I will be joining returning TF Tim Hwang who previously TF’d this class with ROFL’er Diana Kimball.

earwax Makes audio easier to listen to on headphones. Adds ‘cues’ to 44.1kHz stereo (i.e. audio CD format) audio so that when listened to on headphones the stereo image is moved from inside your head (standard for headphones) to outside and in front of the listener (standard for speakers). See http://www.geocities.com/beinges for a full explanation.

Yeah, that’s right, the full explanation lived on a Geocities site, not as in-program documentation. :-( This is why man is quickly falling behind to extensible systems like docbook.

As a side note, I have some hope to one day find the explination of how earwax works at Asheesh and the Archive team’s http://geociti.es as geociti.es/beinges.

is a parody of romantic melodrama, centering on Ermengarde Stubbs and her relationships with villainous mortgage-holder ‘Squire Hardman, would-be rescuer Jack Manly and fiance[sic] Algernon Reginald Jones.^[1]

I stumbled upon it while searching for public domain gothic horror stories, specifically those witten by H.P. Lovecraft, and those not previously recorded as audiobooks by the contributors at Librivox.org.  Well, it appears that the tireless volunteers at Librovox have recorded all of the public domain stories of Lovecraft’s except for this out-of-character tale.

With my fellow Siloers: fearless sound engineer AJ Mazur and the generous loan of equipment from Dave Fisher. I have made this following recording:

Sweet Ermengarde mp3 (14mb)

or in my prefered format for human voice audio, speex

Sweet Ermengarde speex (3mb (due to superior compression in speex vs mp3))

I have been completely swamped with work, and a little unhappy with the limitations of the MUwordpress here at Harvard.  I’m considering moving my blag back to isforinsects.com or to a l.o address, or something else entirely.

Anyway, just wanted to let you all know that I wont be updating for the next couple weeks.  FYI

Hello, I work with the <snip>; a non-profit organization that does history presentations on the middle ages for schools, libraries and museums in the Pacific Northwest.  We do demonstrations and lectures on historical arms, armor and combat of the middle ages and renaissance (Western Martial Arts). I have been hearing about the concept of a sub $200 laptop for education for quite a while (Ballmer among others) and I find if a fascinating concept.  So first of all kudos to your group at MIT. I was wondering if you were planning on having any sort of educational materials already loaded on the laptops.  Our organization has in the past been asked to be part of educational materials, and we are working towards publishing classroom materials of our own in the next two years. If your group were interested in a few sample history lessons as demonstrations of what your laptop could do; perhaps we could supply you with something both historical and visually interesting. If you have some interest I can be contacted at <snip>

According to the OLPC Timeline, this email dates to before the XO was announced with Nicholas Negreponte and Kofi Annan Unfortunately, OLPC didn’t have Sj yet, so their response was less than thrilling.

Red Hat is our partner and is working on software. The participating countries will also provide their own software. Best wishes, <snip (name removed)>

I could understand brushing me off at such an early phase in OLPC’s development.  But the reply was a bit silly all the same. :)

This is a great example of content that needs to be on the XO.  I found this .svg (scalable vector graphics) file over at wiki commons, which is a great source for educational images.  It’s where I found the images for the Dinosaur eBook actually.

The translation for this image shouldn’t be too hard either.  While IE doesn’t display .svg file in a web page (I had to reformat this to jpg) good browsers do, like firefox and the Browse activity on the XO.  If you don’t have firefox, I highly suggest you download it.  And if you download it from the link to the right > I make a couple bucks.  Firefox is free to you of course, as software should be.

This post comes from my old blog, which you can still find here: one-dinosaur-book-per-child-leveled-reader

Those of you familiar with early English language education may be familiar with the concept of a leveled reader. The basic idea is that of a book that very carefully and slowly increases vocabulary. They are very important, if dull, to create and read. There are few (if any) such resources on the XO. Most Leveled Reader resources online are proprietary and costly. What resources that do exist at places such as Free-Reading lack illustration or presentation suitable for children, although their page on Connected Text Activities is excellent.

I wasn’t aware of this lack, or even the concept of Leveled Readers three weeks ago. But then the wonderful fellow volunteer Carol Leche started me onto them while preparing materials for her daughter’s kindergarten classroom. This happened to be right after I had discovered a wonderful cache of images at WikiMedia, the storehouse for Wikipedia image, audio and video files.

The cache of images were illustrations of Dinosaurs by Ladyofhats very thoughtfully released into the Public Domain for use anywhere. How can I resist? I saw illustrations of dinosaurs, and I thought: Picture Book.

So the subject is set, does a similar project exist that I can improve instead? Well there does exist a WikiJr Dinosaur’s project over at en.Wikibooks.org. But it’s reading level, I would estimate, is about 12th grade, and fairly wordy. While texts for 12 yr-olds is important, I was looking for something that can really show off the illustrations.

A picture book with one or two lines of text is also pretty ideal for translation. Translation of software in OLPC is done on ’strings’ of text in Pootle, where all of the ’strings’ from various software projects are listed. A simple project like the Dinosaur Book, if handled properly, could be done in html & css and uploaded into Pootle for translation. This is really a prerequisite for any content on the OLPC, if it’s only in English, and has no ability to be translated, it has limited utility.

If you would like to help contribute to translation, please go this post about OLPC translation at OLPCnews. Work is really just starting on this project. If you have any suggestions, or want to get involved we’re looking for a CSS guru and any early language instructors for languages other than English. If you would like to get involved, comment or drop me a line at the OLPC wiki.