January 2008 Archives

A year ago, I participated in the One Million Masterpiece, a global effort to collect a million oekaki scribbles from one million artists across the globe. While sifting through my email today, I found out that my submission had been peer-selected for inclusion in their 2008 calendar.

Though the 2008 calendar has already been published, you can still submit drawings to this project for a chance to appear in next year's calendar.

My XO laptop arrived yesterday and it's very cute.

However, I'm not sure what I would do with it after I'm finished playing with it. The screen looks really crisp in ebook mode, but I don't have any ebooks. The RSS reader is zippy, but so is Google Reader.

Although the built-in browser is based on Firefox, it doesn't support more than one window (even modal windows like dialog boxes), so Movable Type doesn't work. WordPress appears to work beautifully with the rich text editor turned off. The browse dialog is quite slow to appear and crashes the browser after spawning two of them on the same web page, so I can only upload one file at a time in the browser.

I've been using the mobile version of Flickr to upload photos taken on the XO laptop one at a time.

When I'm at my friend's house, I need to use a special tool to get onto his network because WPA isn't supported out of the box (yet.)

The XO is certainly more portable than my real laptop, but not by much since we're comparing with an ultra portable. However, it's just small enough to fit into my half-sized multi-purpose messenger bag, so it will undoubtedly travel with me far more often than any other computer that I own.

When I'm not doing any computationally intensive work on the computer, I'm usually checking email, catching up on blogs or chatting on IM. I need to install an IM client that will allow me to use AIM, YIM, MSN and GTalk.

I would also like to use the XO as a picture viewer. I've been meaning to get a portable media device so I can show photos that I've taken to other people. I haven't found a slide show program for the XO yet, perhaps I can create one.

My XO laptop arrived yesterday and I am composing this blog entry on it right now. Sadly, I can't use all of the features in my blog management tool. Although the built-in browser is based on Firefox, it doesn't support more than one browser window, so any feature that relies on pop-up or modal windows doesn't work. I guess we can sleep soundly at night knowing that children in third world countries will never experience the aggravation of pop-up ads in their web surfing.