so I’ve had my XO for… over a week now. haven’t had much time to play with it, though. tonight there was a vanlug meeting specifically about the olpc, so I showed up and learnt quite a bit.

when I first got the olpc, I intentionally avoided looking anything up online. I wanted to play around on my own for a while and see how hard it was to figure things out. some things I got right away, some I still don’t get. just this evening I found out that turning the brightness all the way down puts it into black&white mode. I appear to have a “break my desktop” key (top row, second from the right) that often just does nothing… not sure what that’s about, but it isn’t on hte keyboard shortcuts page. I’ve certainly gotten over the size of the olpc; it seems big and heavy now. I swear the darn thing has *grown* :P

at the meeting there were about six other XOs, and one Eee. my most important discovery was that everyone else there had upgraded their xo: I was running old software, and most of my issues had already been fixed. :) yay. there was one XO running xfce there; the rest were all using the annoying sugar interface. (yes, it is annoying. it’s innovative and interesting, but still damn annoying. I want my right-click back!)

I was concerned about the lack of suspend/hibernate, and no apparent lid switch (when the laptop was closed I could see the screen’s light coming out the cracks) - but those seem to be fixed in the latest software. wireless strength isn’t as good as my lovely asus m5n, but nothing is as good as that laptop when it comes to wireless. I love the screen flipping, but the arrow buttons beside the screen don’t rotate with the screen, so left is down and it hurts my brain… but I expect that’s fixable, so I’ll have to report it.

the keyboard is a little… quirky. if you press keys left to right it works as expected, but right to left you have to release one key before hitting the next (sorta - it’s hard to explain without a demo in tamtamjam) so I keep typing “tset” instead of “test”. I don’t have much of an issue with the size, though - I have small hands. :) I just wish the fn key was on the right, so that I could pgup more easily… oh, but this evening someone showed me that the game buttons are actually pgup, pgdn, home and end - so maybe that won’t be so annoying after all. :) I do wish the touchpad had tapping and scrolling, though. I hope that’s something software can change. as for battery life, it seems to be a couple of hours - certainly better than this old laptop (lasts less than 45 minutes these days).

the only real concern that remained in my mind after the meeting was the durability. this thing has been advertised as being able to survive a fair amount of abuse and weather, but I see little cracks between the pieces of plastic that make up the case, and some of them kinda move a bit if I press on them. I love the rubber keyboard ’cause I won’t get crumbs or dog hair in it, but that rubber seems to have a tiny gap where it meets the rest of the case, so I think that it wouldn’t fare much better than any other laptop if a glass of juice were dropped on it. I certainly wouldn’t want my XO being caught out in the rain, or taken to the beach where sand could get in the cracks. it does at least look like it could survive being dropped on the floor - unlike the eee. :)

as for the Eee, I did get to spend a while looking at it… it was smaller and lighter than the XO. someone had installed xfce on that too (I thought it was gnome when I first saw it) because he didn’t like the xandros kde-based interface (I saw a glimpse of this interface, and it did look kinda lame). the speakers weren’t bad, the general design reminded me of my lovely m5n (I like asus design) and the feel of the keyboard was much better, even if it was doomed to collect crumbs. the guy showing it off told me that the reliability of the eee wasn’t great, though. the spacebar on the keyboard wasn’t quite straight, little things like that… and of course it’s more fragile.

so, in general the eee beat the XO at being shiny, and it has more resources for less weight, but the XO wins in terms of cool hardware. flipping the screen around is still fun, and that handle is useful given how often I walk around with a laptop balanced on my hand (hey, at least I’m not the one balancing it on my chin ;) now I just have to find the time to install kde4 on this thing so that I can actually do useful stuff with it…

loads of things I haven’t blogged about, eh?
for starters, I am a very *very* lucky girl. I replaced the thermal grease on the laptop, put it through some tests, and did not see a single problem. it actually appears to be undamaged! (now watch as a power surge kills it just to prove me wrong)

I’m back in china again, and classes start on monday. didn’t spend any time in shanghai on the way back, and it turns out that was good - me and pete reached the school tuesday night, and in the morning when we went to get breakfast, we found out there was all this registration stuff to be done, and new student cards to get, and so on. we were going to have to write a placement test as well, which would have no actual effect on our placement, but after waiting in line for a while, we were told not to do it. ahh, bureaucracy :P

my hatred for bureaucracy grew on thursday. we had some sheet of paper in chinese telling us that we were supposed to do various things, one of which was going to zijingang campus (a half hour bus ride away) for.. something to do with registration. me and ivan were the only ones actually awake in hte morning, and ivan told me that we were supposed to be there at 8:30 - we left school at about 8:20.
we decided to take a cab to get there faster. ha. the cab driver didn’t know where the campus was - we pointed it out to him on the map, and then he didn’t know how to *get* there. he made some phone calls, drove a bit, stopped to ask random bystanders, did some more driving and stopping to ask people… eventually we got there, later than we would have if we took the bus, and 27 kuai poorer :P (he did reduce the price by 2 kuai to make up for his incompetence, though).
we managed to find the right building - luckily it wasn’t far away, ’cause that campus is huge - but then it turned out that we weren’t supposed to be there until 1:30. it was about 9:20 by this point. :P so we went alll the way back home (by bus this time).
we went out again after lunch, and had to fill out some papers for yet another new piece of ID, and then wait a couple hours to watch a lecture about registration… in fast chinese. neither of us could understand it, so after half an hour we gave up and headed out (and on the way out, found out from a teacher that all the info in the lecture was repeated in one of the books we were given - still in chinese of course, but at least we can use a dictionary with that).
happily, I got back just in time to go out for dinner at the fancy vegetarian restaurant, and that was delicious. man that was a long day. now it’s friday, and I’m just messing around on the computer.

