The second gift I got from Dunkirk Systems for Christmas was a computer from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. This comes from what was originally the US$100 laptop program. Now, they are $200, and through the end of last year you could have bought 2 for $400, one for yourself and one for a needy child. This article talks about how the OLPC computers have helped a village in Peru. For someone like myself who has had a computer since junior high school and made a career out of them, I bought into this program completely.

The notebook itself (sorry, I don’t like the term laptop) is interesting. It is white with green trim and looks like it was made by Fisher-Price. Its most prominent feature is a carrying handle – why hasn’t someone thought of this before? It is designed to be rugged. When you flip up the antenna on each side then the top, it is open for use. The top swivels like a tablet PC but the screen is not touch-sensitive. Right away by the size of the screen and keyboard you see it is for a child, especially with the spill-proof keyboard. Other hardware features include a camera, speaker and microphone. You can read more of its features on its Web site.

So what have I done with it? Not too much so far. I was able to get the MAC address of the WiFi card with help from the OLPC Wiki and set it into my wireless router and I was quickly on the Internet. I ran the gauntlet of several of my Web sites with the pre-installed version of Firefox and all looked generally good, though I could not get the Flash plug-in to start and sound did not come from the browser. I also tried some of the various applications pre-installed, from drawing to video, but only once.

When you connect to WiFi you look for it in the “neighborhood” and see dots representing each hotspot. If another OLPC is within range, you see a stick-figure icon that is the logo for the program. This is how children can link to each other and is part of the power – and fun - of this program.

So far I have yet to see anyone within range when I have used it, which doesn’t surprise me. Does anyone out there reading this have one? It would be interesting to get a group of people together with their OLPCs to connect and learn!

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If you own or owned a Palm Treo 600 and/or 650 and had multiple returns for repairs or replacements, please read on.

I got an email from Palm on the settlement of a class action suit against them for the above reason, something I endured myself. A Web site has been created at palzasettlement.com with links to PDF documents relevant to the settlement and filing a claim. An owner can either get a repair, $75 if they owned a 600 or $50 if they owned a 650.

As I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on YouTube, check out the settlement Web site for complete details and you have until July, 2008 to file a claim.

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Earlier this week TECH cocktail 7 (or TC7) was announced. It will be held on Thursday, February 21, 2008 from 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm at John Barleycorn Wrigleyville in Chicago.

This event brings out many people in or affiliated with the tech community, and hopefully a few domainers will be in attendance as well! As this free event usually "sells" out, RSVP now. Hope to see you there.

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As someone who has worked with computers and high-technology for 20 years and as a self-professed generalist, if there is something I can’t grasp, then I fear how tech novices will deal with it. Take digital subscriber line, or DSL, a lower-cost Internet access provided over a phone line by the legacy telephone companies like Verizon and AT&T.

Where DSL is more than sufficient for most Internet users, it has received a lot of negative attention, much of it fueled by the cable TV companies who offer much faster broadband cable service. One of DSL’s drawbacks is that the signal strength deminishes the further you are from the telephone central office in your community. To distance itself from these drawbacks, phone companies have rebranded DSL under different names.

Here’s where the confusion comes into play. Recently I helped 2 relatives get DSL, one from AT&T the other from Verizon. AT&T called its offering of DSL “Broadband Internet” and offered different speeds. I say “called” as when I went back to AT&T’s Web site to lookup the names for this blog post today, they are now calling it DSL! This must have changed at some point in the last 2 months. They call their 4 offerings Basic, Express, Pro and Elite. Originally the confusion was over the name “broadband” as compared to what the cable company was calling broadband. Now they have switched it to what I feel it should be, but this will mean I should make a pre-emptive call to one relative to tell them about the name change.

Verizon offers DSL as “High-Speed Internet” and uses the word broadband in its descriptive information. One of the few mentions of DSL comes in its FAQ when it is describing the Yahoo! software that is offered as an add-on to the DSL software installation. In the case of helping this relative with Verizon, she didn’t know of other Internet offerings, so no explaining to do.

Fortunately my Internet consulting firm Dunkirk Systems does not offer any products or services that need to have their name changed or attributes masked in order to sell them. Granted, much of what I do needs further explanation that their name themselves, and this is something we are very upfront with. Perhaps the DSL providers should band together to dispel rumors about DSL and call it what it is – a decent product for the masses.

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For the past couple of days my two blogs - The Hot Iron and sourcegate - were broken. You could bring up the main URL and see the home page, and if you clicked on any link you would get the very same home page. This happened midday on Tuesday as the hosting company "upgraded" something, causing previous patches to prevent this problem to reoccur.

I am pleased to say both blogs are working. Special thanks goes to Andy Knight who reached out to me after I posted this issue on the ExpressionEngine support forum. Today he sent me details of a fix he made and it worked for me as well. I posted the details of this fix on sourcegate.

Interestingly, over that time period my Feedburner subscribers increased by 5 readers! I'll look into that another time, as there's a little catch-up I need to do. And thanks to Andy, I have one less thing on my list.

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