‘Adultizing’ the XO and other fun with ergonomics
How to make the OLPC machine fit for an adult? Oh, god, the sacrilege here. Didn’t the Almighty Negroponte and friends want the machine to have small keys, the better to keep covetous adults at bay and make kids feel at home?
Well, actually, Nick, without being W.C. Fields, the American comedian famous for his anti-kid lines, I’ve been busy adultizing the XO—adulterating it, I suppose the faithful would say. The XO is foremost a child’s machine. But in the future I can see such variants as library laptops or machines for the elderly. Even now, there’s library potential galore. Meanwhile I prefer a full-sized keyboard for use at home. My new XO, shown here, has three USB ports, and I’m already using one for a mouse and the other for a full-sized keyboard.
More details coming later on, probably tomorrow. The screen is even better than I thought, and the PDF’s even worse, although OLPC has done a good job of integrating the browser and the reader, at least the PDF side. This is a machine urgently in need of software to handle a reflowable book-oriented format like .epub.
Housekeeping: Will most likely save the copyright essay for the weekend.
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