The One Laptop Per Child team pushed out another software release yesterday called Ship 1 build. This is what is supposed to be on the laptops for testing at the factory in Shanghai. I pieced together the proper downloads on to a USB stick and rebooted to autoinstall the update. The firmware went in OK, but the system software was corrupted. After a few more tries, I switched to a new USB stick and finished the install as well as updating the second laptop. The new release now shows a web browser start page for a bundled content library. I also loaded a bunch of new software add-ons from the developer's site. I noticed for the first time that the media player shows visualizations when playing audio. And both the mesh and wifi networking seem much more robust. Alas, the battery charging and battery level gauge are still busted.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I'm up late tonight testing the new, near final Trial-3 software of the XO laptop. I flashed the laptop memory with my trusty 1gb "red brick" usb drive. With a few additional tweaks, this is what will be burned into the first wave of 100,000 mass production laptops to fulfill the Give 1 Get 1 offer and some developing countries such as Uruguay and Peru. The wifi seems to be working much better in this build, but a bug still persists with the NiMH battery not charging fully. I've never been able to run the laptop on battery power for much more than two hours.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

It's a busy night in the virtual neighborhood.

The colorful stick figure icons on screen are of XO laptop hardware and software being tested all over the world. I had a nice chat with a computer enthusiast in Austria tonight who was running the emulator on his PC.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

I have a little kling-on with me.

- mike lee - red line heading downtown

I'm really impressed by San Diego's KPBS coverage on the county fires. There's a rich mix of live streaming audio, Twitter microposts, Google Map overlays and Flickr slideshows. As I sit here in a comfy suburb of Washington, DC, all this brings home the enormity of the burn and the courage of the residents and firefighters.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Another day of the freakishly warm weather in D.C. (80 degrees today) had me outside in my backyard testing a 15 watt solar panel as a charger for the sealed lead acid battery in my Freeplay Freecharge Weza foot-powered generator. Either or both of these will power the XO "$100" laptop anywhere off the grid. Now I just need to hit on a stable firmware & OS combination for the laptop where the power management bugs have been fixed. The core development team is feverishly coding frequent software releases in preparation for the upcoming Give 1 Get 1 program.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

The iPhone came in handy to roll some cartoons for Cici off YouTube while we were waiting for Thai takeout. Her mom has ripped a bunch of Cici's favorite kid flix to mp4 and Ilve got to load a few of those. Cici will never know about Saturday morning cartoons or prime time because most anything she wants to see can be brought via the web or DVDs. She does like to go see movies at the theater tho.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Well I had hoped to blog here with some thoughts on my 5th anniversary on Hiptop Nation, but instead I was in phone carrier call center hell trying to restore my Sidekick service after trying to drop it down to the data-only plan and moving my phone number to AT&T on the iPhone. It took seven phone calls over many days to cluesless reps who made false promises each time just to get me off the phone. Despite repeating over and over that I wanted to continue doing business with them on the $29/mo plan, they still tried to sign me back up for the $59 voice plan without telling me. They claim I'm back on month-to-month without a new cancellation penalty, but I can't even be sure of that until the next bill.

I has been great being a part of this little Hiptop Nation community, and I enjoyed for a long while the new freedoms that the Hiptop/Sidekick gave me. But after five years, T-mobile is still raping customers, and quite frankly, Danger's pace of innovation isn't compelling to me anymore. It's inexcusable that there's still no e-mail spam filtering. The web browsing on the Sidekick is as slow or slower than it was five years ago. I am completely mystified as to why the camera sensor didn't get significantly better on the Sidekick 3. The Sidekick photo gallery limps along when I have more than 50 photos in it, while my iPhone glides effortlessly through 900 photos. I wish Danger luck as it now has to face Apple's formidable entry into their turf.

I'm a faceless amoeba to the mega call center-equipped T-mobile, but it gives me comfort that the giant lobby I work for is setting its sights on the scamming ways of the cell phone carriers. I hope we're able to divert some attention from the wars on Shiites and Spinach to a new war on the cell phone industry.

I'm going to keep blogging here until the iPhone gets instant messaging and hopefully a better solution for text entry will come by the first quarter of 2008. But I've decided not to go after the new LX and be locked in for another two years.

- mike lee - in cambridge, ma again doing business at the mit media lab . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Flickr + FaceBook + LinkedIn + TypePad + Work

Read about, and see, Professor Randy Pausch's last lecture...

- mike lee - wheaton, md