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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
__TOC__
</div>


To contribute a story or news idea, see the '''[[OLPC:Newsroom|OLPC newsroom]]'''.
=Laptop News 2008-02-24=


For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our [[twitter]] feed and [http://blog.laptop.org OLPC blog].
1. Solar power: Richard Smith’s reaching out to the community has had very good results. OLPC now has several options available to them for solar test sites. It turns out that Rob Savoye (“Mr. Gnash”) is a big supporter of alternative energy and already runs his house “off grid” using a mix of solar and wind power. Rob is interested in working with OLPC and is already providing valuable “from the trenches” info.


This page historically hosted announcements and news about OLPC, along with the Sugar Labs [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events '''current events'''] page.
2. School Server: We are still unable to generate new school server builds. (Dennis Gilmore has been looking into this.) John Watlington spent the last week looking at the operation of the laptop without a school server.
Tomeu Vizoso has contributed a patch to Abiword that will fix Write crashing shortly after entering in a collaboration session.


== Upcoming pieces ==
3. Activities: Dan Bricklin has blogged about the latest milestone reached in the SocialCalc (spreadsheet) activity; 109 functions—the “small group”—have now been implemented in the activity (For details, please see http://danbricklin.com/log/2007_12_05.htm#milestone).
; Claudia
: Learning Chat piece: 278 words, ready now. [[File:Learning Chat.docx]]
: Making Learning Visible: Claudia's (& Walter) original is 25 pages. Submitted to a journal. w/o OLPC Background it is down to 12-15 pages w/ screenshots.
: This can become a 4-part series.
; Antonio: Homo docens: 500+ words, Antonio approved my edits. [[File:Homo docens JLedits.docx]]
: Further work: we can definitely ask him to contribute on a quarterly basis but I've found that I have to be very specific as to what I am asking to do and he has to be comfortable that it is consistent with his academic work.
: Ask for a new piece on the epidemiology of learning
; Rodrigo:
: [[Ometepe]] - A beautiful piece with wonderful images. RAH posted a personal and lengthy version (1500+ words) that he shared with his private distribution list. I made an edited version (1200 words) that could be shared publicly. Must check with RAH on this. [[File:Ometepe articulo por Rodrigo Arboleda.pdf]] [[File:Ometepe by Rodrigo Arboleda (3).pdf]]
: I had hoped that we could do a video series with Rodrigo but the budget hasn't been approved. Giulia - can we get an answer on this?
; Rwanda:
: Rwanda case studies
: Ceri Whatley - summary of importance of headmasters - confirm subset to reuse
: Social mapping project - 1- or 2-part piece - check w/ Julia
: Grandmother project - 2- or 3-part piece - check w/ Julia (and is there more to that awesome series?)
; Other Africa
: So. Africa case studies
; Peru and Uruguay:
: ''Oscar B's piece on the IADB study?''
: You said that Uruguay and Peru produce a ton of content on a continuous basis. I'm struggling a bit with how we can easily get the content and translate it into English. Giulia - could Olga help? I don't want to burden her with more work. Maybe we do this every 2-3 months.
; Other LatAm:
: Colombia: Sandra's quarterly? newsletter and website could feed into this. Plus english translations.
: Nicaragua: Regular update, beyond Ometepe?
: Paraguay: Contact [[ParaguayEduca]]
: Mexico: Ask Mariana @ OLPCMexico
; OLPC Australia: Great text and videos.
; OLPC Europe: Quarterly update from them?
; OLPC Oceania: Quarterly updates from Mike Hutak
; OLPC Jamaica: Quarterly update from Sameer, good videos.
; North America
: Miami - David! and a story from Chester
: Canada - Jennifer Martino, Q


== News archives ==
Luke Closs has been able to change the gecko security settings to allow a local HTML file access to XPCOM. Subject to Rainbow review, this means we can now communicate messages between Python and JavaScript. Todd Whiteman from ActiveState, who works on the “Komodo” application has suggested the use nslObserver interface as the method of passing messages back and forth between Python and JavaScript.


'''[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ Weekly OLPC News postings]''' to the community-news mailing list give updates on recent work. Weekly summaries were also posted on-wiki during [[OLPC:News/2008|2008]]. Weekly postings to the list were put on hold at the start of 2009, and started again in 2010.
A simple Moon phase viewer that includes lunar-eclipse information has been written for the XO laptop. (See [[Moon]]).


