robot porn

One Laptop per childish adult

My XO Laptop has arrived. After a short detour via Austin, TX (thanks for ordering it for me, big cousin) and almost three weeks of United States Postal Service limbo it finally is mine. (Okay, the German customs had some fun with it which allowed me to sit in their Berlin office for almost 2 hours and watch the painfully slow processing of my packet. Think as east block style agency meeting slow motion village post office. Only slower. Finally I could have it for only 18 Euros of tax after convincing them it was a gift as well as a toy.)

Of all the 400 color combinations of the logo I of course received the one clashing most with the laptop’s green plastic: mint and sort-of dark green, both quite off the main hue, ah well. I’ll learn to love it.

It doesn’t look as small as it is next to my 12″ Powerbook, most likely because the Powerbook is not so big to begin with.

This is more accurate although I may have extraordinarily big or small hands, so maybe it is not so informative as a picture.

So what am I planning to do with it except for showing off? First, there are some interesting programs (”activities”) already installed, the most interesting being the TamTam SynthLab, a Max/MSP based visual synthesizer modeler. Here’s a video of SynthLab in action. There is another activity called Measure which is a very simple oscilloscope. The XO’s audio input accepts a wider range of voltages compared to regular  computer soundcards, so it can be used as a flexible A/D converter.

A lot of improving and hacking of the XO is currently done and all over the web. Some people want to increase the analog input’s versatility by a usb powered probe circuit to enhance the oscilloscope range. On the software side, because the XO runs on an adapted Linux distribution (with custom “Sugar” interface), we’ll certainly see a lot of applications being built for it in the near future. About 80,000 laptops were sold to individuals like me, so a lot of them are now in the hands of hackers and tinkerers.

And finally, the XO may have a lot of differences to regular laptop computers, but in the end it is a computer by design, so even if development for its regular system stalled, there will be someone putting together a special Ubuntu distro. So, no worries that this system cannot be used for something in the end. It does already run Doom.

disassembly orgy

Not only have I been neglecting my nice blog here for too long, I actually have not sat down at my workbench for months now. By miracle, three days off now have given me the opportunity to get back tinkering and making a mess.

So far, I have completely taken apart my beloved 12″ Powerbook because the internal Airport antenna seems to be broken. This little silver sucker consists of millions of little screws and parts. Better use a step-by-step guide like this one at powerbookguide if you attempt something similar. And buy quality 00, 0 and 1 size Phillips screwdrivers so that you don’t ruin a screw and have to drill it out. Yeah. Now that I reduced that fine computer to debris (you have to take it apart 95% to reach the Airport cable), the people at Germany’s biggest Apple reseller Gravis tell me they cannot sell me spare parts. Damn.

Luckily I could distract myself by taking apart a Playstation 2 TFT monitor by Joytech which are available for about 20 Euros on ebay now. These must be the cheapest way to get a small TFT display now (5,6″ diameter). I planned to use it as a small mobile monitor for a C64 running Prophet64.

Upon disassembling I discovered that one of the PCBs inside was much larger than the screen (a Sharp LQ6AN101 [datasheet]) and because of that rehousing everything in a smaller case would be not as easy as expected. Luckily, the mighty internets have solutions for everything. By reading this thread (in German) I found out that the big PCB contains no circuitry needed for the screen. By resoldering a lot on tiny smd pads you can actually drive the Sharp display only using the smaller PCB which contains everything to convert the CVBS input to the RGB signals the display needs. Neat. 20 Euros and a quiet afternoon give you a nice little display. I’ll shop for a case tomorrow.

Actually, if I was a VJ, I’d definitely invest 60 Euros for three screens (and, say, a quiet weekend) and build my own rackmount triple video screen like the Numark VM03 (street price about 700 Euros). But I’m not a VJ and I noticed that the urge to build things I don’t need can be helpfully remedied by putting it on my to-do list which of course will never be worked off. (But if you are a starving Berlin VJ who likes not-quite-professional looking contraptions prone to failure, give me a call. I might as well do stuff like that for a living.)

So, until that’s done, my TV-B-Gone kit I bought from Mitch at 24c3 has to wait. I already built it and plan to conceal in a plastic mockup digital camera (those they have in store displays who look like the real thing but will fail to amaze the successful thief; I once bought six of them on ebay, please don’t ask why). Something is not working yet, I’ll have to check the forums why my infrared leds don’t blink remote control messages but light up constantly.

And if that’s done I might look into fixing my new oscilloscope, which of course is not new at all, but an old east german RFT EO 213 2-channel scope. The range switches are all dirty, I guess, so far I only found one setting where the calibration square wave works, and only after wiggling the knob a lot. So if that is fixed I can finally use the oscilloscope itself to track down the failure in an electric organ someone gave me to repair. And the next instrument, an (also east german) Vermona Piano-Strings e-piano, arrived at my doorstep today and also needs a thorough cleaning of some contacts as well as of the whole thing itself… and also the spring reverb in my Philicorda 751 organ still is not fixed…

Happy times.