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Mary Lou Jepsen, apart from being a screen technology genuis, is also a gifted explainer, and you can find her in several videos on youtube.

She invented the amazing screen that is found on the OLPC XO 1.0 and 1.5 laptops. This can be viewed from a very wide angle, uses low power, but most notable of all is completely viewable in direct sunlight. This is essential for the many outdoot classrooms around the world, and becasue learning doesn't take place exclusively while sitting in rows in a classroom. Children can take these laptops everywhere, and see the screen.

Jepsen founded a company called Pixel Qi, which creates yet more advances in screen technology that we are going to see in consumer products.

Here is a youtube video, she demonstates the power consumption of various tablets using pixel qi screens, with their varying capablities, and the difference in power consumption - what the screen uses, what the backlight uses, what the rest of the gadget uses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z03hlZThveI

http://www.liliputing.com/2010/06/pixel-qi-low-power-display-power-manag...

Woke up this morning, to find that OLPC and a UN Agency have sealed the deal to deploy to half a million refugee children in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
http://www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php?id=662

One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organisation whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education, is partnering with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to bring new learning opportunities to nearly half a million Palestine refugee children by 2012. The distribution of XO laptops in UNRWA schools is fundamental to OLPC’s mission to give connected, power-efficient and robust laptops to children around the world, especially those who have been displaced by conflict and those living in extreme poverty.

Also, check this. The designer of the shape etc of the OLPC has gone on to make glasses, which are being distributed for free to the 11% of mexican children who need them
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/04/28/fuseproject-colleccion...

i've organised a few events that involved a meal, talks and drinks, at various restaurants in Welllington.

The very very best place by a long way, is Southern Cross.

They have not charged for the room, only for meals. They've provided projector, screen, microphone. They've not required a deposit. They've let me pay by eftpos on the day for 50 people's meals.

They're very pleasant and easy to deal with.

They've been flexible with meals, making things interesting for the vegans. They can handle 50 people all picking their own meal from the menu.

They're on time with food. Their staff don't disturb the speaker while they're speaking.

They also have wifi and are very happy for a large group of people with laptops to turn up for a hackfest anytime.

In summary -- the southern cross is awesome.

Other places have been difficult to deal with - changing their minds on what menus we're allowed - requiring everyone to have the same meal - some require all the vegetarians to sit together - other places will only do buffet. Many will serve only salad to vegans. Many require a substantial deposit, and very costly venue hire fees. Others have been slow to bring the food out, so many people have already left by the time the mains arrived at 9pm.

A group of students from University of Auckland have a very innovative project underway using some OLPC XO laptops.

They have talked about this project on National Radio:

At 1:35pm we're chatting to some local inventors who've come up with a neat way to distribute information wirelessly using existing FM and AM radio networks. With over a million One Laptop Per Child machines out there it could be a cheap, quick and easy way to distribute text and images without using the internet.

program: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/thiswayup/20100327
mp3 http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/twu/twu-20100327-1340-Wireless_access-048.mp3
ogg: http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/twu/twu-20100327-1340-Wireless_access.ogg

The students have been working with the OLPC volunteer group in Auckland - that groups meets every second week. Further details on http://laptop.org.nz (subscribe to the mailing list to get info on auckland meetings).

Our mission is to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

We've now shipped these laptops to EVERY SINGLE CHILD AND TEACHER in Peru and Uruguay.

Wellington OLPC group meets to test software and hardware weekly. No prior experience necessary, just a methodical mind, to go through educational software for all ages, and seek out flaws. The software includes jigsaw puzzles, measuring games, and ebook readers.

We also love to find bilingual and polygot people who can translate, or checking someone else's translation - from popular languages like Spanish to more obscure dialects of Twi from Ghana. We translate things like children's activities and electronic firstaid manuals for the world.

Note: i'm not an offical spokesperson for OLPC - this is my own small rant

A couple things people don't get about OLPC (and perhaps open source too):

The design process is out in the open - you can see the ideas, prototypes, and half baked suggestions all being discussed for everyone to see. For those used to getting their technology from someone like Apple, Nokia, or Microsoft this can be confusing - they see something discussed, and then they see OLPC change their mind... and the confused person equates this with failure. It's not, it's just the organic process by which things are designed being exposed for all to see.