Archives: [[OLPC:News/Archive 1|2005-2006]]
Simon Schampijer updated the Browse activity documentation (Please see [[Browse]]). He also updated the Browse test plan (See [[Tests/Browse]]).
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 2|2007]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 3|2008]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 4|2009-10]]


=== Translations ===
Chris Ball worked with Richard Boulanger ahead of his release of Csound samples—Pippy is now able to list and play CSound *.csd compositions.
Sporadic translations of news archives from 2008 and earlier can be found here:
: [[OLPC:News/lang-de|German]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-es|Spanish]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-ja|Japanese]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-ko|Korean]]


== [[OLPC:Videos|OLPC videos]] ==
Guillaume Desmottes debugged and provided a patch for a problem with Read sharing with Salut (Ticket #6483).
For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see [http://olpc.tv olpc.tv] and [[OLPC:Videos]].


== Sugar news ==
Simon added a 'Set multicast rate' option to the Sugar control panel (Ticket #6461).
Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development '''[http://walterbender.org/?cat=3 on his blog]'''.


== Press ==
Arjun Sarwal continues to work on the Measure activity. He has explored various built-in peripheral devices/sensors of the XO, including:
For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the [[OLPC:Press/2005-2008|2005-2008 press archives]].
* a camera mode within Measure calculates the average values over all pixels of each frame and displays it in real time (See [[:Image:Camera_in_measure_1.jpg]]);
* extracting the wireless signal strength and wireless noise power from iwconfig;
* getting the values from the built-in temperature sensors.


== Past announcements ==
Arjun continues to work on an improved UI for Measure and he has corrected a bug in Turtle Art with Sensors that was giving the sensor values of the previous rather than current sensor block when queried. Arjun discussed details with Barry Vercoe and also Richard Boulanger about sensor support in CSound. It emerges that getting sensor data would result in the form of a modified “in” opcode sampling at control rate and he discussed in detail with Dale Joachim about the various options for undertaking environmental studies using the XO and sensors in the proposed pilot/deployment in Haiti.
Developed through 2011 by the Racepoint Group, OLPC's ''pro bono'' PR firm.


* 2008-08-06 : [[Media:OLPC-Asia.doc|One Laptop per Child expands its presence in Asia]] with project leads in India and China
4. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Turkish, Romanian and Creyole (kreyòl). Also, the Scratch developers exploring the use of Pootle for translations. (Scratch is developed externally and does not use any public version control system.) If this works out properly, we can use it as a model for supporting other non dev.laptop.org git hosted projects relevant to the OLPC.
* 2008-05-20 : [[Media:XO-2-preview.doc|One Laptop per Child frames the next generation of the revolutionary XO laptop]], with a lighter dual-touchscreen design.
* 2008-05-15 : [[Media:XP-on-XO.doc|Microsoft Windows XP is now available on the XO laptop]]
* 2008-05-03 : [[Media:Kane-appointment.doc|One Laptop per Child appoints Charles Kane as President and Chief Operating Officer]]
* 2008-01-07 : [[Media:G1G1-results.doc|One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million]] in 2007
* 2007-12-12 : [http://www.smartbrief.com/news/aaaa/industryPR-detail.jsp?id=2FDAB6BE-AE3B-482F-A7B0-6570C75397E4 ''The Kite Runner'' Inspires Gift Through One Laptop]
* 2007-12-05 : [[Media:Peru-OLPC.doc|Peru launches OLPC with 40,000 laptops]], starting with one-classroom schools across the country.
* 2007-12-04 : [[Media:Birmingham-OLPC.doc|Birmingham, Alabama commits to One Laptop per Child]], with a pilot of 15,000 laptops across the city.
* 2007-11-24 : [http://www.50x15.com/en-us/sol_results_xo.aspx The Holiday Season Starts with Giving One Laptop]
* 2007-10-29 : [[Media:Uruguay-launch.doc|OLPC wins a bid to provide 100,000 laptops to children in Uruguay]], to be overseen by the Uruguayan CEIBAL project
* 2007-10-22 : [http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20071022005302/en One Laptop per Child creates the world's "greenest" laptop computer]
* 2007-06-11 : [[Media:Mass-production.doc|Mass Production of XO's begins!]] at Quanta's Chinese facilities.
* 2007-01-03 : [http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20070103005194/en OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer]


Edgar Ceballos has translated the “Getting Started” pages in to Spanish (See http://laptop.org/es/gettingstarted and [[PO-laptop.org-gettingstarted-es]]).


[[Usman mansour]] reports that an XO laptop user manual in the Pashto and Dari language has been completed.


5. Testing: Chris Ball has prepared a test plan for next week's mesh scaling work (See [[Mesh_Testing]]). Chris wrote a tool that automates key-presses for the Write activity, so that we can perform automated tests that keep track of how many keypresses fail to get through to as we add more laptops to a collaboration.

