Ergo Letter Bag

According to this article Marvell has given the OLPC project a $5.6 million dollar grant to fund designing the XO-3 around a complete system on a chip (SOC) produced by Marvell. -Which will be based on the Marvell Moby reference platform. This means that the OLPC XO-3 Arm tablet's R&D is now fully funded. And Marvell's $99 tablet may not be vapor after all. $99 tablet availability in 1st world countries is projected for 2011. 3rd world countries will have to wait on the OLPC XO-3 till at least 2012.

Marvell Technology Group Ltd has announced a $100K challenge to developers interested in making creative, innovative, and engaging educational applications for their $99 Android based ARM tablet. Aka the Moby Reference Platform . Note: this is the same reference design which the OLPC intends to use as the basis for the XO-3 . Will Perl developers enter the fray? Is Perl support in the Android Scripting Environment ready for prime time? Application submissions will be accepted from Oct. 11th thru Nov. 11th. Winners will be chosen and awards given during the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, January 6-9, 2011. [From the Marvell $100K Challenge website:] Start thinking now of your most creative ideas on developing the best tablet app for teaching children any one or more of the following subjects: Math Science Vocabulary Geography Social studies Grammar Spelling Other curriculum most common to children in Kindergarten all the way up to and including the 12th g...

This is more a note to myself than anything else, but perhaps someone else will find it useful? I certainly find it useful to transfer DVDs over to the kids' OLPC XOs running teapot's Ubuntu intrepid distro for XO . On OSX using VLC , the following will transcode a video stream/file down to something that will play well without skipping on an OLPC XO 1.0. I.e., a theora/vorbis file named w/ the ogg extension using a 320x240 resolution at 15fps. -You'll wind up with an out.ogg file in the current working directory. Open an editor and save the following to a file named vlc2xo: #!/bin/sh /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I dummy -vv "$1" \ --sout='#transcode{width=320,height=240,scale=1,vcodec=theo, \ vb=768,acodec=vorb,ab=64,channels=2,deinterlace, \ audio-sync}:standard{access=file,mux=ogg,dst=out.ogg}' \ vlc:quit Make it executable: chmod 755 vlc2xo.sh Now, you'll be able to open terminal and execute the script with an argu...