Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

Rock!

I am now an Admin on the OLPC wiki!

Now I can move pages and block people and stuff!

Mohahaha!  And now the world!

One Laptop per Child + Creative Commons are gathering free books, music and media for the LiveContent DVD CC is mastering this month. Join us in Cambridge and San Fran this Saturday, or choose materials on your own ( see http://olinolpc.org and http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_… ).

It’s Mel and Nicole’s OLPC group at OLIN throwing a HackingJam. It’s going to be a pretty cool event IMO. I would of course, love to go. But that’s not going to happen since it’s across the country. Maybe this summer?

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The first issue of the Weekly Zine has been posted to the wiki.  Expect more from this project.  It’s awesome licious!

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Weekly_zine/0 

The OLPC Support Gang gets tons of abuse. We’re the people who answer all of the emails that come into help@laptop. We’re all unpaid, and just want to help people. When we can’t solve a person’s problem, or if the XO doesn’t go to all of their Flash websites, or isn’t able to do everything that a $2000 Dell can, we get flak for it.

There are tons of examples of angry customers (which I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t can’t post). But I think that this message to a customer from one of the Support Gang is exactly what G1G1 recipients should understand, something they never understood, or decided to ignore:

Always remember rule number one of the XO. You are not the customer. The
XO is great fun, and stretching it’s capabilities towards our first
world tasks can be entertaining (believe me, I’ve gone further than
most), but when it comes down to it, it just won’t be happy trying to do
a lot of things that you’d think that it should be able to do with no
problems. If in the end, you are disappointed that it can’t do this,
that, or the other thing that a more ‘normal’ box can, remember, it does
a lot of things for its real audience that nothing else can. And that’s
what it’s about.

Disclosure: I don’t answer tickets nearly as much as 95% of the group. When I say We, I’m not nearly as cool as some.

That’s a very valid question. Where did your Give One half of the G1G1 go?

I’m part of a volunteer group at OLPC called the Support-Gang. We answer the great majority of user support questions that are sent to  Help at laptop.org,  Support at laptop.org, the OLPC Forum and on the IRC channel. Because of this I sometimes get some juicy information. This bit, I get to share :)

Walter Bender, president of OLPC had this to say:

Subject: Re: Cambodia & Haiti
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 02:10:21 -0500
From: Walter Bender <XXXXX@laptop.org>

We are going to be hashing this out to a large degree on Monday. But I
do know that we are already preparing 10K machines for Mongolia, 1K each
for Haiti, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Cambodia at the factory
now. The initial machines in all cases, as far as I know, are directed
to programs with government involvement, but not necessarily government
run.

-walter

(Did you hear the news that Canada shipments are starting up finally!!)

This is great news!

Also confirmed in above email is that XO Shipments to Canada are on their way!!!

Lastly, if you would be interested in joining the Support Team it’s really not that hard, and we provide a little bit of training to get you started. At last count there are about 50! of us and the number is steadily growing. These are a great bunch of people so far (Kate, the Yale mathematician, is flat out amazing). If you’re interested in helping out, drop a line to Adam Holt (holt at laptop dot org) and he will ask for a short phone conversation.

Do you see those copper holes at the bottom of the circuit board? It’s labeled CN12, and it’s an unpopulated VGA port, the kind used for desktop computer monitors, and projectors.

This isn’t plug and play by any means. There is a jumper (CN18) *somewhere* on this board that switches between the LCD and this VGA port. Or at least so the specs on the original a-test board suggest.

There is also a chance that the port is disabled in the firmware, but I can’t think of any reason why this would be the case.

There are a few other unresolved issues as well. The LX version of the Geode processor, which all machines since the B2 use, is supposed to support crt/lcd out of the box and I shouldn’t need to use the jumper at all. And lastly, the wiki has this to say:

“In B3/C1/MP versions, additional required passive components will not be populated on the motherboard (but are easier to obtain than the required VGA connector!)”

[Source]

The last model that did have these parts populated was the B2. It shouldn’t be *too* hard to get someone to get me some pictures of their board. Or perhaps the A-test or B-test boards aren’t so dissimilar that I couldn’t use the images from the wiki.

Since there seems to be some ambiguity on the wiki and people seem to want to be able to project from the XO.  This is a project that I will return to.

This is a great example of content that needs to be on the XO.  I found this .svg (scalable vector graphics) file over at wiki commons, which is a great source for educational images.  It’s where I found the images for the Dinosaur eBook actually.

The translation for this image shouldn’t be too hard either.  While IE doesn’t display .svg file in a web page (I had to reformat this to jpg) good browsers do, like firefox and the Browse activity on the XO.  If you don’t have firefox, I highly suggest you download it.  And if you download it from the link to the right > I make a couple bucks.  Firefox is free to you of course, as software *should* be.

I’ve been very very busy as of late.  I have been volunteering with the One Laptop Per Child Project, doing content and grassroots type stuff.  Its a great project, and I love it very much, but it takes a lot of out me.  I haven’t really had time to post here or any of the other blogs I’ve set up.

I am going to make an effort to document the work that I am doing at my blog on the OLPC: www.Whyxo.com.   My fist post is about some of the work that I’ve been doing, namely a Dinosaur Ebook.  OLPC is always looking for more volunteers, so drop me a line if you want to help out in any way, even if you don’t know how.

Those of you familiar with early English language education may be familiar with the concept of a leveled reader. The basic idea is that of a book that very carefully and slowly increases vocabulary. They are very important, if dull, to create and read. There are few (if any) such resources on the XO. Most Leveled Reader resources online are proprietary and costly. What resources that do exist at places such as Free-Reading lack illustration or presentation suitable for children, although their page on Connected Text Activities is excellent.

I wasn’t aware of this lack, or even the concept of Leveled Readers three weeks ago. But then the wonderful fellow volunteer Carol Leche started me onto them while preparing materials for her daughter’s kindergarten classroom. This happened to be right after I had discovered a wonderful cache of images at WikiMedia, the storehouse for Wikipedia image, audio and video files.

Mine write apparently.

I went to bed last night with a pen and a notecard on my bedstand. Between klaxons from my alarm (I hit snooze a few times) I wrote the following:

I felt paused. Was this clock still driving the ship of my time? Or had it abandoned me for it’s own purpose.

&

As I write this I use short–straight–strokes. Just like Joe.

I think that they qualify as flash fiction–microfiction perhaps.

To understand the use of the em–dash, I suggest you visit Grammar Girl.