Tom Brady handles the XO

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!

G1G1 : the XO is the best-selling computer on Amazon

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.

Feedback from emails and blog posts

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!

New laptop.org site reaches 1 million hits in two days

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:

0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 22262172.08 KB 2745259.87 KB 73316359948511.56 GB 7243612443443645.70 GB 11144764325460987.34 GB 402326117138304.45 MB 1148.599254.4158974.00897.25 MB
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
Day Number of visits Pages Hits Bandwidth
01 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
02 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
03 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
04 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
05 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
06 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
07 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
08 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
09 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
10 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
11 Nov 2008 0 0 0 0
12 Nov 2008 2 22 62 172.08 KB
13 Nov 2008 2 7 45 259.87 KB
14 Nov 2008 733 16359 94851 1.56 GB
15 Nov 2008 7243 61244 344364 5.70 GB
16 Nov 2008 11144 76432 546098 7.34 GB
17 Nov 2008 402 3261 17138 304.45 MB

Continue reading

Hardware hacking : first pass at an XO Projector

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.

Continue reading