The Goldfish Chronicles

I’ve a bunch of bits to try and blog over the next couple of days, but one thing that I want to bounce up and down and talk about are OLPC’s - the $100 laptops (currently retailing at $200). Jim Gettys brought a half-dozen along for people to look at and I spent an hour playing with them and discussing them with the others around.

Let’s cover the basics - I love the idea, I love the hardware and I love the software. I’m very happy with my decision to buy one back on Monday. The only open question which is likely to lead to a complaint is putting on other software. I want to put a DOS emulator on to run old 90’s games that my son adores.

There’s a version of LOGO on there that uses the Lego Mindstorm style programming environment of plugging blocks together rather than doing it by hand. I had a lot of fun with that (while others were figuring out how to get console and dig around underneath… sometimes I have the strong suspicion I’m not a hacker). The automatic mesh network seemed good - the biggest bit I had to learn to do was close applications rather than leave them hanging around. In fact it feels much like my Psion netBook did - if you didn’t keep things clean then you’d find your memory was all gone.

I was a bit confused that the left mouse button had an X while the right mouse button had an O - unless it was a localization of the Portguese version I was using, it seems odd to be that way around. I’d expect X to be the right hand side and to imply cancel. Maybe it’s for playing noughts and crosses.

The keyboard felt like a larger zx81, no pulling keys off in our household again; and the whole thing felt light enough to not be a burden on a young kid. I love it. Looking forward to reading about the ’school server’ and presumably there’s some kind of educator’s version.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 8:50 am and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.