I havn't posted a new blog for quite a while - I was too busy with making progress in the real world. Some of this progress related to technology issues for Heritage Village: low cost, user-friendly computing and Internet access. Before Christmas I told you about the One-Laptop-Per-Child program which made world-wide news, including two articles in the Economist magazine. My XO laptop arrived in January, and I spent the next two months testing it out via a Meraki wifi mesh over our local community with the help of neighbours.
Technology can be a great enabler for people restricted by age related problems. My neighbour Richard (in photo), on the other side of our cul de sac has no Internet access and is wheel-chair restricted because of a stroke some years ago. But he still has a keen mind, and with a background in military radio, a keen interest to explore new wifi "radio" technology. Our goal was to determine if the rugged little XO laptop, costing under $200 and designed for children in third-world countries, could also be an enabling technology for Seniors.
The XO comes out of the same MIT labs as Meraki wifi mesh technology, and has a built-in router and rabbit ear antennae that can create a wifi mesh with other units, or join any "hot spot". The XO laptop easily connected to our own wifi mesh, which was fed by one DSL link and 4 mesh repeaters. Normal home wifi routers would not have been able to span the distance. Our prototype public wifi generates a "splash page" (above) which showed up on the XO with a strong signal even inside Richard's home. Most "municipal wifi" systems can't do that!
The small size of the keyboard and screen was not an issue - but the unique user interface "Sugar" and the other open-source software was. We discovered, like the reviewer for the Economist, that this laptop was not ready for prime time. The concept of a very rugged small laptop for e-mailing and web browsing - with the ability to "mesh" via wifi, and convertible into a tablet was great. But without an operating manual, with bug infested beta-stage software and with non-functioning keys , the XO laptop was an exercise in frustration for even a seasoned computer user: certainly not yet suitable to help children or seniors new to technology.
I re-flashed the operating system twice with upgrades, downloaded from the OLPC website, but by end of April, I decided to abandon the project for now. The open-source community is still working on bug fixes, and perhaps the other 300,000 XO laptops distributed to date, are getting better usage by now. We'll monitor the XO technology development, but we're also looking at other low-cost computing solutions.
