Sam has big plans for the future. They all seem to involve robots. I'm cool with that.

While Daleks are not *technically* robots, as they do have a small organic component, that doesn't keep Sam from considering them to be one of the coolest forms of (evil) robots around.

It's been quite a week....

Last Friday, Cedar Falls experienced one of the worst storms I've ever seen. We've lost thousands of trees, numerous homes and businesses have been damaged and there has been one gigantic mess to clean up.

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...