the bouncey zone

Scott likes his XO. Actually using it is still a challenge, but he’s starting to pick up the basics. While visiting his great-grandmother’s house he figured out the camera.

He already knows how to use Dana’s Logitech trackball. He’s making progress with my trigger style trackball and the built-in trackpad, which are a little harder to use. With at least one pointing device under control, he can play one XO game and several web games almost entirely by himself.

He’s not quite three yet…

I’m still learning how to work around the little computer’s limitations. One of the problems with longer videos will be solved in the next software update. (Apparently it copies the movie file from SD card to an internal data store. It takes so long to copy that the file-open calls start to time out. Eventually it fills up all of the available internal space, causing it to become unbootable. The next version will probably just make symbolic links. That means “shortcuts” to Windows users and “aliases” if you’re into Macs.) I also know which formats and bit rates it expects once a video is in position to be played.

I’ve been studying more Python and looking at how existing programs behave. I might be able to use some of them as a starting point for my own programs. Also I’ve been testing various USB gadgets with the XO; the ethernet adapter immediately fired up and tried to grab an address when I plugged it in. That’s a good sign.

Did I mention that we might need another XO in a couple years?

One more month to pick out a name…

Scott’s OLPC XO arrived a few days ago. We’ve all been playing with it since then. Scott calls it “my little computer”.

Others have documented every aspect of unboxing and using these laptops. Rather than duplicate what’s already been done, I’ll just add some general comments.

First, this is the COOLEST PORTABLE COMPUTER EVER! Figuratively and literally. It generates only a very small amount of heat, which comes from the back of the monitor because that’s where its guts are. The hardware is durable, easy to operate (except for the keyboard), and visually attractive. The software still needs some work, but it’s far beyond what I had expected from working with emulators.

Due to open-source ideology and patent license issues, the XO does not support most audio and video formats. As a practical matter, the only movie format supported is Theora, and Ogg Vorbis and Speex are preferred sound formats.

I have no problem with either these formats or the reasons for excluding others. I actually like the free software philosophy. But practically and morally, Dana and I have paid the license fees for the “restricted” media formats at least ten times over. (This is from buying Macs, Mac OS updates, copies of Windows, optical drives and portable media players that came with their own software, and so forth.) Out in the real world MP3, MPEG-4, and Flash video are essential.

So I installed the official closed-source Adobe Flash plugin, which had the effect of making Scott’s favorite online games start working. I’m looking into options for adding support for other other formats. I also worked out various methods for converting existing media files to the “official” formats at an acceptable quality level. All of this was fairly painless.

Thanks to the magic of SSH, I can do admin tasks over an encrypted network connection without interrupting play time. This was disabled by default for security reasons. Enabling it was a matter of opening a local shell and setting a user password. Admin privileges need a second password.

The keyboard is impossibly tiny for grown-up fingers. USB keyboards work without fuss though. Scott likes the oversized Enter key. The arrow keys act more like page up and page down. The left-hand circular control on the screen is closer to actual arrow keys in behavior.

Another button on the screen rotates the image by 90 degrees. After 2 clicks the screen is upside down. 4 clicks brings it all the way around. This button has a lot of potential for classroom jokes.

The screen is awesome. We were able to watch movie clips in direct window-filtered sunlight with half of the screen in a light shadow. The sunny half was a sharp black & white with a hint of color. The shaded part was in color with some enhanced blacks and grays. Any other laptop screen would have been useless at that moment.

The built-in camera and microphone work pretty well, though I wish its video compression could be better. Scott likes the photography program. It’s very similar to Photo Booth on a Mac.

Sleep mode doesn’t exist yet. They’re supposed to fix that in a big software update within a few weeks.

SD cards (also reportedly SDHC) go into a slot in the bottom of the screen. I added a spare 2GB card. Each memory card and USB flash drive appears as a separate list in the Journal. It’s easy to copy things from one Journal to another; this has the effect of copying files from one storage device to another.

I think the Journal system is very cumbersome for ebooks, music, and movies. Playlists or hierarchical file lists would be much better for that. Also, bookmarks in the web browser seem to be specific to that one session. To get the bookmarks back, the user must reopen that particular session from the Journal.

But is that a bug or a feature? The Journal is very good for managing user-created projects. Just keep one browser session for each project to manage that project’s web links. I can see it both ways, and hope others create software to fill in the gaps.

I’d like to make some of that software. That’s why I’ve been studying Python. This little computer has been giving me many good ideas.

The “Give 1 Get 1″ program is now over. I hope they do it again someday. We might need another one before too long.