Elfwood Donations homepage..., About Elfwood

As of today, In total, 2.7% of the members have so far donated

We accept donations made through Paypal Inc and Kagi Inc. To jump directly to Paypal, use the button below:

See a list of everyone who donated so far...

Since September 2007, Elfwood is a small swedish company, formed in order to support its future development of features, support and hosting. Elfwood started as a project by the private person Thomas Abrahamsson, a member of the academic computer society Lysator, in Linköping, Sweden. Between 1996 and 2007 it was only financed by donations and run non-profit as a Lysator member project.
Elfwood is handled by a crew of members (our moderators, and the ERB) who help us run the site. They kindly donate their time to help us get a great site with good support and moderation times.

See more info about Elfwood, its background and mission.

Elfwood is an ever expanding project. It is always in need of more hardware. We need more CPU-power, we need more storage space and more memory. We could also use a penny or two to spread the word about this project. Donations will be used to facilitate the operation of the server, and expand it to meet future needs.
We depend on donations to be able to continue to run this web site!

Of course, you may donate as much or little as you wish, and donations of any size are greatly appreciated! The minimum donation is USD $10.
At Paypal you can choose any amount (like $10, $20 ... ) At kagi, we have decided to keep it to multiples of ten dollars, so the minimum donation is $10 (otherwise, the overhead cost becomes too big to make it worthwhile). (eg, To donate $20, have 2 $10-chunks, to donate $100, have ten, etc)
We accept donations from everyone, not only Elfwood community members. [Also see `acknowledgements' below]
As a Swedish project, Elfwood cannot register with the United States IRS as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. (This means that you cannot deduct any donations from your U.S. federal taxes as charitable contributions).

Elfwood, or rather Thomas Abrahamsson in the name of the project, has partnered with Kagi Online Order Processing so that you may charge your donation to your credit card, quickly, easily, and securely.
Click here to go directly to the donation page at PayPal Inc (Preferred by Elfwood).
Click here to go directly to the donation page at Kagi Inc.

Note for those of you using Kagi: Do not worry about all the talk at Kagi about 'purchasing', 'registration code', 'products', 'register program', etc, etc. Kagi was originally intended for software registration purposes of 'shareware', and still have a lot of that heritage displayed at its site, even though it nowadays can be used for more common purposes, like donations.
Note: It is also possible to tag your donation to go especially to the Elftown project, which is the Elfwood community project. It runs on it's own machine and hardware, and will also benefit from donations. Elftown is coordinated by mr Henrik 'Hedda' Wallin.

The Elfwood project wants to acknowledge its supporters and contributors in a more visible fashion. Elfwood signed-up artists and writers will receive special recognition on their web pages, in the form of a small thank-you badge. Please submit all your user-ID's at Elfwood along with the donations (in the comment field), or mail them separately to me, at fundraise@www.elfwood.com
Anyone who donates $10 will become an 'Elfwood Contributor'. Anyone who donates $20 or more, will become an Elfwood Patron.

Patron

See a list of all who have donated!

Through PayPal (www.paypal.com) or Kagi (www.kagi.com), they go to Thomas F Abrahamsson in Sweden. As the founder of Elfwood, he guarantees that the money will be used only for project purposes! Before all purchases, he discuss planned investments with trusted core members of Elfwood.
Visit Kagi.com
Thomas' homepage

We have currently collected $26179. Off this, PayPal and Kagi takes about 5-10% for its service + bank fees, so just substract that for a starter... It also takes quite some time for us to actually receive the money. After that, this is what we have used them for so far;

The What-we-have-done-with-the-money Log:

2000-07-19 - $650. Ordered a new fast 18gig 10k-rpm scsi2 harddisc for the gallery. Will be used to improve speed, using the cool reiserfs filesystem.
2000-07-19 - $230. Ordered a 30gig new harddisc for 'ewsearch'. Will be used to store search database, and backups.
2000-09-01 - ---- Got the discs and some new hardware for ewsearch. The scsi-disc was faulty and returned for repair.
2000-09-03 - $680. Woohoo! Upgraded Ewsearch to an Abit MB, An Athlon 750mhz, 128mib pc133 DRAM and the new 30 gig disc! Now, the search engine should work better and faster!
2000-10-10 - $640. Upgraded Elfwood to a new 10k-RPM 18gig Scsi-2 disc, that along with ReiserFS improved the speed of Elfwood up to four (4!) times! :-)
2000-11-03 - $470. Upgraded Elfwood with +256mb RAM and Ewsearch with some additional 128mb.
2001-03-23 - $2400. Wrooooooom! Bought a much needed new server! 2xPIII-1000gighz, 1 gig RAM, 36gig u160 10k RPM disc, casing, and all the little bits and pieces around it (keyboard, floppy, motherboard, etc). Saved some money by assembling all the hardware on our own (Thomas&Hedda). Asus CUV4X-DLS.
2001-04-01 - $100. 256 MB of additional pc133 RAM to our search engine, also much needed.
2001-09 : We had a major crash of all our hardware, maybe due to a thunderstorm. Elfwood was down for weeks and lots of spare parts had to be ordered...
2001-09-29 - Hardware Swap: EWSearch PC motherboard replaced with old PIII-set/memory.
2001-09-29 - $500 New 36gig u160 harddisc.
2001-09-29 - $1050 Replacement parts for Elfwood main PC (ABKG7RAID,4x256DDR266C2,Adaptec 29160 U160 SCSI,AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1400MHz)
2001-11-05 - $60. Had to replace the memory units in elfwood, the DDRs should be REG, not unREG type, memory types.
2001-11-20 - $350. +One extra gig (2x512mb Kingston pc2100 DDR/REG 's) for Elfwood main machine. It's was only 0.5 gig before, now 1.5 gig!
2002-07-03 - $390. A powerful UPS was bought that will protect the Elfwood machines from power spikes and brownouts, as well as lightning. UPS=Uninteruptable Power Source, basically, it's one advanced and huge battery.
2002-07-03 - $650. A new more powerful CPU to Elfwood, and an additional 36gig 15k RPM SCSI hard disc drive to the same machine - we we're running out of space. Now Elfwood has 2x19gig discs and 2x36 gigs...
2002-07-25 - $60. Keyboard and monitor Cables for our 3 machines for the re structuring in the computer hall.
2002-12-20 - $1500 - PC Case + 4 x 120 gig IDE (IBM Deskstar 180GXP 120Gb 7200rpm 2Mb UDMA100 IDE (180GXP120)) hard disk drives for Software level 5 RAID will give us plenty of space to grow in and more speed thanks to RAID ("Redundant array of inexpensive disks"). Heat was a problem too, so a new large ATX server PC-case from Cheiftec (Chieftec AR-2000 Super File Server 360W ATX) was also aquired. It has 8x92mm fans - cooooooolnezz!!
2003-03-10 - $100 - An 120gig Backup hard disc drive was bought to be able to have atleast one copy of the whole of Elfwood copied and physically stored away from the computer hall (in cases of theft, fire, etc). Will be mounted in a removable HD rack.
2003-04-28 - $285 + $70 VAT - An iBoot remote reboot gadget will allow to toggle the power of our PC's from a remote location - usable when our computers hang and we can't physically get access to them during weekends, vacations, etc... Ordered from the US, so VAT was added with $70.
2003-05-10 - $205 - 2 x 120 gig IDE (IBM Deskstar) hard disk drives + cables. To run Linux on - Current SCSI disk system fails and hangs computer occasionally, causing lots of downtime.
2003-07-23 - $1957 - Major hardware reconfiguration of main servers.
Basically, Elftown got Elfwoods old hardware configuration (AMD,1.5Gb RAM) and Elfwood got a new dual AMD hardware. Elftown's old motherboard+cpu+memory will become a picture-only web slave server...
Dual AMD-MP Motherboard (Type: MSI K7D Master-L), 2 GB memory (4 x Corsair PC2700 DDR-DIMM 512MB ECC REG), 1 IDE controller for Elftown (Promise Ultra100TX2 Ultra-ATA 100), 2 AMD Processors (2 x AMD Athlon MP2800+ Barton 2133MHz/2.13GHz 128/512Kb 266MHz 0.13 bulk SocketA), 2 IDE Cables (IDE flatkabel UDMA66/100 5x40pin 90cm), 2 IDE new Discs for Elftown (IBM/Hitachi Deskstar 180GXP 120Gb 7200rpm 2Mb UDMA100 IDE), 2 AMD CPU Fans + P&P.
2003-12-12 - $155 - 1 Promise Ultra100TX2 UDMA100 controller incl. UDMA100-cable PCI and 2 x 120 gig IDE (Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 120Gb 7200rpm 2Mb 8.5ms UDMA100 IDE) hard disk drives; For ewancient which will be used as a picture-only server to reduce load on the main PC.
2004-01-06 - $40 - Some duct tape, tools and some temperature sensors to monitor the degrees in the computer hall.
2004-01-10 - $125 - A handful of some quality Zalman and Papst spare fans - they tend to break after a couple of years...
2004-01-15 - $627 - Ewancient upgrades with new motherboard, CPU and memory. The old PII-400mhz couldn't take the load. (Motherboard::Abit IS7-M i865G 4DDR-DIMM 5PCI SATA VGA Audio LAN Socket478 ATX, CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 2.6GHz -C Hyperthreading 512Kb 800MHz Boxed (with cpu-cooler!) Socket 478 + 512MB DDR pc3200 Memory). "Ewancient" is now our most modern server.
2004-01-20 - $222 - Also a new ATX-chassis to replace the old one from 1997, this time a Rack mountable black Chieftec: Chieftec UNC-410B 19'' 4U Rackmount 340W ATX case for Ewancient.
2004-05-01 - $1570 - New top notch PC hardware for Elftown: Intel Pentium 4 3.4 GHz Boxed PC800, Asus P4C800-E DELUXE Motherboard, S478/800, ATX 550W Gold PFC, 4 x DDR-DIMM PC3200 512MB DDR CL2.5
Note: All PC's are now up to date with the rack mounted cases!
2004-05-05 - $100 - A new 120gig hard disk drive for the Ewsearch PC.
2005 (Some various hardware purchases that I didnt log in detail, mainly just a few harddisk drives to replace broken ones)
2006-05-09 $818 - Bought 2 new UPS to save us from power-out's (Inform UPS Guard Plus 1600VA) and 2 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB (disks keep failing and falling out of the RAID array all the time... sigh)
2007-08-14 $1100 - 2 New PC's based on Serial-ATA RAID1+2 (6x320GB) and new motherboards (4 and 8 GB's or DDRII RAM) with Athlon Dual Core Processors (5600+ and 6000+). Various cables, network cards, etc to support it all.

