Thompson-Yezek.com

The situation I spoke of in my last post, Unwelcome Visitors brings to mind the often uncomfortable topic of online pornography. Since this blog focuses on technical issues that modern families face, it's probably best to get to this sooner than later.

Life is a constant work in progress. A website like this is an extension of several very active lives. As you can see the site is in transition from the old wordpress site to a fancy drupal based site. If that last sentence left you scratching your head, suffice to say that Drupal is a WICKED COOL new web technology that I'm up past my eyebrows in at UNI and have decided to play around with on this site as well. After some initial work, it should make site maintenance significantly easier and therefore allow for more frequent updates.

This past weekend we had some family visit, and not surprisingly, playing with all our tech was a favorite activity for all the kids.

I installed the Activity version of TuxPaint, which Sam has played with for several years on my Linux and Mac computers. I had previously installed this via yum, but starting it up on the command line was difficult for Sam, so this is a welcome addition to Mr. Laptop. Sam has become quite proficient with Sugar and has even started using some keyboard shortcuts.

It's been a while since our last post. Yes, this is mostly due to having too much fun with Mr. Laptop and other Christmas presents to have time for the blog. However, Sam's explorations have provided a wealth of things to write about.

With our holiday travel plans on hold, I thought I'd get a video out for a project that Sam and I did last summer.

We read about Vibrobot in Make Magazine volume 10 and thought that we could kick it up a bit. Our version used two AA batteries, included a switch and had a glue stick for the offset weight. This gave ours a bit more power and speed that what is shown in the video in the above link.

I was going to post about some of the problems we've had with Sam's OLPC XO. All of the issues so far have been software related, which is good because that's way easier to fix. I had been thinking that this machine was a bit underpowered, until I got the Watch & Listen video player working and started to realized where some of the performance bottlenecks were. This machine just needs a bit of work, and that's the fun part right?

At any rate, I'm not going to make that post now...