One Laptop for My Inner Child
by John Jerger


I've been following the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project for several years now--I think maybe since the notion was first announced. Like many volunteers, coming to Thailand gave me a new focus on the scheme (what with Thailand being one of the original three countries to agree to buy the laptops), but it removed me from being able to follow the news of the project as regularly.
So when Newsweek ran an article about the laptops in October 2007, my proverbial ears perked up. There was a passing mention of OLPC doing a Give One, Get One program starting in November: basically, you pay for two of the XO laptops, and one goes to the third world while another goes to your home in North America. In just a few days, my mind was made up--this was going to be what I asked my family for as a Christmas present.
Since the 'get one' part of the deal had to go to a North American address, the laptop was sent to my parents' place. After they checked it out for a few days, they sent the XO to Matt Smith's house and he brought it back with him from his Christmas trip. Thanks again, Smitty.

The most striking thing about the computer (aside from its size and weight, which were expected) was that it didn't actually come with any kind of instruction book. The OLPC folks expect that kids will figure out the machine just by sitting down and playing with it. For the most part, I have to agree that it's a fair assumption, since I was able to work out the basics pretty quickly. I still have one of the first pictures that I took with the XO during my bus ride home: a shot of a Thai boy in the seat behind me looking over my shoulder in amazement at the computer.

It soon became clear that I can only give half a review of the XO. One of its many brilliant features is the mesh network capacity, the ability for any set of these computers to interface automatically. But aside from the test computers that were apparently given to kids somewhere in Lampang, I rather suspect I have the only free-floating XO laptop in all of Thailand. There's no one at all nearby for me to mesh my computer with.

I've also had a fair amount of trouble with using the laptop's excellent wireless capabilities to connect to the internet. Not to get too deeply into the technicalities of wireless routers, the typical setting (static addresses) for routers in Thailand is different from the most common setting (dynamic addresses) in America, and I can't figure out how to make the XO deal with the difference. This means I'm unable to connect when I'm at site, but the XO's ability to see more wireless signals than a typical machine generally means I'm better able to get online when I'm traveling (especially in Bangkok).

But this touches a bit on a deeper issue: the XO is not designed to be used as a standard laptop. The operating system, called Sugar, is based on Linux, but is unique to the XO. Files are accessed almost entirely through a 'journal' program which automatically saves your work every time you close any other program. The journal has a search function, but unless the user deliberately makes notes in it, the files are not uniquely distinguishable. All work done in the text editing program, for example, has a default name of "Write Activity," and the user is in no way prompted to change that name to something more searchable. Pictures, similarly, are stored as "Photo by [username]" (e.g. in my case, Photo by 3jnerd).

As it happens, the text editor is about the most regular program on the machine, matched at best in its normalcy by the browser (which is based on firefox) and the calculator. The other standard programs that come with the XO are a chat program (usable only when in a mesh network), a recording program, a paint program, three programs called "TamTam" that are meant for music composition, a program called TurtleArt that is based Logo (a popular program for nerd children, circa the 80s), a couple of things for teaching programing (one for learning Python, one called eToys which seems mostly meant visually to teach the flow of programs), a Memory game, a measurement program (meant to to take a variety of inputs through the microphone jack), an RSS feed, a program for doing more traditional linux commands, a network analyzer, and a program designed to measure the distance between two meshed XOs.
With such a long list, you might not notice what's missing: most notably, there's no spreadsheet program or presentation program. Even the word processing program seems to be only about 65% compatible with Microsoft Word so far. In their overzealous pursuit of something new and different, the OLPC programmers passed on the most obvious bits of what adults use computers for. There's even open source software already in existence that they could have adapted! Even accepting the argument that these laptops are meant as an education project rather than a computer project, I'm left wondering how the freshly educated children are going to cope in five or ten years when they're faced with very different, more standard computers.

And yet, despite my objections to the operating system or the lack of MS Office-like programs, I'm still very optimistic about the future of the XO computers. Since OLPC has focused on open-source software, there's plenty of opportunity for a world community of nerds to tweak things and make the laptops ever more useful. Far more important in my mind is the brilliance of the XO's design.

Pretty much any article about the XO that's been published in the past year has a description of the laptop. The keyboard is reduced in size, both by reducing the size of the keys, but also by cleverly finding extra uses for standard keys (example: a function key plus an arrow key gives you page up, page down, home, and end). When the laptop is completely closed, the only place for dirt to enter the system at all is the power port. The 3 USB ports and the microphone and headphone jacks are covered by the wireless antennae when the antennae are in the closed position (where they also double as the locking mechanism for keeping the XO closed). Cleverly concealed under the XO's monitor is an opening for a SD flash card (the sort of card that you might use for memory in your digital camera). The XO comes with just 1 gigabyte of memory pre-installed, but all the extra storage capacity makes that a non-issue (at least compared to the problem of how you would ever sort through so many files using just the journal).

My personal favorite features of the computer, though, are related to the screen. It can be twisted 180 degrees in either direction before being folded down to be used as an e-book reader. Combining this with Project Gutenberg's library of world literature, I no longer have to load my bag down with extra books when I take long trips. Now if only I could get an appropriate .pdf thai-english dictionary on the computer to study from....

The other great feature about the screen is how it was designed to cope with bright external light (i.e. sunlight). With traditional laptops, your best bet to stop the sunlight from washing out your screen was to turn the brightness up as high as possible and hope that would be enough. With the XO, however, you have a second option: if you turn the brightness all the way down, the screen switches to a black and white mode reminiscent of a digital watch.

I've actually been using this option while typing this article on the bus ride between my house and a physical therapy appointment. At a guess, I've been typing for around a total of two hours, and the battery meter says I still have 48% remaining. Considering that one of my longest-running consistent problems with my old IBM ThinkPad is the poor battery life, I'm a huge fan of being able to sort things out so that the XO can last nearly four hours.

So I like the physical setup of the laptop but dislike the programs. What's the good of that feedback anyway? Like every other person who has written a review about the XO, I'm outside of the target demographic for the computers. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet a Thai child with the English skills to be able to use my North America-oriented computer, but that's hardly a very good excuse considering how icon-oriented many of the programs are.
The truth is, I just like my inner child's new toy too much to hand it over to a ten year old and see what happens.

John Jerger is a CBOD volunteer on the border of Phayao and Chiang Rai. 119s will get the chance to see his XO during Mid-Service Conference, but 120s looking for such an opportunity will have to make special arrangements to meet up with John and buy him a drink.