OLPC XO experiment
I recently went on a two-week vacation to St. Petersburg, Florida. It was going to be a calm and even boring time: swimming in the ocean, getting tan, doing everyday yoga and gathering energy for the rest of the year.
In terms of making this vacation less boring, I decided to take OLPC XO instead of my regular MacBookPro with me. I planned an experiment: go and see if I, a geek and a technology lover, can really work and live on this small green machine. And if I can, then how it would look.
XO is a really exceptional piece of technology, but it’s definitely not your MacBookPro. It is much slower, interface is different, especially in Sugar [Learning Environment], and made for a completely different purpose. And on top of all that, it is Linux, not an all-polished Mac.
Most of the things I do day-to-day on my MacBook, especially when on vacation, don’t require a 2011-ish extremely powerful machine. I do write a lot, but it can be done using any text processor on any platform. I do read a lot, but there is Kindle, and for internet I can use any browser, even the no-tabbed one supplied with XO. I do take pictures a lot, and this is a kind of tricky. My perfect-shooting-machine Sony NEX-5 saves images to RAW-files, and I used to edit them in Aperture. And I do use Photoshop sometimes as well.
Well,—I decided, I can live without this for two weeks. I will take photos indeed, cannot live without it,—but I will take a large SD-card, and a spare one, and a spare another one, and edit everything when I am back home.
So, it was set. I packed my green small precious monster, and in a couple of days started my unboring experiment.