And their target probably isn't you - you are not their market (i'm making assumptions about who is reading my blog). If you're sitting in a developed nation somewhere with a wad of cash in hand wanting to buy laptops for your 2.4 children, sorry. Just have a read of the start of the OLPC mission statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop ..... The goal is both the poorest children (i.e. not your children) and it's mass deployment. You not being able to purchase one doesn't make it vapour ware. Every single child in Uruguay has one of these laptops. Very soon every single child in Peru wil have one also. That makes the project MASSIVELY SUCCESSFUL in my book.

now with te reo, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

the new XO 1.5 laptops arrived with a new language option :-)

The prototype XO 1.5 laptops have arrived in Wellington - Some will be heading to Christchurch and Auckland in time for the weekend.

Grant with one of the XO 1.5 laptops

First thing we did - we pulled them apart. Inside in a new processor (faster), as well as a very different looking motherboard. We spotted 1Gbyte of RAM, and a 4GByte microSD card serving as the non-volatile storage.

They arrived with Sugar OS 0.8.4. This isn't a stable release, and the hardware is still being tested by people like us -- so finding a few things not working was to be expected.

We really like the new touchpad -- it's like you'd find on any "normal" laptop, instead of the fancy, kinda expensive one that the original XOs had. Now you'll notice the edge of the usable area if you stray too far.

There are some device drivers missing - such as the video capture - and the screen driver hiccups. But we did manage many hours of playing food force, which usualy crashes on the older hardware. Foodforce needs lotsa CPU and memory.

Some more structured testing will be this saturday's testing.

Auckland Saturday - 11:00 am @ The Windsor Castle 144 Parnell Road, Parnell - they have internet, Tabitha bring one of the XO 1.5 machines

The NZ OLPC "Friends in Testing" meets every saturday in Wellington. This saturday will be the first meeting after a very successful Software Freedom Day here.
http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/wellington

This saturday is also the first ever meeting of the Auckland group.

What's involved is: brunch, coffee, conversation, intro to the green XO laptops, how the OS works, how to install an activity, and then you test your chosen activity, try to find some bugs. If we find bugs we send a test report back to the project.

If we don't find any bugs we also send a report saying how awesome the project is. Those that know python may wish to track down and destroy the bug, but for the most part we don't.

We've been asked to test the list of activities that are being deployed to kids in Peru soon

We're meeting at 10:30am, and tying the two locations together via irc (we're a bit bandwidth constrained in cafes.

Wellington is at the southern Cross http://thecross.co.nz
Auckland group is at Ironique, 448 Mt Eden Rd, Mt Eden.

Please join us - there will be many newcomers at both events.

p.s. People hacking on other projects are also welcome - we like "cross pollination". I know there are some koha, statusnet and drupal hackers coming.
p.p.s. If you have your own laptop, whatever flavour, bring that along too. The "sugar" software project that powers the OLPC laptops should run on most anything, and if it doesn't work on yours, we'd like to know that too.

OLPC Viewfinders - made on Reprap, originally uploaded by Br3nda.

Checkout out these thingies.

They're viewfinders - slot them into the OLPC XO laptops's top right hand usb port, and they're now in perfect position to be a viewfinder for the laptop's camera.

These were made on a reprap, the open source, open hardware 3d printer that's capable of printing copies of itself.

They're made from a milk byproduct polymer/plastic. They cost a fraction of a cent each.

These were printed by Vik Olliver, who also painted them XO green. THANKS VIK!! :-D

Get in contact with OLPC NZ if you'd like a copy of the file that prints these.

On friday we had the first of the Catalyst Drupal+Postgresql Codesprints. About eight drupal devs gathered with laptops, hidden in a meeting room where nobody could find us, and went through the issue list for drupal on postgres.

