More Uses For An OLPC

Video player for toddler.

Meghan likes watching DVDs in the minivan and she likes banging on the keys of the OLPC so I combined the two. I used Handbrake to rip one of her favorite DVDs then loaded mplayer onto the OLPC and played back the movie from a a thumb-drive.

VLC and mplayer had similar problems with freezing before announcing the file was longer available. I tried turning off power management with no improvement. It wasn't until I disabled the radio that playback was successful .. then I found the defect mentioned earlier.

My First Defect (for the OLPC)

I noticed that turning the radio off and then back on from the OLPC control panel resulted in being endlessly prompted for my WEP password.. so I investigated a little more and then raised this defect .. now I will have to see if there is something similar in Fedora.

Other Uses for an OLPC

Baby webcam monitor..
Downloaded motion and set it up, put the lpatop on some furniture and left my daughter sleeping while I watched her in a browser window from another room. It worked ok.

New OLPC Spin

Funny thing coincidences.. I was talking to a co-worker about the OLPC and suggesting he avoid vmware images or ISOs and that instead he should use a Fedora system and add Sugar from RPM because the ISOs that I had seen and become out-of-date or unavailable.. and then we found Sebastian Dziallas reports there is a new spin of Sugar available from Fedora. This is a customized version of Fedora that can be run as a live cd or even from a USB stick.

Downloading now..

The OLPC is here

I haven't been keeping with news so I was surprised and happy to find my new(est) toy on the doorstep tonight - an OLPC XO. I have been trying to put it down for several hours now so that I can take care of, well, anything else but it's fascinating. Performance wise it is not snappy but I can get on the network, download things, type in the word processor (abiword, I think) and generally fiddle around. I want to download some new apps just to see and then I am going to try and leave it alone for a while. At least overnight..


Has anyone else in Dallas (or elsewhere) received theirs?