One Laptop per Child

Here’s a quick link to the Fedora 10-on-XO SD card, now available individually via Amazon.  Please let me know when yours arrives; I have ordered one in the mail, and it came in short order.  This was a much better experience than burning my own, but the boot time is still too slow.  Trying to boot a stock F10 image doesn’t make sense.  The real win will be the ability to switch between F10 and Sugar environments on the sane NAND — similar to a project Scott was working on half a year ago.

I also want to point out some of the lovely international OLPC blogs and sites that are being added to the sidebar, including olpcapac.  Some of them I like as much as our raptor friends.  There should be a couple of longer posts about this coming out soon, on the Fedora-OLPC list.

There’s a lot going on that’s too short for the blog, and today I started working on a list of one-line daily notes, including a site of the day (today: Mexico’s free-content site about their OLPC deployment and plans) and an article of the day (today: the Yay-bee-see content bundle that was just posted yesterday by the prolific Ben Sittler.  After a bit of polish tonight, perhaps I’ll make it into a single collated blog post as well.  Props to Walter Vermeir, whose lovely Wikizine has been an inspiration to me for some time.

One point of particular interest: Amazon’s conversion rates (the number of people who follow OLPC’s referrer link and buy something) jumped to 3.5% yesterday; update Dec 1: and was at 4.5% over the past weekend.  That’s a good sign.  And after a slow launch of laptop.org/global, we’re now seeing thousands of people referred to the international G1G1 page each day as well.

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G1G1 will be global this year, available (via laptop.org/global) in every country where the XO has passed certification and labelling requirements.

This is an initial list of countries we will be shipping to.  To send a laptop to anywhere but the US, you’ll need to enter your information via amazon.co.uk, and (for now) pay roughly 50 GBP in shipping. Update: we are working on reducing the shipping costs for the EU and Canada.

We are adding to this list all the time.  If you don’t see your country listed, and can help us work through the requirements where you live, let me know.  You can preorder a G1G1 laptop directed to any address in the world where UPS ships, excluding the six embargoed countries below.  We prioritize the countries in which we quicken the certification process based partly on the level of interest and the number of preorders, so make your interest known!

You can currently receive your G1G1 “Get” machines in any of the following countries:

North America : Canada, the United States

Central & South America : Haiti, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay

Europe : Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom

Middle East : Iraq APO addresses

Africa : Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda

Asia : Afghanistan, Mongolia, Nepal, Australia.

Countries where you will not be able to receive G1G1 machines:

Countries under embargo in the US : Cuba, Iran, Iraq (except for APO addresses),  North Korea. the Sudan, and Syria.

All machines shipped this year will be US/International keyboards.  Details to come on the available adapters; UK, and US adapters will be available; some EU recipients will also receive or will need to get a US-to-EU converter.

Australia is getting final certification this week, and launching their own G1G1 OZ.  Updates coming and contacts still needed for: APO addresses for Fulbright scholars and military deployments overseas, South Africa, Bolivia, India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, and Russia… as well as most other African countries.

Nicholas was interviewed on the Charlie Rose program on NPR this week. It ended up being a pretty cool 12 minute piece on the state of the OLPC program.

Clip of the last time Nicholas was on Charlie Rose in 2005 after the jump.
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Nice!!!

As part of our fabulous contest with Dailymotion, they are skinning a few of their sites to promote the the contest and Give One Get One program.

Dailymotion

So-far Dailymotion has skins up in the following countries:

http://www.dailymotion.com/br Brazil
http://www.dailymotion.com/pl Poland
http://www.dailymotion.com/nl Netherlands

I am really impressed browsing around DM. They have videos and portals for more languages/countries than I realized.

Their new Open Library OLPC bookreader is lovely, and has been tweaked to recognize the XO’s gamepad keys for navigation, and to display in both normal and rotated screen modes.  Many thanks to Anand and Aaron Swartz for making this work.  Web whiz Rebecca Malamud worked up a lovely portal for children, customized to display well on the XO, and Aaron helped make sure the first demo library bundle of OpenLibrary books is available for testing.

With this work, the 1.1 million public domain books of the Open Library are available, OCR’ed text and all, to everyone with an XO and an internet connection.  Now we are working on making them work better offline, for children whose primary connection to the Internet’s archives is through a friend with a USB key who visits from time to time.

I hope that we can come up with an awesome collection of reading lists for children, and a scripted way to turn a reading list into a bookshelf  available for reading online (via Rebecca’s portal) or offline (zipped up as an XO library bundle) for Gen XO.

Todd Kelsey, long time OLPC volunteer who has helped with documentation and translation projects in the past, has a mesh proposal in to the Knight News Challenge.  He writes of his proposal:

Mesh News is an entry on the Knight News Challenge, which has received a request for a full proposal. As of 12:30pm EST on 11-20, the 2000 entries have been narrowed down to around 350, and Mesh news is in 8th place in terms of overall number of views, and dropped from 3rd to 5th place in terms of “ratings”. If it does make it past the full proposal stage to the “final 50″, and then to the “final 20″, I think it could help a few kids out in various parts, provide a bit of employment, and help to get some additional publicity for OLPC.  Go G1G1!!!