6. Bundles: Michael Stone wrote a first draft of software for “bundle-distribution” over USB keys. These keys, when used to boot an XO, will unpack a collection of activity and content bundles (contained in $USB/bundles) into appropriate locations on the NAND. The rapid completion of this prototype built on and would not have been possible without access to the excellent previous work of Scott (olpcrd) and the Debian-Installer team. Michael documented the first part of the process used for writing similar software (See [[Building_initramfsen]]).

7. Presence service: Morgan Collett started looking at handling chat with normal Jabber clients better and started looking into ways to promote community Jabber servers. (Morgan had found several references on the wiki to people who tried to set up a Jabber server with the required patches and modules, and just
couldn't get it to work and gave up.)

8. Production: The final batch of laptops for the G1G1 program are finishing up in production and making their way to Chicago. They will start shipping out to consumers as early as Monday. We expect to ship them all before the end of March.

9. Support: With the help of a couple of volunteers, Kim Quirk and Adam Holt opened all the returns currently at the Brightstar warehouse to sort the boxes into three categories: no problem found, will not boot, or other problem (keyboard, battery, screen, or touchpad). One goal of the evaluation of the returns is to create volunteer repair centers from the parts of broken laptops.

A strong grassroots community is coming together in Peru in support of the project there: over 50 people came to the first gathering, and about half that number have written into voluntario@laptop.org asking to help out.

10. ICDL: Tim Browne and Ben Bederson of the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) have optimized their outstanding online Mongolian children's book collection (www.read.ma) for the XO laptop. ICDL and OLPC were featured at a World Bank event in Ulaanbaatar last week following the launch of the XO laptop in two schools in Mongolia. Tim and Ben also announced that the ICDL’s improved readability updates for the OLPC have been implemented. The exemplary books from their collection, now totally more than 2,600 children's books from around the world, are dramatically easier to read on XO. Next up for ICDL and OLPC: translations and “pop-out” text.

11. OLPC health: Dr Lia Meisinger has joined the health efforts and she would be curating content on Maternal Health, Childbirth and related issues (See [[Health_meetings]]). XO laptops are being used at a rural medical clinic in San Blas, Mexico (See http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdorfman/2262339766/).

12. Science and Maths: Arjun helped Jayawant Patki from “Aptara – The Content Transformation Company” from India to get their content running on the XO. They have extensive Science and Maths content for primary school children that would be accessible using the Browse Activity.

13. In the community: Sebastian Silva has a team of people working actively together on his new Spanish-language community site (http://meta.fuentelibre.org/trac). OLPC Austria is sending a delegation to CeBIT. Many people, including Mel Chua and Ian Bicking, will be at PyCon to help man an OLPC booth.

14. Library and creation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein are finalizing a specification for internationalizing content bundles to share for discussion early next week. The library core will be fully localized next week using this structure, as an example.

A number of Spanish literary materials, written and spoken, were identified over the weekend as part of an open texts push, including the Spanish versions of the primary science guides and resources developed in France by LAMAP. One of the LAMAP directors is currently in Lima and plans to meet with the ministry of education next week. Bundled collections are being developed from these, and the first should be available next week.

Lauren Klein has been working with Pablo Flores on a publishing channel for stories from his schools. She is also writing about ways to use Omeka and Moodle for teachers to share their works and maintain collections.

Wade Brainerd reports a “sugarized” 3D Pong is almost ready. The Jordan brothers, at the Game Developers Conference this week (on the passes they won at last summer's Olin Game Jam), are working on the next version of SprayPlay.

15. OLPC Memo series: Marvin Minsky has begun a memo series on learning. Read his essay: What makes mathematics hard to learn? (See [[Marvin Minsky]]).

=More News=
Laptop News is archived [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ here].

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

==[[Milestones]]==
Latest milestones:
{{:Milestones}} <!-- Translators, you can either include the english version or the translated version -- it does NOT work with redirects -->
All milestones can be found [[Milestones|here]].


{{anchor|PRESS}}

==[[PRESS|Press]]==
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
{{:Press}}
More articles can be found [[Press|here]].

==[[Video of the OLPC | Video]]==
Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found [[Video of the OLPC|here]].