I was expecting to have to adjust to china’s pollution all over again when I got back, but it’s been a lot easier this time. just got a bit of a cough - much milder than the first time I was exposed to this air. the temperature is much nicer too - it was a cloudy wet day when we arrived in shanghai, and the temperature was only 25 or so :) it was almost as if we hadn’t left vancouver. the weather’s back to being sunny now, but it’s still a lot cooler than when I left hangzhou. I can actually have the air conditioning off and not be dripping sweat! :)

I’m feeling a lot better now - far more energy, probably from eating so well in canada, an interest in actually reading some of my many books, and even a little enthusiasm for learning chinese again :) yay vacation! I seem to feel best in the morning, though. maybe because the air is actually at a temperature that could be called ‘cool’ then.

I’ve been a bit behind on news, but it looks like things have been going well in the open source world - OOXML lost the vote (by a margin small enough to concern me, though) and AMD has promised not only opensource drivers, but documentation too! :) I had resigned myself to getting an intel system next, but with this news maybe I can have AMD (I’ve always preferred their processors).

I never did blog about all the fun stuff in canada, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get around to it… anyways, I’ve decided that it’s time I get kde4 up to date, so I’m going to go play with that now. :)

well, I was having far too much fun to think about my blog… until today.
I started off the morning by crashing my bike, hurting myself and damaging the brand new front wheel (although I think it’s minor enough that once the brakes are adjusted it won’t really matter). then when I got home in the afternoon, I dumped half a glass of fruit juice into my laptop (oh, and all over my clothes, of course). the rest of the day (after taking apart and cleaning the laptop as best I could) I got by with nothing more than minor injuries, like pinching my finger in my cellphone, and slamming my leg into the bike pedal a dozen times :P
then in the evening I decided my poor laptop should be dry, so I put it back together, wiped off a few bits of juice I’d missed (the stuff got *everywhere*), and tried to turn it on.

nothing.

it’s dead. :(

I spent months researching this laptop, I put it together myself, I had stickers all over it… and now it’s dead. :(
it was fairly old even when I bought it - I had trouble finding places that still had the parts - but it’s been incredibly reliable, and the most linux-friendly machine I’ve ever had. I don’t want it to be broken. wah. :(

and I’m going back to china on monday, and I *need* a laptop there ’cause it’s my only link to the outside world… and I am not fucking looking forward to trying to find a vaguely linux-friendly laptop in china, and making sure I’m being sold what I expect, and trying not to get too badly ripped off on the price…

I’ll try the laptop again in the morning, I suppose, just in case it wasn’t quite dry enough and I didn’t make things worse trying to turn it on too early.

[edit]
I am a very lucky girl. it *did* turn on again in the morning. I can’t test whether it can function completely, though, ’cause I had to take the heatsink off while I was cleaning it, so now I need to replace the thermal paste before I can leave it on for more than a few seconds. :)
this update would’ve been up earlier, but a power outage got in the way, and then I was on my way to the beach :)
strange that wordpress didn’t save a draft for me - maybe it doesn’t do that for edits?

oh dear. my poor little laptop is getting sicker. :(
some months ago, probably back in winter sometime, I was silly enough to bring it out in a pub, while fairly drunk, and got a spoonful of ice cream on the edge of the keyboard. I cleaned it out the next day, and left it to dry, and it seemed to be okay - apart from the capslock key taking more effort to press, which was actually a good thing.

but a couple of months ago, it started acting up. the capslock would randomly turn itself on every once in a while. this was slowly getting more and more frequent, and about a week ago it got so annoying that I used xmodmap to switch it to a ctrl key (thinking that having ctrl bumped once in a while wouldn’t matter).
yesterday it got to the point where it was sticking ctrl down, not just hitting it for a split second. took me several minutes to figure out what was happening, since I’d already forgotten about remapping the key :) so I removed the mapping entirely. capslock now does nothing at all.

I thought this would solve things… but no.
today, my tab key has started having the same issue :( I can’t just turn off the tab, it’s such a useful key…
I’m considering taking the keyboard apart again and seeing if I can do anything, but it’s really fiddly and not easy to take apart, and I might just make things worse.
I can’t send it away to be fixed - don’t know where to send it, or if an old laptop like this would be accepted anywhere, don’t want to be without my darling laptop for months, don’t really trust other people to not make it worse somehow, and all my receipts are in a box in canada anyways.
so, I guess for now I’m living with a possessed laptop.