OLPC XO Laptop Review
December 30th, 2007 Filed Under awesome, featured, news, science
“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” — William Gibson
Today, December 31st 2007, is the last day of the Give-1-Get-1 (G1G1) campaign for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, where you donate $400 to the OLPC, and one child in Peru, Mongolia, Cambodia, or Nigeria gets an XO laptop, and you get one too. This is the only way right now for anyone reading this to get one at all, so until further notice today is the last day to get one of these laptops. Even developers on the project have to return theirs when they’re done. Many people, including myself, think that OLPC should continue the G1G1 campaign indefinitely: this is a great way to help make their project economically sustainable.
I donated on the first day, partly because I believe in their mission, but also because the machine itself is so neat and I wanted to play with it. My XO laptop arrived a week ago in one small box with only three parts inside: the laptop, the power cord, and the battery. I was looking forward to the hand-crank, but they canned it for an unspecified reason. A pull cord generator is due out “in developed markets by late summer 2008″.
I pulled it out and it looks like a green Speak n’ Spell, what with the handle. I spent, honestly, at least 5 minutes trying to figure out how to open it–it’s an alien puzzlebox. I put the battery in, opened the port covers, fiddled with every button and crevice I could find. Turns out those “port covers” are also latches for the screen, and also they function as wireless antennae. You can’t open the laptop without putting up the antennae. Very clever.
The keyboard is really tiny, just barely enough space for my fat American fingers to function. I pushed the button with the power symbol on it and it booted instantly with a full battery. I was annoyed by the touchpad constantly resetting the cursor to the sides, but a quick visit to the troubleshooting page showed me how to open the device, and at the bottom, that the touchpad issue is a known bug and I should try the four-fingered salute. I did, and the problem was solved.
It was a little difficult at first for a veteran computer user like myself, due to extra keys with new symbols, but I found my way around. I clicked on the Eye icon and there I was on the screen! I didn’t know it had a webcam, and I made a 10-second video lickety-split. I got on our wireless network (WEP), downloaded an mp3, and a few clicks later it was playing. I swear, I almost cried thinking about what some lucky Peruvian dirt farmer’s kid was going to get, compared to the monochrome textpunk 300 baud cassette beast I had.
Of course, knowing it runs Linux, I just had to get to a terminal and futz around. There’s actually a Terminal Activity, and it’s a standard shell; no root password either. I wanted to install one of my favorite games, NetHack, and my first try (’apt-get install nethack’) didn’t work; but it’s using components from Fedora Core 6, so my second try (’yum install nethack’) did. With these specs–a 400MHz processor, 256MB of RAM, 1GB of flash for hard disk (75% available out-of-the-box), webcam, wireless mesh networking, microphone and speakers–it’s literally, almost to the point of mockery, a hundred times more powerful than the computers I grew up with. And it’s a laptop, and it only consumes 2 watts of power.
After playing with it for day, I knew this laptop was made for a child, and even though I wanted to, I couldn’t let it collect dust on a shelf to show to friends once every few months. So I gave the laptop to my nephews, who are 6 and 10, and from the photos it looks like they’re going to get lots of good use out of it. I’ve been so lucky to have been born in the time and place that I was, and I’ve spent many hours in complete rapture surfing the Internet with free software running on cheap hardware. The future is indeed here; now let’s distribute it more evenly!
Stumble it!Nethack server online
December 30th, 2007 Filed Under fun, games, software
I normally play Nethack on nethack.alt.org (NAO) as ‘zem‘. I’ve been playing Nethack since 1990, and all 5 of my ascensions have been on NAO–once a year since 2003.
I think my recent ascension this month inspired some friends of mine to play again, and on NAO for the larger community experience–more “bones” files, ability to watch games, an IRC bot that announces every game’s ending. It’s been fun, but one friend lamented that the NAO high score list–which has 2000 entries on it, 20 times more than the default–is so packed that it basically requires an ascension to get on it.
So I installed nethack and the dgamelaunch software, and now pwanson.com has a ‘public’ nethack server. Just telnet pwanson.com port 4242 and hack away!
_Animal Farm_ by George Orwell
December 15th, 2007 Filed Under books
I read this book when I was in 8th grade. Since then I’ve lived in a kommune and seen more of human nature, and I understand it so much more now. A quick read and a pretty decent little story.
_On Writing_ by Stephen King
December 6th, 2007 Filed Under books
I’d read some of Stephen King’s work as a kid, but hadn’t really paid much attention since then. I enjoyed this memoir-with-writing-tips, which was quite accessible and does a great job of painting King as a nice and humble guy (despite being the most successful novelist in the world, according to Wikipedia). I’m inspired to try writing some fiction of my own again.
Project: Reasonable Goods
November 25th, 2007 Filed Under activeprojects, portfolio, projects
I realized I haven’t actually made a post about my main venture of late, Reasonable Goods. For any given consumer product category, there’s usually one brand or model that stands out as a great value. It’s not necessarily the cheapest, and it’s probably not the best, but it gets the job done, and it won’t be missing that one feature that everyone says you need.
The Swedish have a word, lagom, that captures this concept in its essence. In English, there is no direct equivalent, but it is often translated as “reasonable”.
Check it out! I’d love some feedback.
