Author: Elaine

De trimming

We took the tree down this afternoon.  This was scheduled for last weekend before I found an OLPC XO  on my door step. 

I take off the ornaments and box them.  I am very fussy about it, because I have some highly breakable ornaments and I want to make sure that I wrap them securely.  I do the fragile ones first, so if I get tired by the end of the process it won’t matter if I am just tempted to throw the sturdy ones into the box.  We have ten document boxes full of decorations. I like the document box because they stack easily and are reasonably sturdy.  The most fragile ornaments are in boxes within the boxes. 

As an experiment, we put the tree in the sitting room this year because I knew we would be having a big sit down dinner on Christmas Eve.  However, we decided that we will probably not use the sitting room again.  Usually, when we put the tree in the dining room (originally the living room of our house until we repurposed it) we can see the tree from several rooms.  In the sitting room, we could only see it when we were going in and out of the mud room, and I missed being able to see it as we moved around the house. (Our sitting room is like the traditional parlor in that we don’t use it unless we have company.)  

Opera on the OLPC

This morning I installed the web browser Opera on my OLPC. It’s like they took the training wheels off. For one thing, they render pages at a higher resolution, which means sites looks more like what I see on my desktop. I do have to wear my reading glasses, but I still prefer seeing web-sites in what I consider their ‘normal’ resolution.
This is a test of posting from the OLPC.

T-Mobile

As part of the T-Mobile USA Partners with One Laptop per Child, each laptop came with a year’s subscription to T-Mobile. Jack wasn’t even aware of this until I pointed it out.  This morning, I activated my account. The first floor of the building I work in has a Starbucks, and the signal of the hotspot is as strong as the signal for our own router, so I took the little green machine in for testing.  It passed the test with flying colors, and the only reason I am posting this at home instead of at work is I worked through my lunch half hour.
I imagine I will use the OLPC mainly as a mobile web browser and e-book reader, so it is nice to have a year’s worth of T-Mobile.

Traffic Cams in Colorado Springs

I’ve known about the traffic cams in Colorado Springs for years, but only recently learned about the mashup which shows where the traffic cams are on a map: SpringsCam. Today, when I check the traffic cams at 3 pm the roads home were all drive, but they were snow covered and slick by the time I got on the road at 4 pm.  Fortunately, everyone was inclined to drive sedately, and I got in double the time it usually takes.

Surprise!

January 05, 2008 – Click on image for higher resolution version.

The hay wranglers stopped by for the hay forks they left last time they delivered hay, and I noticed a box on the porch.  I didn’t think much of it, and brought it in while I told the wrangler where to find their hooks.  When I got back into the house, Jack was opening the box and saying “It’s a present for you.  I thought at first it was probably a new lens for my camera, but when I saw the edge of green I started squealing.   I’ve been  following the saga of the One Laptop Per Child for a while, so I recognized what it was as soon as Jack started lifting it out of the box. As I write this, Jack is hitting buttons to see what happens.

DRM Removal from Itune files

I received an Itunes gift card for Christmas and was wondering how I would get the songs that I purchased into Ogg Vorbis for my Linux desktop system. From DRM Removal, I learned that I could burn the songs to an audio CD, and then rip them to whatever format that I wanted.
Since there is such a straightforward workaround to the DRM involved, what is the point of having it at all?  And where did those violent terms for putting audio onto a CD and taking it back off come from?

Warmth

Yesterday, it was 9F when I woke up. Today, it is 44F. And the Chinook, which tends to blow when the temperatures rise, isn’t even that strong this morning. It will be so nice to go out and feed the horses this morning.