Out of the way

Getting the XO was sweet, after waiting many many months for delivery. And it's nice. The first thing I did, naturally enough, was install Opera. Starting from the OLPC Wiki page on Opera it turned out to be pretty simple. Since our network at home is hidden, it was harder to write the script that gets me online than it was to install the browser. And when 9.5 came out as a final release a little while ago, I just downloaded the RPM, and updated like any linux user (Actually, this is still a slightly odd process. Not difficult, but you have to want to do it because software on this machine needs to be installed by a command-line process. And downloading things with the native browser is ok, but I have no idea where they go, so I use Opera to download things I want to actually find).

I haven't really customised much yet. I pushed the dpi to 150 (between the default 96 and the device's 200) and put some buttons where I like them, and turned on single-key shortuts (for me a crucial feature of Opera). I would like to make a keyboard customisation for browsing in tablet mode, and maybe for reading email like that too. But I have been busy, and beyond testing what works here I haven't done a lot. This is my first blog post from the machine.

That might change this week. Once again my Apple laptop hasn't lived up to my demands, and after two years the screen is dying, and I think the hard drive is starting to fade away. (It seems to have a reasonable auto-management system, but the best system in the world in useless when there is no longer a working drive to manage).

The screen problem is getting serious, and holding me back from working. So when I leave tomorrow for the US I will be taking my XO, and probably buying myself the most portable USB keyboard I can find (the kid-friendliness of the XO means that I think that will be an important investment, although maybe I will get used to this little keyboard faster than I think).

There are a few advantages to this that I can see. One is security - since the machine has so little storage that my email won't fit, I have to carry all my data in an external stick. That's actually pretty easy to set up, and will make my life a lot more portable. The second is that this machine weighs a fraction of what my macbook does, butseems physically far more robust. The third is heat - unlike the Mac I cannot actually cook on this device. And energy consumption is another. One of the things I love about the apple is that I get great battery life. But it still burns massive amounts of energy, epecially compared to the miserly XO in high-contrast mode. Oh, and I will be able to work outside with the XO.

It would also force me to think even harder about document formats. I already use X/HTML, CSS and SVG for presentations, and many documents I write (the alternative choice for me is plain text composed as email so Opera automatically saves it forme when the battery gives out and this machine just dies). But reducing the power of my work machine means being stricter about that - and therefore being more able to pass my work to my phone - or someone else's. This strikes me as a good thing, although the odd open-office spraeadsheet I get from our accounting department will need some thinking to deal with... About time, probably.