The issues i want through
http://drupal.org/node/514330 - update to the installation instuctions - wasn't actually needed as the old instructions still work in 8.1 and 8.3.
http://drupal.org/node/400296 - back port of a postgres fix for the simple test module into drupal 6 - the patch needed work. Luckily the patch writer was in the room with me, so he was nudged to fix it. He's done so, now i gotta find time this weekend to look again.

http://drupal.org/node/396388 - thanks @nzkoz for translating this from french :) After much testing on D6 and D7 I just couldn't find how to make this occur. It's obviously happening to many folks who then take the error message and search and find that issue - so I left it with a plea to please add instructions on how to make the error occur.

At the Wellington OLPC Friends in testing session yesterday, the beginnings of plotting for a OLPC/Sugar miniconf for LCA2010 began.

Leading the charge is Tabitha Roder, along with from Walter Bender and the Wellington OLPC team. They've called for others in the region to join their bid [olpcfriends.org]

While i was at the testing session I decided to try my hand at a hello world sugar app. (Sugar is the environment running on the OLPC XO laptops)

Someone sent me a link to Sugar installing on FLOSS manuals, which tell that all i need do is:

apt-get install sugar

well, that bit works - but X will crash and die back to GDM after starting. Turns out the Jaunty version doesn't work.

/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
Setting IM through im-switch for locale=en_NZ.
Start IM through /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/all_ALL linked to /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default.
/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/jarabe/desktop/meshbox.py:19: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead
import sha

I spend Friday afternoon at the aotearoa digital arts symposium.

I brought with me 50 DVDs of Ubuntu Studio. Alas i didn't realise they aren't live CDs, install only. Douglas rescued me as he brough with him 25 CDs of standard ubuntu januty so folks can try before they install.

The laptops that turned up were half windows laptops, and half mac os. All recent hardware and generally very tech savvy people as you expect from "digital artists".

Five people left with Ubuntu studio, - many more CDs handed out. Some turned up without a laptop, but took CDs with them to try later.

Also spent some of the time talking about OLPC, Freedom in general, and opensource that works on closed source OS like Audacity (audio editor) or Gimp (kinda like photoshop).

All in all, a good afternoon.

Here i'm quoting from Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, but i wonder how much different New Zealand's members of parliament are:

The average age of a Member of Parliament is 55. And I point that out, only to underline the fact that the average Canadian watches about 26 hours of television a week. Those under the age 25, it's about 12 hours a week. But they're consuming more media than ever before. But, they're consuming it where they want it on their iPhones and on their Blackberries and on their PVRs and on their laptops. And they're doing it through mechanisms that didn't exist.

And you'd be surprised the number of Members of Parliament who have never held an iPhone, who couldn't tell you, functionally, how a Blackberry works and have no idea how these things integrate. And when you ask the average member of Parliament "How do you consume your music?" They'll say "well, maybe I'll go out and buy a CD and drop it in the thing or maybe I'll hear something on the radio on the way" and you say "How do you watch movies" and they'll say "Well, I'll go out to the theater when I have the time on a Friday night or maybe rent a DVD at home" and you say "How do you listen to radio or get your news?" and they'll say "Well, I'll sit at 6 o'clock after the meal, finish a steak and watch the news, or get the paper in the morning."

The old way of doing things is over. These things are all now one. And it's great and it's never been better and we need to be enthusiastic and embrace these things.

Press release from NZOSS on G2009 Negotiations with Microsoft | The New Zealand Open Source Society

New Zealand Open Source Society is calling for far greater use of free software in the New Zealand public sector. The renewed call comes at a time when central government agencies have been conducting line-by-line reviews of their expenditure and the UK government has released sweeping policy change...

“The crucial insight from the UK policy is that cost of ownership is not the issue; what matters is value delivered.” says NZOSS president Don Christie “With free software that value can be delivered across multiple agencies through re-use.”

The Electoral Enrolment Centre has been using free software their desktops, happily, for the last seven years. A rollout of free software, such as ubuntu linux, on new desktop/laptops would be a sensible decision. In times while we're laying off public servants due to cost cuts, why pay uber dollars for software that gives less flexibility.
Government (and education) is the right place for the more altruistic aspect of free software - build it once and reuse it through multiple departments without need for further investment. (not to mention the control you get from having the source and the rights to change it/hire someone to make it exactly as you need).