Dailymotion and OLPC are launching a contest for the best commercial spot for OLPC and G1G1.  The winning ad will be aired on national television during the last two weeks of the year.

Take a look at their website and blog, and our current assets available for remixing at media.laptop.org, and take your best shot!

Another quick post in our series on home-brew XO customizations — Bob Chao of CC Taiwan fame shows you how to localize an XO keyboard into Chinese with stickers!   Currently in Chinese; I’ve asked him for an English translation for everyone else who wants to run a little keyboard-customization shop (currently I’ve heard strong requests for German, [extra] Arabic, and Hebrew).

Thanks for the trailblazing, Bob.  If you have a cool hardware hack to show off, leave a comment here or drop me a line!

Special commentary by: Paul Fox

Most of the marketing and message surrounding the OLPC project, and the G1G1 fund-raising effort, is centered on the kids of the world who are our true mission. And that’s as it should be — you only have to look at some of the pictures from the deployments to convince yourself of that.

But let’s face it — if you’re going to donate enough money to both “give one and get one”, you might want to be convinced that the “get one” half — i.e., _your_ cute little green machine — is actually going to be useful. Call it enlightened self-interest. (I’m assuming you’re thinking of this at least partly as a toy for yourself. Go ahead — admit it — it’s okay.) I got my XO during last year’s G1G1 promotion. Maybe I can help convince you.

One of the best parts, for me, is the screen. Shirtsleeve season always feels too short here in New England, so I like getting outside as much as possible when it’s practical. Being able to walk outside to surf the web is a great feeling. Another screen feature: by flipping the laptop into “e-book” form, I take less space on the subway while reading email (offline reading, of course).

Another XO plus for commuting: the extra wireless sensitivity offered by the cute green antennae makes it possible to hit the web, courtesy of a nearby open access point, from my bus stop.

More OS tips and tricks after the drop.

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Tom Brady stopped by the OLPC offices last week (you can see him in our group photo below!) and really got into the project. He wrote about the visit on his blog yesterday in his Insider Update at tombrady.com. It was a real pleasure to meet him – we spent over an hour talking with him and showing him the XOs. He spent some of the time shooting video clips about the laptops, with shout outs for bloggers and a few specific sites.

Tom took a couple XOs back home with him when he left (along with one of the lovely bags Scott and I acquired from the artisans of Cuzco)… Giselle is from Porto Alegre, one of our earliest school trials, and an enormous star there. I wonder if we can get a photo to send them!

The XO has been in the #1 spot for computers and PCs yesterday and today.   Rock on! I’m slowly moving away from my Thinkpad to my XO for development and other work, as I improve my setup with keyboards and monitors, get more frustrated with this power-sucking device, and as the 8.2 interface improves.  Once I can switch freely b/t Fedora or Debian and Sugar desktops later this month, I may stop using my Lenovo entirely.

As usual, please send people to laptop.org/xo when telling them about our program; that way we capture the referral fee and any questions about giving more than one, or simply giving a laptop, are answered from the main OLPC information page.

The Open Library crew have been working on some fantastic things to help improve delivery of books to children.  And now they’re starting a blog for all things OL; give them a holler.

A handful of people are leaving messages each day via email, on this blog (and even more on OLPC posts on my personal blog, the Longest Now), and as private messages to the olpc accounts on flickr and YouTube. I am compiling a selection of the most interesting ones on a feedback page.  Have you received great feedback or replies, positive or negative, to OLPC stories you have posted?  If so, tell us about it!

Hello world, Henry Edward Hardy, OLPC sysadmin here.

I’ve just been looking at some of the stats for the new One Laptop Per Child laptop.org site. The site went live on the 14th of November, and we should hit 1 million hits as I am writing this.

The site has been up for two days.

Here are the daily stats so far:

01 Nov

02 Nov

03 Nov

04 Nov

05 Nov

06 Nov

07 Nov

08 Nov

09 Nov

10 Nov

11 Nov

12 Nov

13 Nov

14 Nov

15 Nov

16 Nov

17 Nov

Average

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Guest post by Yama Ploskonka

Yama wandered into the offices yesterday with some unusual gear.   We were all surprised that he managed to bring it onto the plane with him…

An LCD projector, the kind you buy at electronics stores for $500 or so is basically an LCD screen, a light source, and some optics, and stuff to keep it cool, build an image and such. The hard part of finding information in the internet about how to build one at home is that there is so much of it.

Mary Lou Jepsen has talked about building a $100 projector in the past, using different parts.  But the XO happens to have an LCD screen, and differently from the screens I have hacked in before, the XO is designed to be easy to take apart.
Doing the basic set up took me about 6 months of imagining, and 6 hours of actual work – your mileage may vary.

The end result was exciting, we actually were able to see the XO screen projected on the wall. Details and procedure below the fold.

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