Trouble with my OLPC

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I took advantage of the "give one, get one" One Laptop per Child (OLPC), and I have been pretty excited about this little computer's arrival. It came yesterday, and it's very cute. It weighs more than I thought it would, though. Two of us at our house have tried to figure out how it works, but we can't figure out anything.

I was able to play some notes on the Tam Tam music making program, but some of the keys didn't work. While I watched the Youtube Tam Tam tutorial about a week ago. I was unable to switch between instruments. Granted, I haven't read the instructions (available on the Internet only), but for the life of me I have no idea how the children will be able to learn. Theoretically, there is free Hotspot access for one year for purchasers, but there is no information about that, either. I wasn't able to connect to the Internet, but I didn't realize that you have to click on an icon that looks like a Tinkertoy.

Trying to figure out how to use the little computer was so frustrating, I think it may be a while until I try again. If this doesn't get easier pretty quick, maybe I can donate it to a disadvantaged child. However if the children for whom these were designed experience the frustration level that we have experienced around here, I can't imagine how they would ever have any interest in computers at all.

If you have purchased one of these little OLPC laptops for a child in your life for Christmas, run, don't walk to the toy store and buy a few more gifts. If this is your child's big present, and you have planned for hours of pleasure from this new toy, it's going to be a grim, grim Christmas.

UPDATE: We are making progress! We have now managed to make some sounds in Tam Tam that rival that mini pocket piano that I bought for a dollar a couple of years ago! We have also managed to make the little XO OLPC meow like a cat and moo like a cow! One of the neighbor children had a book with little keys on the right hand side maybe a dozen or more years ago that did exactly the same thing. We feel very clever, but with the OLPC too big for a paperweight and too light for a door stop, we feel it must have more to offer to avoid third world child rage.

UPDATE 2: We note that the OLPC laptop has easy keyboard access to the double s character for the disadvanged German children and an o with a slash in it for the children of the less developed area of Scandinavia. How cool is that?

UPDATE 3: We have managed to figure out how to take a picture with the OLPC. Unfortunately we can't figure out how to save it, but keep in mind the only resources we have are 2 additional laptops (which manage to connect to the Internet pretty easily, as opposed to the OLPC which can find the wireless connections but can't connect) and 19 collective years of education beyond 8th grade. We remain optimistic that the children of the world must be far smarter than we are.

UPDATE 4: I have managed to connect to the Internet, but pages load so slowly it is enough to make you wish for dial-up! I found a Googlepage once before I was able to connect, but now I can't find it at all. Also, I now have learned that troubleshooting the OLPC will be done by the children themselves, and they will help each other find solutions. This is pretty impressive. Since the laptops have apparently been shipped already to Peru, if you know any OLPC kids there, say perhaps the smarter ones (hopefully already possessing Ph.D.'s from MIT or University of Texas at Austin) would you please ask them to post up their info instanter? Also, please make sure they have an English version. I am in very bad need of their advice.

UPDATE 5: Having failed to find a pint-sized PhD to lend a hand with the OLPC, I've been looking around at the OLPC Wiki. There I learned that even though the OLPC has a built-in microphone, the "internal one doesn't work at this time," so its necessary to plug one in. I also discovered that Opera, a very nice browser, can be used on the little XO. Unfortunately, these are the instructions: "Installing Opera on test machines is easy. From a shell, run these commands as root: . . ." Right. Easy enough for those open-source Linux types, but for me? Apparently, the idea is that if you don't find what you need in your OLPC you'll just write up a little program to solve the problem post-haste. Even more puzzling is this: "If you are having trouble with rpm, just grab a tarball." Well, enough for the OLPC now, I'm off to go look for a tarball, whatever that is . . .

Santa Baby - OLPC Update

I was expecting a ton of blog posts on Christmas Day on how to use my new OLPC XO laptop. I was sure that proud moms and dads who had purchased the little computer under the Give One Get One (G1G1) program would have a lot to say, but no such luck. Are they are as puzzled as I have been?

I’ve been searching on a near daily basis for new info on the OLPC’s, but have mostly come up empty. About all I was able to find after Christmas were these directions for making a viewfinder out of Legos for the built-in OLPC camera--pictured above. As I mentioned the other day, this is a sort-of do-it-yourself laptop.

So who's getting the OLPC in the US under the buy one get one program? From the evidence, its technical sorts--or their kids. Some are clearly the children of software gurus. One mom blogs "One thing we [she and her husband] agree on: before we had a child we asked ourselves "When can she have a computer game?" and Michael's answer was always, 'When she can program it!' " I will refrain from comment . . .

Other people clearly have a hardware or engineering background based on this excerpt from an OLPC news forum post about an OLPC that was dead on arrival: "Get a DC voltmeter and check the output of the power supply. Maybe it is NG, in which case you can probably cobble up a replacement yourself faster than getting a new one from OLPC. Remove the battery and check the voltage on its terminals. Even if it is dead, there should be some voltage on the open terminals."

I don't have a clue how to do any of this stuff. But even a greater source of concern is that those technical sorts seem puzzled, too. I am beginning to think that maybe I should just stick the OLPC in the bookshelf for a while, based on this forum query: "Since the user guide for Pippy in the OLPC Wiki is pretty thin, I thought I'd ask if anyone had figured out how to save program code (there seems to be no way to do that reliably, and if there's a specific syntax guide or if any Python syntax guide would be sufficient. We're puzzled here..."

This is not a good sign . . . I am pretty sure that most of the villages where the OLPC's land won't have that level of expertise. In fact, my research turns up the fact that Peruvian children are mostly taking pictures. With OLPC Internet enthusiasm and idealism high, I am sure that the youth of the Andes, once they master Google and English, will find the picture on this blog a great help. But God forbid I question: I tried to leave a comment on the OLPC blog, and got back a page that said my comment appeared to be spam. When I used the back button, everything I typed was gone! Clever, eh?

No Blue Screen of Death for my Little OLPC

I thought you might want an update on my progress with the OLPC. I am beginning to enjoy it, as it's one of the cuter little knick-knacks that sits on the table next to my couch. Tonight I was feeling courageous, and give it one more try. The battery was dead, and when I plugged it in, my journal told me I hadn't turned it on for over 2 weeks. I decided to try a simple little task: open some old e-mails, take out a little information, and put that information in the word processor.

For a bit, I was pretty pleased with my progress. I was able to connect to the Internet, go through the emails, put the information into a document, and have both applications open. I found myself doing a pretty good job navigating back and forth. I was becoming increasingly proud of myself when I realized that this was cumbersome and slow and a very poor use of my time.

I thought about saving the information and finishing the job later, but then I realized that not only did I not know how to save a document, it would be faster to copy the information from the document into an e-mail, and just finish the job later--somewhere else.

It was easy enough to select the information, but I found myself lost on how to copy it. I was also curious to see whether I could copy from one application and paste it into another. Since copying seemed pretty difficult I thought I would try Cntl + C, another experiment. Guess what? All the information I had put so carefully into the word processor disappeared, to be replaced simply by the letter c. As I started trying to figure out some way that I might be able to retrieve what I had tried to copy, the entire screen darkened somewhat, and everything froze. Completely. What looked a lot like a miniature piece of 8 1/2" x 11" inch paper covered the middle of the screen. Was this a sign? I let 20 minutes elapse and nothing had changed. I gave up.

While it was nice not to have to see that old-fashioned blue screen of death, I am still trying to figure out how the children will be able to learn to use their specially designed laptop. (Previous adventures with the OLPC)