Luis Galindo’s workshops with OLPC and game development continue at the Creative Center in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Â They recently finished a Scratch game about recycling, available to play with at scratch.mit.edu.
Geeks Without Frontiers, working with Cozybit’s Javier Cardona, recently released the latest version of their open source village-scale wifi tech, o11s. This is solid work that deserves more visibility.
Also covered by ostatic.
The contest rules are out for the OLPC/Nickelodeon storytelling contest. Â OLPC and Nick will be judging the submissions together. Â All XO users in Latin America are eligible to compete by submitting a story, anination, or other multimedia clip of up to 3 minutes. Â Contest ends August 29.
OLPC Association y Nickelodeon organizan y juzgan el concurso en conjunto (anuncio, reglas completas):
Hat tip to Claudia, Christoph, and Giulia.
Daniel Drake has good news for XOs of all flavors:
OLPC OS 11.2 is now out for both XO-1 and XO-1.5, along with some activity updates.
Install it and check it out!
This release is build on Fedora 14 and Sugar 0.92, which includes a feature I am especially fond of: a touchpad-mode selector. Â For those of you who miss being able to use the stylus-mode of the older dual-mode touchpads, this lets you toggle between stylus and capacitive modes.
This release has vastly improved build properties: olpc-update is now faster and requires much less free disk space, OS Builder is much improved for those spinning their own builds.  And the XO reflashes more than twice as quickly now:
“As of this release, installation images are now sparse, meaning that data is only written where data actually resides. The result is that installation time is now more than twice as quick.“
Solar charging has also been tweaked on the XO-1.5.
While there was no 11.1 release this year, there are plans in the works for an 11.3 as well. Â If you have bundle updates or other fixes that didn’t get into 11.2, that’s the release for you.
AÂ huge thanks to everyone who has helped with developing and testing this release!
The XO-3 design work is coming along, still scheduled for the end of next year. Â The screen will be one of the latest Pixel Qi models. Â They will run Linux, though what flavor is still under investigation; followers of C. Scott’s blog can read the full details there. Â And like the XO-1.75, they will use an ARM chip.
In an IDG interview, Nicholas notes that design discussions about how to implement solar and satellite connectivity continue. Â Meanwhile, those interested in working on software for the XO-3 are invited to get involved in XO-1.75 hacking this summer.
Contributors program versions of the beta-test boards will be available soon.
reposted on behalf of OLPC France
Registration is now open for the 2nd SugarCamp Paris. Please join us in making Sugar a better learning experience!
This event is organized by OLPC France, and takes place in Paris, France from September 9 (evening) to September 11 (evening).
The goal is to enhance Sugar as a free learning platform, already used by ~2M kids around the
world, and to focus on a specific problem: how to make Sugar *documentation* better with respect to accessibility and readability?Partial travel refunds are available for regional trips for those who could not otherwise come. Please contact the organizers with any questions.
Let’s take this challenge, and enjoy a good time with many members of the OLPC/Sugar community!