Blogging resumes (and other news)

After far too long of not blogging, I have arranged the circumstances to make it more likely I would blog through the use of an innovative concept I like to call "Blogging on the bus". Such a thing is now possible since the arrival of my late Christmas/early birthday present: an XO laptop (and about an hour of travel by bus to/from work every weekday).

I participated in the G1G1 (give one, get one) campaign and received the small laptop/large PDA device shortly two months after ordering it. Apart from being too small to allow me to touchtype, I really like it. It should be at least faster to write with than with my crusty old Palm III and also easier to read RSS feeds, etc. than same. I'm not sure I have figured out how to have it sleep and wake up (suspend/resume) really fast like my Palm did (thus never having to boot up/shutdown), but the OLPC wiki is nice and should have the answer.

UPDATE: The software that shipped with my unit does not support this yet:
How do I put an XO laptop to sleep?

The sleep feature is not enabled in software provided on XOs shipped starting December 2007 in the Give1Get1 program. A software upgrade early in 2008 will support suspend/resume sleep features, for much improved battery life.

Also worthy of noting is the successful completion of the courses part of my master's program at Carleton University. I now have to pick a decent topic and a supervisor to get started on this "other half". I'm hoping to add neat features to T.O.D.D. (a.k.a. testoriented), such as automatic testing, thus effectively putting me out of a day job. (ha ha)


Lastly, I would like to thank everybody who left words of thanks for my posting about Hacking the Microsoft Natural keyboard 4000, redux, as well as whoever drove all that traffic to my blog. I think we now have enough evidence to say that Microsoft definitely shipped the wrong mapping for that slider. I wonder if I should also start selling a little "Scroll" sticker (or, really, just a piece of electrical tape - such as this patch kit) alongside a floppy disk containing an automated and friendly version of the software I had posted, calling it an "upgrade kit" of some sort.