This is the final reminder for the party at my place tomorrow (Saturday, July 12) at 7 pm. If you would like to come, please respond and I'll email you my address ( Read more... )

It may be hard to believe that my XO experience could become even worse, and yet it did. I must admit that as much as I curse it, I still use it. I don't have much choise: my de-trackpad'ed Fujitsu laptop is no longer mobile, because using an external mouse means having to find a flat surface to move it around on, and that's often infeasible when I ( Read more... )

... for the last few weeks, I got a chance to try XO out the way $deities intended it to be used: networked with other XOs at an Austin Linux Users Group meeting last Thursday. These capabilities are supposed to make it the coolest laptop known to humankind.

In theory, at least.

Beside me, 2 people brought their XO laptops to the meeting: Mr. The ( Read more... )

Update on backups. It really is possible to back up an "activity" by dragging and dropping it from the Journal to a USB drive icon at the bottom of the Journal. I did this to an activity named test1.txt, and a file by that name actually appeared on the USB drive. But, as I expected, it appeared in the top-level folder. I could not have placed it in ( Read more... )

No, dear reader, I'm not done complaining. I saved the best for last.

XO has some even more fundamental problems... sorry, weirdnesses. Sorry, design features.

If you are computer-literate person, wouldn't you feel a bit embarrassed to ask where your files are? XO makes you stoop to new lows of embarrassment. ( Even if you are a Linux geek, you won't be able to find your files )

I shall not stop until I've vented all I have to vent about XO. Hey, for those $400 if I did not buy a functional computing device, I at least bought a right to complain, no ( Read more... )

XO is so slow that if you open 5 applications (sorry, "activities") it slows down significantly. If you open 6 of them, it slows down to a complete grind. And I'm talking about such low-intensity activities as text editing and web browsing! I haven't even tried video or sound recording or editing yet ( Read more... )

It's not the chiclet-sized rubbery keys (though I suppose I wouldn't try to type a dissertation on this keyboard). No, there are several other reasons why I think the OLPC / XO laptop is crippled ( Read more... )

My broken laptop is at the Fry's repair shop, where they will keep it for a week just to run some diagnostics on it! The diagnostics will cost me over 100 bucks. And that's not counting the cost of repairs. There's no telling how much that will be. The technician at Fry's said "it may not be economical" for me to get this laptop fixed versus buying ( Read more... )

This Christmastime the universe brought me an assortment of small nuggets of anthracite in the form of annoying and disappointing events. None of them is big enough to justify a whine (so consider this an unjustified whine); they are rather like small, delicate chocolates in the box -- as you bite into each one, you wonder which shade of bitter ( Read more... )