More from Jake, a geek traveling in Iraq

Earlier this week, I posted an item on Boing Boing about Jacob Appelbaum's geek trip to Iraq (HOWTO set up a VSAT in Iraq). The 22-year old San Francisco resident known also as "ioerror" tells BB he's in the country on vacation, "not working for anyone, paid for the trip out of my own pocket, visiting some friends here." He's taking gigs and gigs of digital photos with his Canon 20D, including this series about buying a pair of Generation 3 Night Vision Goggles for only $900USD.

Here's another post on Jake's blog about IEDs — improvised explosive devices — in Iraq. Shown here, an IED constructed with a cellular phone. One call missed.

Jake says the image came from "someone who's a massively talented hardware hacker," who in turn says it was shot by a soldier in Iraq.

Today, Jake says:

I even happened to get a set of photos of the Yezidi (Wikipedia link), a sect of Muslims that worship a peacock as their king. The rest of the Muslims think they worship the devil. Most Satanists actually talk about the Yezidi as being part of the same club if they've ever heard of them. It's an interesting place that's for sure! I have some amazing photos of their temple.

Link to Jake's post about visiting a Yezidi village. He has lots of video from the trip he wants to blog, so if you want to help him seed torrents, here's how to reach him.

Update: Kelly Rosati says:

I thought I would send you some info on the pic of the cell phone in Iraq. I had this same photo posted on a family forum I run by my uncle who is an EOD officer in the navy (he did not take the pic.) Here is a quote from his post:

"They're using cell phones as initiators to set off explosive devices when we get down on them. Instead of the phone ringing, it sends the power to a blasting cap. This EOD Tech had gone down on an IED, placed an explosive charge and detonated it, and went back down to ensure it was disabled. That's when he found the phone!! He was very lucky the phone did not receive the signal, unfortunately, many of our guys have not been that lucky. Just another day in Iraq, our guys respond to 3 to 5 of these a day."

Update 2: Da Mystik Homeboy says:

I'm dropping a line on behalf of ioerror in Iraq (I guess he doesnt have email access atm)- the videos he posted are now torrents on his livejournal.