Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

Why the XO Laptop is better than the Classmate

There’s been some awful FUD flying around the OLPC world in the last few days, with misquotes, misinformation, and flat out lies being propagated left and right. Even Engadget, one of the better geektech blogs out there, got it completely wrong regarding OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen’s departure from the project.

Fortunately, there’s good resources around that tell the story from the people who really do know what is going on. First, there’s the interview with Mary Lou Jepsen on Groklaw. In it she explains the real reasons behind her choice to move on to Pixel Qi, and her ongoing relationship with OLPC. Astute readers will note that her commentary there bears little or no resemblance to some of the FUD flying around other news sites.

Of particular interest is this tasty quote. There’s been lots of noise about OLPC squashing competition (in particular, the Classmate PC), and making unreasonable demands from Intel. That’s complete hooey. Competition should be between competitive products. So how does the Classmate stack up against the XO?

Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can’t be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn’t use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not only is the XO cheaper than the Classmate, the XO requires less infrastructre expenditure for electricity and for internet access. In Peru we can run off of solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or perhaps 20 years. Just try running electricity cables up and down the Peruvian Andes for that cost while making sure it’s environmentally clean energy. The Classmate isn’t as durable as the XO, and its screen is about 30% smaller, the batteries are the type that can explode and only last 1-2 years and can’t be removed by the user and harm the environment. The batteries are expensive to replace: $30-40 per replacement. The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made, the Classmate isn’t – this matters a great deal when one proposes to put millions of them in the developing world.

Given that comparison, why would any country, any organization, pursue the Classmate over the XO? Answer? Underhanded dealings, lies, and unfair practices. That is not to say that aggressive competition doesn’t happen in the marketplace at large, but OLPC is not trying to compete in a marketplace. It has a mission to do some good in the world. It’s purpose is not to broker back room deals to increase stockholder value. It’s goals are far more noble, something that carries far too little weight in the world today.

Back on the clarification train, we have the inimitable Ivan of OLPC giving the full details behind the whole ‘Microsoft Dual-Boot XO Laptop” spiel. Unsurprisingly, it’s nothing like what the blogs and the news sites are characterizing it as. I’m rather disappointed that the tech community seems to be aggressively looking for a reason to bash the OLPC project – looking for schisms, problems, and interpreting every change or update in the project as a sign of it’s imminent demise. While it’s certainly common to see this all the time in mainstream media, I had, perhaps naively, hoped the geek world would take a broader, less sensationalistic approach to reporting on this project. Sad to say, that’s doesn’t seem to be the case.

Doesn’t matter. The project is a success, and continues to be so. And I for one am glad.

Escapism and the Big Screen

Viewing setup - After

I get into these funks in winter, where I just want to curl up somewhere and escape for a few hours. For me this is where my love of movies comes to the fore. I’ve built enough of a setup that I can watch movies at night without disturbing my family, while enjoying good sound, good video, and a comfortable listening area.

Sure it’s escapism. But it’s escapism I understand – therefire I can embrace it and revel in it.

It has let me catch up on movies that I’ve owned for quite a while, but never actually got around to watching. Over the last week, I’ve gone through a handful of titles…

A Scanner Darkly

Just watched this one tonight. I’ve never read the original story by Philip K. Dick, so I had very little information on what I could expect to see. I knew about it’s odd filming style, but nothing else, not even the cast beyond Keanu Reeves.

It was good. It seems this was Robert Downey Jr. at his most neurotic, and because of that, his acting style initially repelled me. But then I realized he and Woody Harrolson were perfectly cast. By the end I was totally involved in the story, and found it engrossing, poignant, and emotional

Spiderman 3

Boy I’m sure glad I didn’t spend money on this one. What a disappointing end to a trilogy. I’ve heard folks say “Don’t bother, go watch 2 again” and I have to agree with them. What a stinker. Visually has some moments, but there’s several scenes toward the middle of the film that had me seriously considering turning off the DVD and giving up, they were so ludicrous.

The Bourne Identity

I’ve never actually seen Identity all the way through, from beginning to end. I’ve seen bits and pieces in various cable surfings, plus the non-stop previews. It was very good. Engrossing, mystifying, and all around fun. Many folks have called it What Bond Should Be, and I can see that. Matt Damon gets a lot of flack for his simplistic acting approach, but he was perfect in his role. And, of course, there’s the ever wonderful Franka Potente, of Run Lola Run fame.

