More General Information about the OLPC

Posted on December 23, 2007 by John F Croston III

There are a few things that I have noticed over the course of the day using the OLPC, the XO Laptop, or the $100 Laptop. One of the big ones is that if you take it to a coffee shop people will look at you and then the laptop and look at the laptop some more.

I had a lot of people come up to me and ask if it really worked. I said “Yes, it does and you can get one for yourself even” and went into how they can order the OLPC themselves from OLPCs Give 1 Get 1 website.

I had a lot of people ask “Is that one of those green laptops”, or “Is that one of those $100 laptop”.  I got the most questions from older people asking “Isn’t that the laptop we saw them talking about one CBS”? I assume they saw the “60 Minutes” piece on the OLPC. Each time I would stop reading about the laptop and offered them a chance to use it.

One lady I guess was going to order one for someone or she already had, so she wanted to see it and touch it. She had a young girl who was eleven if I remember correctly use it. The young girl said it was easy for her to type on. Of course she tried to go to one of the Disney websites, which asked for the latest Flash plug-in to see most of the website, not that accessible of a website. A Disney website is probably not the first place someone from third world country would go or at least it shouldn’t be.

Another gentleman asked what kind of software you could put on it, since someone he knew or he was going to a third world country and wanted get a few to let people there use it if it could do a bunch of activities.

One women I know asked if you could look up porn on the laptop. I told I figured you could, since I had not heard that they had software to stop it. Really wanted to know if kids could look up porn. So when she got hold of the OLPC she went to the Playboy website and started laughing when she got to their home page. I grab the OLPC back from her to get rid of it, since we were sitting the middle of the coffee shop with a lot of little kids and older adults.

I did get some reading done about the OLPC on how to get started, how it works, and what activities the OLPC has on it. They even have a wiki, which contains information about hardware, software, content, testing, educators, developers, and a whole lot more. They have some cool rollovers explaining what certain parts of the machine are for. One of the ones I just found was the page that has information on what the keyboard does. They also have a page that shows which features the OLPC has.

With all the question and people playing with it I did not get to do as much as I wanted today on learning about the activities on the OLPC. It was like three different “Tam Tam” activities. They are:

  • “Tam Tam mini” – an application that allows for people to perform music and play instruments.
  • “Tam Tam Edit” – an application allows you to generate music using a colorful and intuitive graphical interface.
  • “TamTam Jam” – the music performance activity. Sounds are played by striking individual keys on the keyboard. This is designed more for younger children.

Other activities that the OLPC has are: (this information was mostly taken from the activities webpage)

  • “Chat“ -simple environment for discussion, whether it is between two individuals or an entire classroom.
  • “Memorize“ – is the classic memory game of finding and matching pairs with a twist: a pair can consist of any multimedia object, such as images, sounds,and text.
  • “Record” – provides a simple way for children to take pictures, view slideshows, and record video and audio all content that can be shared via the mesh network.
  • “Journal“ – is an automated diary of everything a child does with his or her laptop.
  • “Draw“ – provides a canvas for a child or a group of children to express themselves creatively.
  • “Pippy“ – a simple and fun introduction to programming in Python, the dynamic programming language underlying much of the software on the laptop.
  • and a whole lot more

The final cool thing on the activities page is the last item, which  is the part about downloads for the OLPC. The download page has like 50+ items to download and use like (some is games others is source code):

  • “Domino“ – classic space game
  • “Image Quiz“ – a simple concept: one question, one image, one click
  • “3D Pong“ – three dimensional wireframe arcade game
  • “SimCity“ – construct and maintain your own city
  • “Block Party“ – Tetris-inspired game
  • and a whole bunch of other things

The woman across the table from me at Murky Coffee in Arlington said, “I should bring the OLPC out with me, it might actually be better than having a puppy or a baby with me for getting people to stop and talk to me”.

Hopefully this blog post is usefully for those that do not have their OLPCs yet, are waiting until Christmas to open with their kids, want to read up on what it has, what is being developed, or what you can do with it.

Posted in Accessibility, Activities, Development, Helpful Tips, Helping Others, Murky Coffee, OLPC, One Laptop per Child, Reading | 4 Comments

First Blog Post from my new OLPC – (One Laptop per Child)

Posted on December 22, 2007 by John F Croston III

This is really cool to be able to connect to the internet by wireless from another persons mesh network, I don’t have wireless.

The typing on this key board is difficult since the keys are so small. They seem to be made for like ta five to eight year old or someone with really small hands. The good part about the small keys is you have to type much slower, which means hopefully less errors.

This OLPC will be great for taking to the coffee shop and t0 do just a bunch of reading. This keyboard makes it tough  and the buttons near the mouse pad are really small and if your not careful you end up moving the cursor and then typing somewhere else after you hit the left click.

That’s enough for now time for a bunch more reading on how to use this new device. Longer posts with photos will go up in the next day or so.

