Presentation in Slovenia (Kiblix)

We moved from Graz down south to Slovenia. Presenting OLPC + Sascha Meinrath at the Kiblix festival. Kiblix is a linux open source festival in Maribor. The topics there are creative commons, free networks and general for fun hacking topics.

I was just asked by Peter if our presentation can be uploaded to his videolectures.net site. I did not know that this site is pretty large! ~ 2000 video lectures in the field of IT. Looks like a very interesting site.

weekly status report OLPC.at

We (olpc austria) decided to copy Walter Bender and send out a weekly status summary.
This goes out to the other grassroot groups in the hope that it will foster further intra-country communication.

NEWS

1. Elevate.at
2. Activity Handbook
3. T-Shirts
4. XoTV

1. Elevate.at

We will be presenting the OLPC concept and our (development)XOs at the elevate.at festival in Graz, Austria. In case you live nearby, please come and visit us. We will be happy to have a chat with you and you can test the XOs yourself.

2. Activity Handbook

Christoph Derndorfer, Daniel Jahre and maybe(?) Helga Schmid (Helga?) will be working on the Activity/Sugar Handbook. In case you have any comments or anything that needs to be mentioned, please contact them

3. T-shirts

In case you want a T-shirt, please contact Simon Dorner

4. XoTV

Jaume and me have been hacking on XoTV. The idea of XoTV is to be able to stream video to a central streaming server which in turn can stream back to a large number of clients. Imagine mini TV station in your hands.
This is not quite the same as Youtube because the streams do not necessarily have to be stored.
the backend behind XoTV works (Giss.tv) and was tested, we are currently still working on the frontend and UI side.

thinking about open hardware...

freifunk has a nice discussion on how to create simple open hardware for mesh routing.

background material for presenting the XO at the TU

Well, here is the full "did you know" video:



I do not agree with many of the said things but I do agree that we did have a tremendous exponential growth in the last x*100 years. I do not know when this will stop or if it will continue for a long time.
So takling this information explosion is one of the main challenges. How to do it?
Well, one thing is the brilliant capability of the human mind to work with abstractions. I consider mathematicians and physicists to be quite good at that. But creativity seems to be equally important.
Talking about creativity! I was very astonished by Sir Ken Robinson's presentation at TED: wow!



And when we listen to Richard Feynmann talk about his own upbringing and education, we can actually grasp how the curiosity of children is working and how it is also kept alive! I highly recommend this video.



And finally when we listen to Hans Rosling who spent years in Africa we find out that actually the world is not just "poor developing countries" versus the "rich west" but that there is a new huge middle class worldwide. If this middle class now gets access to very good education, then a lot can and will change.

Big demo/ presentation at the TU Vienna

So, tomorrow me and Christoph Derndorfer have a big demo of the XOs at the Technical University of Vienna.
We hope to first of all explain OLPC to a wide audience of students, assistants and professors (pfew! the mail went out to all of them!) and second of all, we would like to motivate people to contribute.

I feel quite stressed about it :)

We have been preparing our demo for 2 days. Let's keep our fingers crossed.