The Bourne Supremacy

If you’re going to take the time to start in a series, why not see as much of it as you can. The sequel to Bourne Identity was certainly as good as the first, with recurring roles and appropriate references to both the first movie and modern day events. One thing I did not expect was the outstanding performance by Brian Cox (he who played William Stryker in the X-Men movies and Nathan Waldman in Long Kiss Goodnight). He had a good strong role in Supremacy, and played it marvelously.

I haven’t had a chance to pick up the Bourne Ultimatum yet, but judging by how much I enjoyed the first two, it’s now gone onto my wish list.

Our house, taking shape!




IMG_2976.JPG

Originally uploaded by eidolon

I’ve been pretty lax on the posting front lately. Certainly not for lack of content that I’d like to share with ya’ll, but primarily from lack of organized thinking time.

One banner of light in all the nuttiness is receiving regular updates on our house, currently under construction at Mosaic in Berlin. On Sunday we had the opportunity to go on-site and see the work up close. We had a rep from the builder with us, who did a great job of answering all the annoying technical questions we had.

On the Mosaic side, only one building is fully framed, and that happens to be… OURS! Cat and I have the right most side in this picture, a large three bedroom unit. We’re looking at the ‘back’ of the building here. The left side has 2 1 bedroom flats in it, one of which is already sold to our current roommate. Yay!

Zach got to actually go inside the building (there’s no ramp up yet, so the builder-guy just lifted two of the kids up inside). I was able to hang on the rear window frame for a while looking around our living room, getting a feel for the size and space. Models and drawings are great, but actually seeing the space for real, and looking around… it was a pretty emotional moment for me.

It was the first really warm day in weeks, and of course that meant mud. Some folks fared better than others (one of the kids unfortunately ended up face down in a puddle), but all in all, we had a great time.

Zach and his XO




Zach and his XO

Originally uploaded by eidolon

After waiting almost 6 weeks, the XO laptop came via Fedex today. I had been rabidly refreshing my browser watching for tracking information, but didn’t actually see it in the system until it showed up on the doorstep.

Zach has latched onto it with quite a bit of excitement, and is happily writing stories in the word processor now. He fiddled around with the web browser (getting it onto the wireless network was a piece o cake), and played around with the Turtle application (very similar to Scratch), and is now just writing stories.

I’m tickled pink by how attached he is to it. We’ll see if it settles into a long term happiness, but I think this is the perfect combination of teaching toy, game machine, internet tool, and all around handy machine for him right now.

Thank you OLPC and the Give One Get One Program.

Calculating coinjars revisited

Last year I tinkered with figuring out how much money was in a coin jar by weight. The numbers I came up with were reasonably close – within 10-15%.
Some folks have come up with an online coin calculator that does something very smart. You weigh the total pile, then pick a handful of coins out of it, randomly. Count the number of coins in your hand. That’ll be a statistical sampling of the rest of the coins in the pile, and the page extrapolates based on that sample to the total weight.
Quite accurate, and pretty durned smart.
Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

You might be a Geek Fogie if…

With a nod to Jeff Foxworthy, I hereby present a couple ideas on how to tell if you might be an old-fart geek fogie…

  • If everytime you hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE, you expect to see Sidekick pop up for a second.
  • If you ever owned a a paper punch specifically for double-siding your floppy disks.
  • If you remember your amazement at copying a diskette using ONLY four disk swaps.
  • If you find yourself thinking that a Telebit Trailblazer would really speed up your internet use.
  • If you ever rented a truck to get a computer that someone was ‘just giving away’.
  • If you have to fight the urge to make FWEEEEE SCHHRRKKKRRRK noises whenever you hear an ATM or a Fax machine in use.
  • If you have ever uttered the phrase “Yeah, but the Newton was better.”
  • If you refuse to throw out disks for machines that haven’t been manufactured in over two decades.
  • If you know what ^X^Cc means.
  • If you remember the first time you bought a color monitor. Double points if you’re still paying for it. Special bonus points if you still have it.
  • If you find yourself in the middle of a problem, and being tempted to type ‘S..TILTOWAIT’
  • If you have ever personally owned an entire DEC documentation set, and thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
  • If you remember getting your first hard drive, and amazing your friends with comments like “This thing can hold as much data as FIFTY floppy disks!”
  • If you remember when disks WERE floppy.