My new One Laptop per Child (OLPC) next to my older 16 inch laptop

UPDATE – Added photo of both my laptops on the larger one, since I have not yet read enough to be able to do it from the OLPC.

Posted in Mesh Network, OLPC, One Laptop per Child | 9 Comments

Interesting Things You See and Here at Chinatown Starbucks

Posted on December 20, 2007 by John F Croston III

On my way to the DC Blogger meet up at RFD (Regional Food and Drink) in Chinatown I saw a large group of people with bright lime green police vests on getting ready to cross the street. I was like what do we need that many cops here and not other places in DC.

I stopped in the Chinatown Starbucks to kill sometime before the meet up. I got myself a bottle of water, since I’m not a coffee drinker. I know its bad for the environment the plastic and all, I reuse them. There was like one chair downstairs left. I wanted to read, but also watch the people go by on their way to the Wizards game and whatever else they were going. There was a woman at the table and I asked if she minded if I used the spare chair she had at her table, she said fine and went back to her phone conversation. From what I heard she spent like 15 or 20 minutes talking in French to someone before she finished and then left.

While she was on her cell phone a bunch of the cops (about a dozen) stopped in front of the store blocking the view of the sidewalk. She looked up from her conversation stopped talking for like the first time in 10 minutes and just shrugged her shoulders and went back talking. A few of the cops came in and got coffee.

Next a metro cop came in with his bicycle and stood behind the counter drinking a coffee. He must have to work this area all the time an needed to warm up. One of the real police officers came in and started talking to the metro police officer. I came to find out all the cops in the vests that were wandering about were police academy cadets. I was wondering why they needed like forty plus cops and or cadets in Chinatown on a Wednesday night. Don’t other parts of town need them more, like at least Adams Morgan for the drunks.

The real police officer ended up being one of the instructors and said that the cadets were going to be in that area until like New Years. The Metro officer asked if this was part of the cadets training or getting extra experience. It seemed like it was extra experience which would make their time in the academy longer. The metro cop said that really stinks, since he remembered once he was about done with the academy like 10 years ago all he wanted was to get out.

While this conversation was going on another DC police officer came in who I think was an academy instructor too. After she got in one of the cadets came in and told them that some person had come over to them and said a guy was bothering people around the corner outside one of restaurants. The second academy officer told them to never mind it was probably nothing to worry about. After a bit she decided to go out and ask the cadet for a description of the person just to mess with them to see if they had been paying attention or not to what was going on.

Finally all the cops and cadets left the Starbucks except for the bicycle cop. This is finally when I noticed the woman at the table behind me was having a man read different articles from the newspaper. The more I listened she was helping him learn or improve his reading skills. She was very patient with him. After the first article she asked if he liked sports. He said sure and she had him read the first part of the article about Sean Taylor making the Pro Bowl even thou he passed away like three weeks ago.

He would read along slowing trying to make sure he read and pronounced everything correctly. A few times he stumbled on a word and she would have him go back until he got it right. He trouble pronouncing “Posthumously”, so do I. She did this in a very nice way so he learned and I guess did not feel put down. After he would read for  awhile she would stop him and then asked him to explain what he read in his own words. I guess this was to make sure he understood what he had just read.

Once they had run out of time, since I think they both had to be other places to go she gave him a present in one of those small hanled gift bags. He gave her a card which she opened and read, while they talked about what each one was doing for the holidays. They decided to meet the Wednesday after New Years, since I don’t think either one was in town after Christmas. When they left he had never opened his bag and I wanted to see what he got from her.

My guess was it was some small book. This is what the holiday time should be about helping others improve their lives.

Some times during the heck tick holidays you just need to sit a while, read some yourself, watch, and listened to others.

Posted in Cell Phone, Chinatown, Cops, Helping Others, Police Officers, Reading, Starbucks, Washington, DC | 2 Comments

Need Help with Skills List

Posted on December 17, 2007 by John F Croston III

In preparation for my talk on Accessibility for the January, 2008, Refresh DC meeting I am looking to build a small simple accessible web application that might be useful in the end to the DC Technology Community. It will allow people to put in information about themselves and their websites, along with what areas they have skills in. This web application will be used to show how an application can be both 508 compliant, accessible, useful, and use web standards all at the same time.

I am looking for your help in putting together a list of skills people might have or need to work in technology. I know some people are designers, developers, printers, marketers, and business development so the list might be a bit broad. In the long run I think it will mostly be used by people looking for designers and developers.

Below is the list I have so far and I know it is not everything. I’m not sure if it should be more of a general list or should be like “Photoshop CS”, “Photoshop CS2″, “Photoshop CS3″, etc.

Here is what I have so far.

UPDATE – I added missing items or corrected capitalization from the people listed next to them. Justin Stockton also suggested that I add Adobe, Microsoft, etc. in front of items that should have them.

