BestTechVideos: Tag olpc Videos

Our Stories Project: OLPC, UNICEF, Google, StoryCorps

scoundrel — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 03:18:23 GMT

Google Tech Talks
May 17, 2007

ABSTRACT

"Our Stories" is a joint project of One Laptop Per Child, UNICEF, StoryCorps, and Google to help preserve and share the histories and identities of traditional cultures around the world through storytelling and oral histories captured and shared online. The goal is to capture 5 million stories through the OLPC efforts and to upload those audio files to the Google Our Stories site where they can be shared globally. Children will be asked to interview/ record stories of their parents and grandparents, asking them some of life's greater questions (e.g., what are the most important lessons you have learned? what would you like to be remembered for?). The initial focus will be on 6-10 developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where the OLPC efforts are strongest. In addition, the Our Stories site will bring online the 10,000 stories already captured in the U.S. by StoryCorps, and grow with those efforts toward 250,000 U.S. stories. StoryCorps will help create the interview guides/ instruction packages. UNICEF will play a major role in helping to reach the children and provide on the ground resources in-country, and to extend these efforts through their UNIwiki project. In addition, the site will link to many different oral history and storytelling projects around the world, in an effort to provide a central connection point and enable searchability over this fragmented environment. The stories will, over time, also be geo-tagged on a Google Earth overlay as well.

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LinuxConf.Au: Making Sausage: How the OLPC Machine Was Designed

scoundrel — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:45:01 GMT

Software and hardware are very different. Software is malleable and has no cost to reproduce; hardware is a very different experience.

Hardware systems design is like sausage making:

You can only make as much sausage as you can get all the ingredients for
Some parts of the recipe can be substituted, but not others
There are only a finite number of ingredients you can use in a recipe
If you know the right ingredient suppliers, you may be able to get custom ingredients made for you, so long as you are making a *lot* of sausage
Some of the major ingredients take years to grow, rather than a season. You can at best let the farmers (custom chip designers) know what kinds of ingredients you'd like the next time, and have to live with those commodity ingredients that are available in the quantity you need
It isn't a pretty process.
You don't know exactly how it is going to taste until you've cooked it.

I will explore the sausage making that is the first One Laptop Per Child System, a novel, very low cost and low power laptop for kids education in the developing world, that runs Linux. The reailities of life for many or most of the world's children present novel challenges to our hardware and software design, particularly due to lack of power, infrastructure, and available expertise in the field.

Its recipe, while made out of standard or at most semi-custom ingredients, makes it a novel system including: Our display has higher resolution than 95% of the laptop displays on the market today; approximately 1/7th the power consumption; 1/3rd the price; sunlight readability; and room-light readability with the backlight off, mesh networking, a novel dual mode touchpad that can function both as a standard touchpad and be used with a stylus, and novel power conservation capabilities. These include the ability to leave the screen and wireless mesh network fully on while the machine is suspended to RAM.

As you might imagine, these novel capabilities present novel challenges to Linux, which is the only system which could quickly fulfill our needs. It also presents challenges to our software: the power conservation techniques needed are very new and conventional GUI's are intended for adult office workers: our audience are young children learning to read or getting a basic education, since most children only receive 5-6 years of education in many parts of the world. I'll touch on some of these aspects as well.

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LinuxConf.Au: Electronics with Linux

scoundrel — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 10:42:37 GMT

Main content:

list some of the open source tools for electronics development,
describe the author's electronics design software environment, (what packages has he got installed),
discuss the various means to fabricate printed circuit boards,
show a few recent small-scale personal projects, such as the motion detecting night light or the doorbell pulse extender and event logger
Relating to the OpenWRT project
display and discuss car boot based wireless automatic offsite backup system, using OpenWRT, rsync, ssh, and a laptop hard drive,
display Netrek server operating on an embedded router using OpenWRT,
briefly describe the packaging constraints.

Relating to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project:

display and discuss two of the OLPC A-Test laptop boards,
display and discuss three of the OLPC B-Test-1 laptops,
discuss results of rural low noise testing.

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LinuxConf.Au: Sugar Tutorial

scoundrel — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 13:04:24 GMT

Sugar is the GUI framework being built for the One Laptop Per Child project. It is implemented in Python, and provides applications ("activities") with facilities for presence, to enable multi-user collaborative applications.

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