This comment reminds me of a Mac menubar app I once saw that had an interesting story behind it (which I only remember vaguely): the author lived in a Middle Ea

This comment reminds me of a Mac menubar app I once saw that had an interesting story behind it (which I only remember vaguely): the author lived in a Middle Eastern city with shoddy power delivery that municipal power cuts off a lot. "The market" has a solution in that there are people in the neighborhood who own generators and rent out connections to it so you could just run down stairs, and rewire your apartment's power to that generator. I don't even remember what the app does, a quick google gives me an iPhone app that has a schedule for your neighborhood, and mentioning the city as Beirut: https://archive.is/qrZZr https://archive.is/qrZZr > Sam says he doesn't buy backup juice for his apartment, which he rented last spring. Somewhere along the electrical wires cast like nets across the city, a bootlegged electrical line running from a generator was spliced in his favor: A single “magic” outlet powers his wireless router during outages. It’s one thing to be kept from doing your laundry, and another thing entirely to be kept from your friends or family. Besides, tracking down the generator owner responsible for this one outlet would be a journey of more than 1,001 nights. In the city of Beirut alone, there are roughly 12,000 generators and their owners. Though it is technically illegal, regulators have a hard time squashing the network, which has grown to cover most of the country. Officials aren’t so much paid off to look the other way; they’re paid because, it is said, they own some of the generators.