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The “$100 laptop“ the product of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative (OLPC) and MIT Media Lab founder Nick Negroponte’s near-realized dream to provide laptops to schoolkids in the third world, seems to be hopping along. The final hardware form factor and supply chain questions seem to now be mostly resolved, with the effort shifting to the operating system and final usability.

Since it’s inception, $100 Laptop has been using various versions of Fedora Linux. Apparently the people at Red Hat have taken Fedora and customized it into a child-friendly UI known as “Sugar”. Videos of it have started appearing online, with instructions on how to run the OS within Mac and Windows.

Video link: http://www.ivr-usability.com/olpc/olpc.html

My impressions: It’s a curious little thing and it looks like a straightforward repackaging of common gnome applications such as Abiword.

It will be interesting to see how this thing tests. The interface — for all of it’s reliance upon primitives and oversized icons — seems pretty complex for the kindergarten crowd. Even though I was a precocious tot when it came to the blinky terminals of the Commodores and Tandys of my youth I still find it hard to imagine that the laptop will be intuitive to very young children. Perhaps older kids will truly appreciate it. Perhaps the device will be self-selecting, and the same apple-cheeked youths will be using it to ping-attack your enterprise network during their later pimply adolescent years. By then we can only hope they will have moved on to Dells.

BTW: In memoriam:

I wuv you Timex Sinclair 1000. Still miss you.

Back in the pre-911 days, I ran a cartoon website called Cartoonlandia which allowed cartoonists to submit their works in a collegial-style atmosphere. It did really well and needed some additional nurturing but a full-time job took away my energies and I had to eventually abandon maintaining the project.

One of the contributors was a fellow called William Bredbeck. His cartoon series, Meow, was perhaps one of the most offbeat, hilarious things I ever read. I am pleased to see he’s put his entire collection back online.

And by fusion I don’t mean tilapia with miso rub sauce. You’ve been officially nerd warned.

One day in the year 1936, an inventor named Philo T. Farnsworth had a conundrum. He could continue working on his novel idea for a electrostatic fusion reactor, or he could work an another novel idea he had for an electronic gun that would spray a beam of electrons onto a phosphor-coated surface inside a vacuum chamber.

He decided to pursue the latter project and this is why he’s known in the history books as the Genius Who Invented Television(tm).

So what happened to his other invention? Farnsworth shelved it, and for a while the US dept. of defense took interest, but ultimately dropped the research. Over 70 years later, Farnsworth’s forgotten fusion reactor design is suddenly developing a storm of interest among fusion researchers, and for it’s promise of the previously unfathomable goal of practical fusion power.

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I have thousands of photos from my travels. I’ve been trying to find the right solution for accommodating all these. I wrote a neat script in PHP which will create thumbnails and autosize expanded views using only one source image. Plus it reads from the directory so all I have to is drop in a folder. Nice.

First up: A highlight of my better photos.

I’ve been here for six months now.

I’m pretty content with the life I’ve made for myself here. I have a great job, nice friends. I am close to my older sister. I have much less stress, and a more money in the bank than before. I’m officially counting my blessings.

The winter will subside and bring on the spring. What will life be like by then I wonder?

This is my first blog entry.