XO shows up
December 19th, 2007 by HenAmongst the flurry of boxes that have been showing up in the last few days (Atlantic shipping sucks, so Christmas is supplied by Amazon) there was a box today that contained a nice little green and white number. OLPC’s XO to be precise.
At last - hardware that doesn’t waste time on a manual 
Plug. Battery. Device. Battery shaped hole in Device. You don’t need a degree in Lego to guess what to do.
Then you spend a while trying to open the damn thing. Degree in sofa/stairs manipulation later, it’s open and you’re ready to go. Power button. Nice loading image. Started.
Question: What’s your name?
I lied and gave my son’s. He’s too young to read right now, so he’ll never know.
Request: Choose the colour for your logo!
Or rather, keep clicking on the logo until you like the two-tone colour. After a while I found the purple/yellow combo I wanted, to match the purple/yellow logo on the back of the laptop. I’m very happy about that by the way - my Kick Off team wore purple/yellow, my CM* custom teams wear purple/yellow (with gold/black as the away kit) and a hacky bit of code I did in Delphi years ago was Purplepad, a dumb Notepad clone with the massive value add of a purple background and yellow text. So - very happy with the colour.
Eventually said son noticed what I was doing and wanted into the action. So I showed him the paint program (too hard), showed him the TurtleArt (pretty rainbow) and got him to hold the laptop (too heavy). So it’s all mine! Though for some reason the green toy like demeanor has him believing that in fact it’s not all mine and is his computer. It’s going to take some sweet talking to explain that it’s not the ideal device for his Flash and DOS games; though I do plan to poke a bit to see if I can get a DOS emulator to work.
Mostly - I’m looking forward to pushing myself into some Python programming, using TurtleArt as a teaching tool along with the Lego Mindstorms software and just having fun.
Biggest dissapointment - no solar panel/hand crank power system; but in Sunny Seattle with dodgy carpals, that’s probably a blessing.
December 20th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
idk, uhm, er, let him cook up the DOS games?
actually, s/let/make/; s/\?/!/
December 20th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
offtopic: can you config WP to show queued comments pls?
on second look, the URI is pointing to a non-existent comment, so at least WP assigned my comment a number
December 21st, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Me too, me too! It’s going to be a holiday present for the little one, so we had to hide it and only open box when she’s not around. Very fun. I figured out opening (the wifi ears are the locks) pretty quickly.
Got stumped figuring out wifi, since I had to dig through the help on the web to remember how to figure out the MAC address so I can stick that in my router for association control.
It’s interesting figuring out their metaphors for things like CTRL-TAB for us poor Windows users. Overall we’re going to be sure to lead the little one to doable tasks, like typing in Write and doing simple graphics. I’m curious as to how quickly she’ll figure out the rest, though…
Can’t wait to open it up somewhere and have the mesh network kick in!