Big win for a little bank

This is the kind of levels down to which FOSS people should be doing business.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, makes tiny loans (“some as small as $20”) for people to escape their financial bondage & stock up to go into business for themselves.

He’s been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

Could you imagine a standard bank floating a separate loan for $20?

That’d be as crazy as giving away your software, no?

I think that there’s a connection there, between smallish software investments & smallish banking investments.

Like many software companies (& workers), the Grameen Bank is a for-profit enterprise, having a 99% repayment rate & having loaned 5.72 billion dollars in micro-loans since 1983.

At first glance, the enterprise could be mistaken for being a bit chicken-feed, but figures like these tend to give it a bit of hard reality. Why not set up a low-overhead high-turnover software business to aim at similar levels?

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

Search This Blog