The One Laptop Per Child promotion (G1G1) has been extended to December 31, 2007.  Act now!!

Technorati Tags: One Laptop Per Child,OLPC,charity,xo,AMD,Negroponte,50×15

Act now!  You have until November 26th to donate an XO laptop and get one for yourself.  Some nice perks…  one year free T-Mobile Hotspot access and a $200 tax deduction.  All for $399 (actually $423.95 with shipping).

The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege. Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.

[One Laptop Per Child]

Technorati Tags: One Laptop Per Child,OLPC,charity,xo,AMD,Negroponte,50×15

Interesting idea. I’d like to have something like this…

OLPC’s XO laptop comes with anti-theft kill-switch in select countries

People always ask me how many gadgets I have. The quick answer is “a lot”. Unfortunately, I never kept good track of all my “toys”. I still have a bunch, but have either given away, sold, or simply lost a few of them. As many as I’ve owned, I could probably still tell you the story behind each and the pros and cons I observed.

To add to my collection, I recently picked up a Cingular 8125 Pocket PC phone (made by HTC). I was going to take a couple of pics and write a review, but instead I got side-tracked and decided to take some pics of the gadgets I still have laying around (click on the thumbnail for full size):

Missing from the pic are ~10 radios (ham/scanner/shortwave), ~8 cameras, a couple video recorders, a few PDA’s (including a Rex, Sharp Zaurus, HP 200LX) and a lot of other cell phones, misc electronics, and watches. Oldest to newest in the pic:

- Minox Subminiature Spy Camera (film)
- Olympus Pearlcorder L200 microcassette recorder
- US Robotics Pilot 5000 (pre-Palm) — one of the first off the production line!
- Motorola TalkAbout Flex pager
- Nokia 5180 cell phone (AT&T Wireless)
- Motorola i1000 cell phone (Nextel)
- Motorola i2000 cell phone (Nextel)
- Motorola P280 cell phone (Voicestream)
- Motorola T193 cell phone (T-Mobile)
- Compaq iPAQ 3630 Pocket PC PDA
- Compaq iPAQ 3860 Pocket PC PDA (cracked screen)
- Magellan Meridian Color GPS
- HP iPAQ 6315 Pocket PC PDA phone (T-Mobile)
- Apple 15GB 3G iPod
- TomTom Go GPS
- Blackberry 7100 PDA phone (AT&T Wireless/Cingular)
- Apple 1GB iPod Shuffe
- Nikon S1 Digicam (5.1 megapixel)
- Motorola V3 RAZR cell phone (Cingular)
- Apple 60GB 5G Video iPod
- Uniden ELX500 5.8 GHz cordless phone
- Cingular 8125 Pocket PC phone

I guess it’s time for eBay? FYI, some of these are for sale, so let me know if you’re interested.

As for the Cingular 8125, there are already some good reviews out there so I won’t reiterate what others are documenting very well. My initial impressions of the 8125 are very positive — probably the best Pocket PC phone I’ve used to date. Definitely a change in form factor from my RAZR, but I’ve sorely missed the Pocket PC functionality I had with my HP iPAQ 6315. Here are some links to a few good 8125 reviews:

MobileTech
Mobility Site
Howard Forums

I had an old 20GB 2.5″ laptop hard disk laying around and decided to purchase an external drive enclosure so I could put it to good use. I found a simple one at CompUSA for $24.99 and it’s been working out great. Besides using it as another backup drive (you can never have too many), I decided to load up some Portable Apps on it…

A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB thumbdrive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug, none of your personal data is left behind.

If you haven’t seen any of the portable apps lately, they’ve come a long way. The latest suite includes Portable Firefox (web browser), Portable Thunderbird (email client), Portable OpenOffice.org (office suite), Portable AbiWord (word processor), Portable NVU (web editor), Portable Sunbird (calendar & task list), Portable FileZilla (FTP client), and Portable Gaim (instant messenger). The best thing (besides being free) is all these apps can fit on a 256MB USB thumbdrive! Of course, if you prefer, you can also just load these apps individually.

Other than the fact that there’s no Mac versions of these portable apps yet, everything has been working out very well. I’ve also encrypted my 20GB disk with on-the-fly encryption from TrueCrypt (open source). For file synchronization with my other machines and external disks I’ve been testing a freeware app called Allway Sync. Check ‘em out!