danger of financial and physical collapse in every respect having had all other sources of funding fade away under the current economic climate. Teachers are currently not being paid and food is intermittent. For most of the children, this was their only meal of the day.

PROJECT 2: 
Makat Village Community (Maasai), Lake Natron, Longido District, Tanzania
A community surviving in one of the most remote areas of the Great Rift Valley, it is surrounded by water which is unsafe to drink (fluoride levels 14% higher than the maximum levels recommended for safety by the WHO).

Makat is at least a day’s off-road drive from anywhere, the entire community has access to only one dilapidated Land Rover (when it works) which belongs to the Headmaster.
The local population suffer appalling and preventable bone deformities and teeth erosion due to the natural fluoride levels, as well as a range of other preventable diseases and ailments due to malnutrition and the lack of education, medical care and supplies and emergency transportation. The area and community find it almost impossible to retain teachers and medical staff due to the isolation and lack of food and clean water.

Challenge Africa aims to:
1. Assist with immediate basic health and nutritional improvements via:
• The funding and construction of a rainwater conservation system (guttering and 2-4 large cement tanks) attached to the current Makat community school building to provide safe drinking and cooking water for the children and pregnant women of the community.
• The funding and construction of an additional three-room Government Standard classroom building (2 classes + 1 Food Storage Room).

2. The additional classroom structure will also provide more roof surface area for additional guttering and additional water tanks

3. The Food Storage will ensure World Food Programme continues to provide basic maize on a quarterly basis. This is currently irregular and in imminent danger of withdrawal due to lack of appropriate food storage facilities.

4. Fund and take part in Brucellosis testing on the Makat Community’s cattle to provide essential medical data. Brucellosis is often misdiagnosed as malaria.

5. Fund and take part in STD drama workshops with the community under supervision of Dr Penny Aberhardt and the District Medical Officer.

6. Subject to funds: aim to install 1 x solar panel at the Merogoi Outreach Clinic (1 day’s walk) to incentivise Doctors to stay at the Outpost (reducing isolation) so that there is some basic medical facility ‘locally’. For similar reasons, we would like to install one panel at the Teacher’s Accommodation Unit at the Makat School.

Please note that all personal costs of Challenge Africa’s volunteers are paid for by themselves, not from your donations.

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]

An anti-smoking advertisement from the American Lung Association.

1988: C. Everett Koop, surgeon general of the United States, publishes a report declaring nicotine as addictive as either heroin or cocaine.

Nicotine serves as the tobacco plant’s natural defense against insects and, in its pure form, is more poisonous than either strychnine or arsenic. Its chemical structure is similar to acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, giving it easy access to the brain’s reward and pleasure pathways.

Koop, something of an idiosyncratic figure despite serving in the conservative Reagan administration, went after the tobacco companies hard, something no one in his position had done before.

Koop, a pediatric surgeon, valued hard science over political expediency and was not afraid of staking out positions contrary to either the administration’s views or popular opinion.

He was much tougher on big tobacco than the Reagan administration would have liked and when AIDS came along, Koop was criticized both by gay rights advocates (for bluntly stating the health risks inherent in gay sex practices) and by conservatives (for advocating sex education as early as the third grade).

Besides his damning report on nicotine’s addictive characteristics, Koop was instrumental in making warning labels mandatory on cigarette packs.

(Source: Various)

This article first appeared on Wired.com May 16, 2007.

[via: http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech]

If you’re an element14/Premier Farnell/Newark customer who left a comment under one of the earlier update posts (here and here) and promptly forgot about it, please go and have a look; Jenny from element14 has been working through the wee small hours to answer specific order enquiries you have left there.

If you’ve any more questions for poor Jenny (who must have blisters on the tips of her fingers from all the typing by now), please leave them under this post – she’s offered to keep up the support she’s been giving our readers because she is, broadly speaking, fabulous. But please go back and check the old threads (again, they’re here and here ) to make sure she hasn’t answered your question already!

Thank you so much, Jenny, We really appreciate all your work.

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]

This just arrived in my inbox from Jo: I hope you find it helpful! I’ll be asking the RS Raspberry Pi team to swing by the comments section later if you’ve got any questions for them.

Thanks to all those of you who have posted comments – positive and negative – since our last update. We recognise that many of you are still wondering where you are in our queue and when you will be able to purchase your Raspberry Pi.

While this won’t resolve all of your questions we hope this update will give you a clearer picture of what is happening right now.

A secure delivery schedule is in place for the next 75,000 Raspberry Pi boards, which will take us through May and June.Next week we will be opening up our online Raspberry Pi store and inviting the next customers in our queue to place their orders.

To give you some idea of what this means, by 5pm GMT on the day that Raspberry Pi launched, 29^th February, we had received around 75,000 registrations. We expect to invite all of these people to place their order over the course of the next 7 to 10 days.

We’re preparing further communications that will give more detail on our queue and what this means for people who registered post 29^th Feb, which we’ll share shortly. In the meantime, we’ve also updated our FAQs and will continue to post updates on a regular basis.

Best wishes

Jo & all the RS Raspberry Pi Team

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]

Eben and I were at the Sci Fi London Horizons event at the British Film Institute on Sunday, talking about the Raspberry Pi to a room full of Spectrum fans who were there to celebrate the Speccy’s 30th birthday.

Official Friend of Pi, Andrew Edney, who took the video of Eben’s talk at the BBC Micro’s 30th anniversary, was also at Sci Fi London Horizons, and very kindly recorded this one too. (Fewer people walked in front of his camera this time.) Bill Marshall from RS joined Eben after his talk for a Q&A. And there’s a bonus in the last three minutes, when I leap into frame and start talking at about a hundred miles an hour. Apologies; cameras and microphones scare me half to death. The result is that I can’t understand my first two sentences, and you won’t either. The rest should make approximate sense, though.

Andrew’s put a blog post up about the day too – head over and have a read!

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]