On 19/02/11 23:39, Rob Owens wrote:
On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 08:54:03PM +0000, AG wrote:Dear all My wife and I are looking to go volunteering for at least the next six months and will be 95% off-grid. We want to remain connected to the Net and continue to have access to a computer, and Debian will be our system of choice.If you are going to be somewhat nearby civilization, this series of articles might be interesting to you: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/03/not_spot_diary/
Many thanks for your comments Christian and Rob.Finding PV cells that effectively and reliably charge laptops does seem to be quite a task here in the UK. I have found a couple of potentially promising leads which I will investigate further. However, if you come across anything along these lines, please post.
The other issue is to track down a reliable laptop (doesn't need to be too rugged), that has a decent battery life (& doesn't degrade rapidly with each subsequent charge) and allows for basic power-saving/ energy efficient options. Has anyone any recommendations for that ... or is that also a bit of a rarity? The two laptops I've had in my life so far started off well enough but degraded in battery life quite quickly, and one of those was a Dell, so I was quite disappointed with that.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts so far. If anything else comes to mind, please let me know.
Cheers AG