Tabitha Roder is a heroine - she does awesome things in her day job i'm sure, but it her weekend volunteer "job" that is inspirational.

Tabitha is the force behind Wellington's Friends in Testing - This is a group that meets *every* weekend, has breakfast, and then proceeds to test the latest build of Sugar OS on the One Laptop Per Child XO laptops.

She pays for data (over cdma cellular) from her own pocket, she feeds the poorer students coffee and fries while testing, and she send a report back to the project at the end of the day.

The true awesome thing she does is cheerlead and muster the group of students, coderhackers, parents, and others to turn up every weekend - She's done a mighty thing that has a positive effect on far reaching parts of this work.

I seem to spend a lot of time in bars with laptops - most commonly OneLaptopPerChild XO Laptops.

we have a great bar in Wellington - the Cross - which is set out just right for hackfests, and has some good beers on tap. Most importantly it has wifi.
2 weeks ago my other half: callum, did a mini-workshop on how to take apart an XO laptop and put it back together again, along with some basic maintenance info. This we did in a bar :-)
Lotsa photos

We also have a monthly hackfest in the cross - Super Happy Dev House. The next one is 1st March and will have a Silverstripe theme.

Last time we had a theme it was mobile development - a bunch of nerds in a bar, with laptops, beer, and a whiteboard - talking about different form factors and mobile browsers.

Mel Chua and Walter Bender, both contributor/leaders in the OLPC and Sugar Project world, came to visit Wellington yesterday

Walter gave a short talk on sugar, the software that runs on most OneLaptopPerChild XO laptops.

He spoke on learning, and how if you're going to give every child in the world an ipod, you should also give them a synthesizer to make the music - give a child a wiki with an edit permission, not a pdf. Even though you can read a wiki page as easily as a pdf, the difference is important.

Sugar, which is essentially a window manager with a suite of contributed learning apps, will run on any linux distro now - and those linux distros in turn run on almost any hardware, so sugar can go anywhere, not just the XO laptops.

Sugar enabled "1st class participation" in creation. Children can appropiate the technology - and sugar gives the tools for solving problems, instead of giving out the solution.

Walter compared sugar to crumple zones in cars - don't lock down technology to be unbreakable - if you do this then the crumple zone becomes the passengers, or rather, the users - who cannot change the technology they are using.

Instead, unlock the technology and let the user break it as they wish. Sugar created easy recovery methods who children can break their XO software and then easily and trivially recover back to stability.

Child then become involved in the technology, not just recipents.

It's the middle of glorious summer in Wellington - so dignataries and "internet celebs" are visiting our fair city

Here are some upcoming "visitations":

Wellingtonian Martin Langhoff talks on OLPC.

“One Laptop per Child has already distributed nearly a million laptops in 31 countries”

These are the same laptops that "Wellington Friends in Testing" have been testing every week, over brunch.

“One Laptop per Child has already distributed nearly a million laptops in 31 countries”Source: www.uoc.eduThe “One Laptop per Child” computers are designed for working, as the people responsible for them say, “under a tree”. That is, networked and forming a learning community. For this to happen, the best ...    hey!! it's the hoff!    

www.australianit.news.com.auSource: www.australianit.news.com.auNSW secondary school students could be issued with $56 million worth of Linux-based laptops as part of Kevin Rudd's digital education revolution.

Shared with Flock - The Social Web Browser
http://flock.com

Amazon will be selling the OLPC XOs via the G1G1 (give one get one) - which i understands means they'll be shipping to New Zealand.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/150642/amazon_to_sell_olpc...

From Pia Waugh's blog:
http://pipka.org/blog/2008/08/16/olpc-in-niue/

This morning a group of us (Martin, Tim, Leonie, Callum, Tabitha, Stephen and I) gathered at the Southern cross for brunch and an OLPC testing session. It involved following a test script to check what works, and what doesn't.

Tesult: 2 confirmed bugs, 11 new bugs filed, lotsa apps tested , lotsa existing bugs gone.