* A Frappr Map of G1G1 recipients can be found at [http://www.frappr.com/?a=constellation_map&mapid=137440255169&src=flash_map&sig=visitor_map&src_mvid=137440332484&origin=unknown&ct=seemore]
* A collection of several videos can found at [http://www.olpc.tv OLPC.TV]
* IBM Podcast, Walter Bender on One Laptop per Child [http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int042407.html]
* Ivan Krstić delivers a [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4285568518538296189 technical presentation of OLPC] at the Google TechTalk series
*60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/20/60minutes/main2830058.shtml]
*CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [http://money.cnn.com/services/video/]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/07/25/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-04/ Episode Four]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/06/08/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-03/ Episode Three]
*Red Hat Magazine: Ins/ide One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/04/25/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-02/ Episode Two]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/03/23/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-one/ Episode One]
*Portuguese lecture "Perspectivas do uso de laptops pelas crianças (e nas escolas)". Video in [http://www.cameraweb.unicamp.br/acervo/acervo.html Cameraweb Unicamp]
* OLPC [http://www.sf.tv/var/videoplayer.php?videourl=http%3A%2F%2Freal.xobix.ch%2Framgen%2Fsfdrs%2F10vor10%2F2007%2F10vor10_26012007.rm%3Fstart%3D0%3A05%3A20.498%26amp%3Bend%3D0%3A09%3A50.738 Video from Switzerland], 26.01.2007
*Interview with Nicholas Negroponte [http://www.acm.org/pubs/cie/jan2006/clips/nicholas_negroponte.mov on the &100 Laptop]
*Presentation by Jim Gettys at [http://www.techpresentations.com/2007/03/07/one-laptop-per-child/ FOSDEM 2007]
*GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ [http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html Students test the laptop]
*Mark Foster delivers presentation to [http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx Stanford University]
* Technology Review [http://www.technologyreview.com/video/laptop Mini-Documentary]
* A Brief [http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html Demo]

==[[Testimonials]] about my XO laptop==
[[Category:OLPC]]
[[Category:OLPC]]

Latest revision as of 23:06, 5 August 2013

The contents of this page are considered outdated and some of the information may be stale. Please use information here with caution, or update it.
  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

To contribute a story or news idea, see the OLPC newsroom.

For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our twitter feed and OLPC blog.

This page historically hosted announcements and news about OLPC, along with the Sugar Labs current events page.

Upcoming pieces

Claudia
Learning Chat piece: 278 words, ready now. File:Learning Chat.docx
Making Learning Visible: Claudia's (& Walter) original is 25 pages. Submitted to a journal. w/o OLPC Background it is down to 12-15 pages w/ screenshots.
This can become a 4-part series.
Antonio
Homo docens: 500+ words, Antonio approved my edits. File:Homo docens JLedits.docx
Further work: we can definitely ask him to contribute on a quarterly basis but I've found that I have to be very specific as to what I am asking to do and he has to be comfortable that it is consistent with his academic work.
Ask for a new piece on the epidemiology of learning
Rodrigo
Ometepe - A beautiful piece with wonderful images. RAH posted a personal and lengthy version (1500+ words) that he shared with his private distribution list. I made an edited version (1200 words) that could be shared publicly. Must check with RAH on this. File:Ometepe articulo por Rodrigo Arboleda.pdf File:Ometepe by Rodrigo Arboleda (3).pdf
I had hoped that we could do a video series with Rodrigo but the budget hasn't been approved. Giulia - can we get an answer on this?
Rwanda
Rwanda case studies
Ceri Whatley - summary of importance of headmasters - confirm subset to reuse
Social mapping project - 1- or 2-part piece - check w/ Julia
Grandmother project - 2- or 3-part piece - check w/ Julia (and is there more to that awesome series?)
Other Africa
So. Africa case studies
Peru and Uruguay
Oscar B's piece on the IADB study?
You said that Uruguay and Peru produce a ton of content on a continuous basis. I'm struggling a bit with how we can easily get the content and translate it into English. Giulia - could Olga help? I don't want to burden her with more work. Maybe we do this every 2-3 months.
Other LatAm
Colombia: Sandra's quarterly? newsletter and website could feed into this. Plus english translations.
Nicaragua: Regular update, beyond Ometepe?
Paraguay: Contact ParaguayEduca
Mexico: Ask Mariana @ OLPCMexico
OLPC Australia
Great text and videos.
OLPC Europe
Quarterly update from them?
OLPC Oceania
Quarterly updates from Mike Hutak
OLPC Jamaica
Quarterly update from Sameer, good videos.
North America
Miami - David! and a story from Chester
Canada - Jennifer Martino, Q

News archives

Weekly OLPC News postings to the community-news mailing list give updates on recent work. Weekly summaries were also posted on-wiki during 2008. Weekly postings to the list were put on hold at the start of 2009, and started again in 2010.

Archives: 2005-2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009-10

Translations

Sporadic translations of news archives from 2008 and earlier can be found here:

German | Spanish | Japanese | Korean

OLPC videos

For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see olpc.tv and OLPC:Videos.

Sugar news

Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development on his blog.

Press

For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the 2005-2008 press archives.

Past announcements

Developed through 2011 by the Racepoint Group, OLPC's pro bono PR firm.