Feel free to contribute any additions you might think of…

Rockin in the Workshop

So there’s this house we’re calling Interlude. It’s a rental, we’re living in it since we sold Homeport and is our home until Mosaic is ready for us, sometime late next year.
It has a usable basement, with a high ceiling and dry floors. Not particularly warm in the winter, but usable.
I’ve moved my workbench, my tool chest, all my tools and parts and other debris into a nice little work area, and have been slowly working on various projects (such as the Mame cabinet – see that post for a picture of my workshop space).
But something was missing.
Broken RokuThis past weekend, I finally gathered together all the pieces of the Roku Soundbridge M500 I won from Radio Paradise two and a half years ago. Not long after I got the Roku, it broke in a funky way – part of the LCD display went blank. I contacted Roku about getting it repaired, they said to send it in and they’d look at it, but I never got around to doing so. Ah well.
This past weekend I powered it up again, just to see if I could get it useable in the workshop. Oddly, it came up fine, even connected to our wireless network. With 3″ of the left side of the LCD out of action, I had a hard time navigating the menus until I found the ‘brightness’ function, cranked all the way up, gave a sort of ‘shadow’ on the LCD where the text was. A few updates later, and I was up and running with RadioParadise, listening through the old stereo I had installed a while back.
Ahhhhhh.
I really wish these devices (that stream audio either via wireless or network) were less expensive or easy to put together by hand. I could totally see having a bunch of these for Mosaic for public spaces around the community. “I’ll be out in the workshop, I’ll run up RP there.”

Dimmable Compact Flourescent (CF) bulb test

IMG_2467.JPGThis past weekend I decided to take the plunge and replace the bulbs in our recessed lighting in the kitchen with dimmable CF bulbs. We had been using these huge honkin 150watt floodlamps, which were great for getting a tan, but didn’t handle the constant vibration of folks walking around upstairs very well, not to mention chewing up gobs of power when running.
I hadn’t actually seen dimmable CF bulbs in action, so I was curious how well they’d work. Flourescent lights can’t take the same electrical route that dimmable incandescents can (if you lower the voltage in a flourescent light, the ballast that regulates the power into the bulb can’t pass enough power to make the bulb actually light up.
I saw the dimmable bulbs in our of our regular visits to Target, and picked up a handful.
Our lightswitch has one of those little sliding tabs next to the switch that lets you adjust the brightness. I installed all the bulbs, flicked the switch on, and lo!
But would it dim?
The answer is… “Sorta”. The dimmer switch does in fact lower the light level coming from the bulbs, but not in the range the older bulbs could do. I’d say we can get a 25% reduction in light output from the bulbs before they go out.
All in all, this is just fine. We can’t have that sort of glowing nice ‘1/3rd’ light mode that is handy post-dinner (we can sort of do that by turning out most of the ceiling lights and just going with one lamp over the stove), but the dimmer is handy for taking the lights from “bright enough to do real kitchen work” down to “comfortable to live in day to day”.
So why is this relevant? Well, aside from the bit that the 5 bulbs now in the ceiling use as much power as only one of the old bulbs did, apparently the new energy bill that just came through congress is mandating that all incandescent bulbs be off the market by 2012. (If that link fails you, see the article on Slashdot and the same on Engadget).
According to the article:

The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes.

Personally, I’ve already switched all our bulbs to CFL’s, and we have a lot of them (an off the cuff count puts it at about 30 for our 4br house). We’ve been here 2.5 years, and I was just trying to think of the last time I had to replace a CFL that had gone out. I think it was once, using a very old bulb we had brought from the old house, but I hadn’t until now replaced the ceiling lights in the kitchen yet.

Apple continues to lose my respect.

Update 15:23pm.. – THIS BLOG ENTRY IS REFERRING TO A FAKE POST ON THE FAKE STEVE JOBS BLOG. I was duped, hook line and sinker. I’m annoyed at being deliberately mislead, but relieved that my rabid furniture-chewing has no real basis. I’ll leave the post here as an example of my own duplicity.
It’s been a hard fight for me.
I’m completely taken by Apple’s designs, platform, and technology. They’re the only company to take Unix seriously enough to put a front end on it that WORKS. Their hardware is sexy as all git out, and for the most part, works very well.
I have considered seriously going the Apple route more than once. Ditching this Linux thing and embracing Cupertino.
There’s always been this nagging, though. Apple is very lawyer-heavy. They tolerate no smack-talk from the little guy, and have a tendency to go all Corleone on anyone who even HINTS at revealing their deep dark secrets.
But now I think they’ve overstepped their bounds.
In the past, when Apple threatens a writer or publisher, the contents of the negotiations are kept secret. A site disappears, the negotiations are private, and we assume they reached some amicable settlement.
One fellow isn’t going quietly into the night. Daniel Lyons, the author of the “Fake Steve Jobs” blog, which has been a satirical poke at the head of Apple, is being attacked by a pack of rabid lawyers. While there may be a small bit that they disagree with, Daniel has gone the unusual route of publishing exactly what the lawyers are saying to him. The most recent exchange has said lawyers saying, in essence, “You should play nice with us. Here’s a list of your assets you own. Here’s where your family and your home are. Would be a shame if something were to, like, you know, happen to any of them….