Plans

These are our current goals and plans;

Replace old server cases to get better cooling for Elftown and Ewsearch PC's. {done!}
Get some speed on our internal network between the PC's - seem to be only 10mbit/s now, should be 100 or 1000 mbit/s to be smooth.
Save for a new major upgrade when the current computer goes on its knees again...
To contiously help the Woodworks ezine to pay for their domain and hosting!

Is it answered in the FAQ just below?
No? Okay then, First of all, ONLY mail questions about the fundraising activitity to this email address! do NOT mail ANY questions about technical support of Elfwood, joining questions, or anything else unrelated to Elfwood donations. For those questions, please go to our contact page!
For questions abuot security and how to actually do the donation, plasee read the information at the Kagi FAQ!
   fundraise@www.elfwood.com
   Contact Page.
   Kagi FAQ.
   Click here to go directly to the donation page.

Q: Can I use Checks?
A: Personally, recieving a check in Sweden (unless they are of some larger amount of money) cost me too much to cash (Usually around $15). If you want to use a good-ol'-snailmail and send a check, I accept that. Email fundraise@www.elfwood.com for my home adress. I think Kagi also accepts Checks as payment method now, so consider that...
Q: How much does Kagi take of it?
A: They take a percent of the total sum (so if you donate 2xdonations, they take from $20). Of $10, they take $1.50, of 20 they take 2.50, of 30 only 3.50, and so on... (The less percent, the higher the amount). See the complete list at Kagi.
Q: How much is $10 in my own currency?
A: See other sites for up-to-date currency conversion. I recommend The Universal Currency Converter(tm). Otherwise, see the Google directory for alternatives.
As Of 2004-01-01, the approximate exchange rates for $10 are (approximately!):
70 SEK, 5.5 GBP, ~8 EUR, 13 AUD, 13 CAD, 1 JPY.
Q: Can I get my money back?
A: Well, no... If you donate money to us, it's donated. Of course, we make exceptions in some cases, like if you accidently donated us $1000 instead of $10.
Q: Can I use money orders?
No, Sorry. I have tried to cash money orders at my bank, and they simply won't accept them; its too much hazzle and they don't even know what a money order *is*. Sorry. I am not sure, but I think that Kagi does accept them though...
Q: Can I send you cash?
A: Yes, KAGI accepts cash now too. See their page for more details! :)
Q: I live in Sweden, can I transfer the money directly to your bank account?
Q: I do not live in Sweden, can I transfer the money directly to your bank account?
A: Yes, you can. Please understand that there's usually high costs involved if you do this from outside Sweden (I've seen figures like $10 USD for the transfer cost, as compared to almost nothing if you go through PayPal). The bank I use for the Elfwood account is "Handelsbanken", a swedish bank (www.handelsbanken.se/linkoping_city). The account number is 6600 - 292 528 558 (Handelsbanken, Clearing number 6600). The SWIFT is "HANDSESS", which should be stated when you do payments from another country.

Check out Ellen Million Graphics, All profits from these products goes to Elfwood.

Credits: Thanks to Mikael Baath for the Elfwood raytraced donation 'beggar lady'! To see a bigger version, click here.