Jason Sares is a Giant Dork

Two great parts of my Festivus Travels!

I got home and found my OLPC XO Laptop had arrived in time for Christmas!

Some quick thoughts

• The packaging is awesome
• The hardware design is top notch
• The software looks great
• Has the best font rendering I’ve ever seen
• Adobe Flash isn’t working
• The processor is too slow

I’ll take some pictures tomorrow!

I’ve stopped using Apple products since they decided to screw all their customers over that unlocked iPhones.  Luckily (at least that’s the way I’m looking at it) my 5G iPod died a month ago and I started looking around for another MP3 player.

I wanted a flash based player with at least 8GB on-board and a MicroSD (SDHC) slot that was as attractive as the 5G iPod.  I found a great looking player in the Sansa View and the 16GB model was a great price at $200.  It was a little hard to find but after a week of looking I got one straight from SanDisk.

It had some problems reading my ID3 tags from some of my music but they released firmware 1.06 which corrected the problem.

The other problem was mounting it in Linux.  Normally when you connect it to USB it’s using the MTP Media Transfer Protocol (should be called Microsoft Transfer Protocol) which of course doesn’t work under Linux.

But by holding down the left arrow when you connect it will use the standard USB Mass Storage Protocol MSC Mass Storage Class (sometimes referred to as UMS) and mount as a normal drive.  Then you can just drag and drop your music folders and all is good in the world.

Bottom line, it’s a nice player that should work with any OS and let’s you easily backup your music.   The forums over at Any Thing But iPod where very helpful.

One of the best things about living in the Silicon Valley is all the meetups cool companies host where you get to hear straight from the developers and get free food.  Even if you don’t know anything about their projects you can just show up and freeload some carbs.

Just in the last week I’ve went to Mozilla and TWIKI.NET meetups and if I had to compare the two companies on hospitality TWIKI.NET is the superior project (sorry Mozilla).

TWIKI.NET is the commercial support company for the crazy popular TWiki project. Peter Thoeny, Rod Beckström, and Amir Shobeiri hosted a great meetup at the PlugAndPlayTechCenter and served some gourmet pizza and beer.  The turnout was really good and the presentation solid.

Mozilla gave a talk on Firefox 3 (which rocks BTW) and did give me some cool stickers but the pizza wasn’t the best and worst of all no beer.  That might have been because it was at lunch but still, I need beer.  The room was packed and Mike Schroepfer the VP of engineering gave a great presentation.

So thanks Open Source, for all the free pizza and beer, oh yeah and the code!

If you’d like to get some free food for yourself checkout Meetup, Upcoming, and Lunch20.

Asus has corrected the error it made in not releasing the code it used for ACPI. This is a great sign that when companies are called out they will support the GPL.

I was just setting up some services on the giantdorks server and I forgot which distro (doh) we’re running. uname -a wasn’t very helpful so I looked at /etc/issue and found it was openSUSE 10.2 (i586). Anyone know which distros this works for, or any other ways to find which distro you’re logged on to?

Edit:

I found an additional way is to use lsb_ release -a