And then, I swear to friggin God, there’s a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they’ve got a pretty thorough list, which means they’ve been doing some research on this and the offer didn’t just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.

This is disgusting. The Fake Steve Jobs site is satire. It’s amusing, entertaining, and does nothing to harm Apple. But Apple is coming down on Lyons like a pack of wild dogs, and no ethical, moral, or financial boundary will stop them from destroying Lyons.
This is not a company I can, with any real conscience, support.

Well, Dang.

We just got mail saying that the XO Laptop for Zach won’t arrive until at least January 15th. On the one hand, I’m glad they let us know so I can stop frantically hitting <refresh> on Fedex’s website, but I’m sad because he won’t have it for his vacation.
I am consolidated knowing that our contribution is still helping the OLPC project, and somewhere in central or southern America, a child -will- get a laptop because of our contribution, but I still wish Zach had his for the winter break.
He’s happily spending time working with Scratch on his desktop machine anyway, so at least when the XO does get here, there’ll be an environment he’s already familiar with on it.

OkCupid

Extrapolating from a conversation on IRC today…
I swear OkCupid is the place budding ‘web 2.0’ programmers go to see how badly they can screw up a busy site, and still stay in business.
They’ve gone through a dozen site ‘overhauls’ in the last few years, rewriting the entire thing into some new funky dynamic design that not only fails to implement features they had working in the old design, but also tends to breaks most browsers. Then they spend the next few months ‘fixing’ problems with the new site, until most folks have forgotten about the missing features…
AND THEN THEY DO IT AGAIN.
Dear OkCupid. We know you’re a site that caters to up and coming jetset socialites and the like, but please… Stabilize your site, lock down a feature set, and stick with it. When you roll a new site? Make sure all the features still work? It’s really not that hard.

Know a foreign language? OLPC needs you!

According to OLPC News, the OLPC project is enlisting help translating software for the XO laptop into other languages using Pootle :

How it works is that you go to the localization server for the One Laptop per Child Project. Register by creating a username and password and providing your name and email address. Choose the languages you wish to contribute to, and then the specific file of the project, like “XO Core” or “Terminology.”
Pick a word from the list on the left and write a suggestion in the box on the right. Clicking “Suggest” sends the translation to the server. If your Amharic is rusty, and you’re not quite sure about your suggestion, check the box beside the word “Fuzzy” to let the program know that too.

I’m a dumb ‘murrican, so I’m no help here, but maybe others can chime in?

Battle for Wesnoth : A free turn based strategy game

While sitting around waiting for Starcraft 2 to be released, why not try out some of the other excellent offerings out there? Personally, I’ve been itching for some “You, move there, you kill him, you, build that” action for quite a while, and I was not particularly up for reinstalling Warcraft on the windows machines.
I had taken a look at Battle for Wesnoth about 2 years ago, and while I found it ‘interesting’, it didn’t really grab me. I checked the project page, and saw a lot of work had been done on it, so decided to give it another try, and boy am I glad I have.
I won’t go into details about the game. There’s a very nice Youtube trailer here that shows some basic gameplay and highlights the amazing artwork that has gone into the game. Artwork tends to be the achilles heel of many opensource games. Getting good artwork (and in the amount necessary) is very difficult. The Wesnoth folks have filled in their entire tileset, characters, and dialogs with very clean, professional artwork. It’s a joy to play.
Check out the Youtube video of the trailer.
Sure, by World of Warcraft standards, this game looks primitive. But the gameplay is intricate and detailed, no rough edges nor incomplete implementations. There is a decent music soundtrack, and sound effects in the game are amusing and bolster the enjoyability.
And it’s free. And runs under Linux, Mac, or Windows.
What more could you ask for?