  • Accessibility
  • Actionscript
  • Adobe FLASH
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Applescript
  • ASP
  • ATOM
  • C
  • C++
  • C#
  • CGI
  • Cold Fusion
  • COBOL
  • CSS
  • DOM Scripting
  • HTML
  • J2EE
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • JCL
  • JSP
  • Lingo
  • Linux – Justin Stockton
  • LISP – Matt Bowen
  • Microsoft Access
  • MySQL – Justin Stockton
  • .NET
  • ORACLE
  • Pascal – Justin Stockton
  • Perl – Justin Stockton
  • PHP
  • PostgreSQL – Justin Stockton
  • Python
  • Sharepoint – Doug March
  • SOAP
  • SQL
  • REXX
  • RSS
  • Ruby on Rails
  • RUP – Doug March
  • Section 508 – Justin Stockton
  • SCHEME – Matt Bowen
  • SCORM – Doug March
  • UNIX
  • VBScript
  • Web Standards
  • XHTML
  • XML
  • XSLT

I would like it to be a more general list and I figure the application I’m building could be used to either find people locally with a given skill to help with work or if you have a question that you might need further explanation on. I’m figuring the web application will only be available to retrieve information about people from those people that have signed-up and the other person wants to make their information available to others by web page or e-mail only. The application will contain a notes field so you can expand on the level of your knowledge in a given area or subject.

So please use the comments to add skills I have not listed.

Thanks, greatly in advance for your help.

Posted in 508 Compliant, Accessibility, Helpful Tips, Refresh DC, Web Standards | 7 Comments

CLiCk Speak Firefox Extension

Posted on December 10, 2007 by John F Croston III

Last year while at SXSW 2007 in Austin, Texas, I spent some time at the Knowbility trade show booth and talked with a young man by the name of Charles L. Chen about his Firefox extension CLiCk Speak. I have found this extension to be every useful to me in that it allows me to listen to what my web pages sound like to a non-sighted individual. It does not have all the features of that the major screen readers like JAWS and Window-Eyes have, but CLiCk Speak at least let’s you hear the information on your pages.

The following text is an overview of CLiCk Speak from their website.

“CLiCk, Speak is designed for sighted users who want text to speech functionality. It doesn’t identify elements or announce events – two features that are very important for visually impaired users but very annoying for sighted users. It also has a simplified, mouse driven interface that is designed to be easy for users familiar with point-and-click graphical user interfaces. Like Fire Vox, CLiCk, Speak works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux; and Fire Vox has multilingual support, making it great for users who are trying to learn a foreign language and need to hear foreign language web sites read out to them for practice.”

CLiCK Speak buttons in order left to right are 'Speak Selection', 'Auto Speak Mode', and 'Stop Speaking'

The three main features that I have used is the one that just reads down the page from the beginning of your code, so source order does matters, after pressing the “Auto Reading Mode” button. Next it has a “Stop Speaking” button so you can stop it from reading of the page whenever you want to and just push the “Auto Reading Mode” button again to resume from where it left off. The final feature is where you highlight a section of text and click the “Speak Selection” button and  it will only read that part of the page. I could see this as being useful to read a part of the page that you have just updated and wanted to make sure it sounded good. Another advantage to the highlight and read text feature is that if you wanted to go to lets say ESPN.com or CNN.com you could have it read you the article or sport scores, while the browser window is only showing in the toolbar at the bottom of your page. That is if you have headphones on, so no one finds out. It could be used by people that have English as a second language to learn English, since it also highlights each sentence as it reads them.

Charles L. Chen and company have another Firefox extension called Fire Vox. From what I have read this one is more like a normal screen reader.

The following text is a summary from the website.

“Fire Vox is designed to accommodate different users with different needs. For visually impaired users, all Fire Vox commands are keyboard activated. In addition, the keyboard commands can be easily reconfigured in the self Fire Vox Options menu to avoid conflicts with other accessibility software products or to suit personal preferences. For sighted users who need a screen reader, such as web developers interested in testing their webpages or educators who work with visually impaired students, Fire Vox’s highlighting feature makes it easy to keep track of where it is reading from on a page. This highlighting feature is also useful for dyslexic users and partially sighted users.”

While at last weekends DC Adaptive Technology meet up I talked with Patrick Timony about another free screen reader, that is called Thunder, which is free.

I have not tried the Fire Vox Firefox extension or the Thunder screen reader yet, but I plan on trying them out in the next week or so and will report back on what I have found out.

I hope these products are helpful to you in your work and can save you money by not having to get JAWS or other expensive screen readers that cost  hundreds of dollars.

Posted in Accessibility, Adpative Technology, Charles L. Chen, CLiCk Speak, DC Adpative Technology, Firefox, Helpful Tips, JAWS, Window-Eyes | Leave a comment