[ale] Re: OLPC meeting Sunday

[Charles Shapiro]

Well that was pretty interesting!

Octane is pretty cool, if somewhat crowded on a Sunday afternoon. Tat, Jim,
and his wife Geri, and I all hung out and hacked  OLPC Stuff for a couple of
hours there late Sunday.  The wifi connection there is free and open (no
evil registration screens), hurray.  We had a lot of interest from fellow
coffee-shop customers when we pulled out the OLPCs. Maybe we should figure
out a way to rotate delegating someone to talk to Civilians, so the rest of
us can concentrate on exploring the machine. I like to talk to pretty girls,
but that's not necessarily my primary interest in these meetings. The NYT
Sunday Magazine had an interesting if somewhat condescending article on the
OLPC this last week (
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin),
worth a skim if only to see how the Main Stream is viewing the
project.

The Mesh Network -> Internet question is still kind of up in the air,
although we were all able to see each other and the wifi at the coffee shop
without difficulty.

You can contact vast numbers of OLPCs over the internet by changing the
jabber server from its shipped value of "ship2.jabber.laptop.org" to "
jabber.xochat.org".  So far you have to do this from the terminal:

sugar-control-panel -s jabber jabber.xochat.org

Then close the terminal activity and restart X Windows by pressing
<ctrl>+<alt>+<erase> .  This change is permanent until you reset the jabber
server with sugar-control-panel again.  After you do this you'll see quite a
large number of other XO laptops in your network view when you are connected
to the internet on it, and I presume that you can open a chat session with
any of them.  So far writing a GUI interface to sugar-control-panel is very
much a Gleam in my Eye.

We managed to bang around a bit more as well. You can  use the OLPC as a PDF
reader by opening a PDF file through the browser,  and even without an
internet connection we found there's quite a bit of content shipped with the
box. I'm still a little blurry on magnifying the pdf file while it's rotated
90 degrees for viewing as an E-book, so I'll fiddle with that next time
around. When I did it in the coffee shop, the type ran off the edge of the
page and it wasn't immediately obvious how I could read the right-hand side
of the lines. I also pulled one of the  ".svg" files used as icons on the
software toolbar over to my Lenovo R50 and managed to open it in inkscape. (
http://www.inkscape.org/ ).

Next weekend I'll be out of my head 'cause of the Groundhog Day Jugglers
Festival ( http://atlantajugglers.org/festivals/gh08.htm ). I'll probly
bring the OLPC to the festival, since there's a pretty high concentration of
Geeks among jugglers. But I expect to do nothing but throw objects (and
possibly myself) in ornamental patterns. Hey! Any of y'all with kids -- or
even without kids -- should come to the free show Saturday at 2 pm at the
Yaarab Shrine Temple on Ponce de Leon.  And of course the festival itself
will be goin' on from Friday night through Sunday afternoon.

The weekend after next is Atlanta Pecha Kucha (
http://www.atlantapechakucha.com/ ). Another interesting thing.

-- CHS


On 1/26/08, Charles Shapiro <hooterpincher at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Nobody has replied to the last email proposing to meet and exchange OLPC
> learning at Octane Coffee on Marietta Street 16:30 Sunday afternoon. I
> intend to be there for an hour or so fiddling with Stuff if anyone wishes to
> join me.
>
> BTW this was written from my G1G1 OLPC over my wired broadband connection.
> The AirLink 101 USB Ethernet adapter works just fine for connecting if you
> have an ethernet jack.
>
> -- CHS
>
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