What are the options for portable power?
A friend of mine is off to the Peace Corps in a few months and we were having a conversation about what she should bring. It’s almost a certainty she’ll end up in a remote village in Mauritania (that’s right — I had to look it up too). It’s likely she’ll be without power except for monthly trips to the city. Is it worth bringing her laptop?
Wouldn’t it be really cool if she could get some sort of self-powered device for intermittent electricity? Perhaps an exercise bike or something? Maybe even something small and simple, like the One Laptop Per Child project’s pull-string? It seems to me to be something that could come in handy even here in the developed world. Shouldn’t have something like this already made it to market?