This week, the RDC indulged a bit, and spent #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday tinkering and upgrading our XOs to Sugar 8.2.0. We encountered a bit of difficulty upgrading directly to Sugar 8.2.1, but were successful with an earlier build (767). A couple of the laptops we delivered to the local area were two years old (part of the initial G1G1 campaign) and running the original version of Sugar, so they were definitely due an upgrade.

Two more local laptops were retrieved belonging to local families. Many thanks to Nathan Malamud and Vilma McCutcheon for contributing their laptops to our project. Nathan is our lead beta-tester and videographer for our 2009 summer program. Vilma is an original “Friend of the Rural Design Collective,” and was a Bookmobilista when the Internet Archive BookMobile made its maiden voyage to Oregon in 2007. We have a pretty cool announcement to make relating to that in the next week or so …

And speaking of “Friends of the Rural Design Collective,” we want to welcome Roy Rousseau to the club. Roy has kindly provided us with the funds to purchase our sticks for the Sugar-on-a-Stick part of the project. Thank you, Roy! We will be announcing more friends over the coming weeks.

In other news, Levi is working on the web interface for the IACL-4-OLPC collection (and we are currently brainstorming a better name for our bundle, so consider “IACL-4-OLPC” a code name), while Steven is going the extra mile on the upgrade front, and souping up a couple of the XOs so we can experiment with EPUB. This will require an upgrade to Read 7.0, which was just released this week by Sugar Labs. We can’t wait to give it a whirl!

Greetings! We had a great #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday – we successfully downloaded our target collection of books in DjVu format, and took a close look at the current state-of-the-art in bundle creation and content collections at http://wiki.laptop.org/. We realize that what we are trying to do is somewhat ambitious, so we are trying to manage our own expectations.

The first order of business was registering our developer keys with the OLPC. We want to upgrade our current base of XOs to support the DjVu format, and it appears we need to upgrade to Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) .84 to improve performance (hat tip: James Simmons and Sayamindu Dasgupta). We will be updating several of our OLPC laptops to support this feature. We are currently conducting research to see if there is any way to auto-update the XOs that boot from the sticks to make integration of the DjVu format into the default Read.Activity easier.

We also spent some time setting up our XO Computer Lab at 246 6th Street (photos forthcoming!) so we can start sharing our work in progress with visitors to our studio. Today marks the designated halfway point in our program, but we are having so much fun working together and coming up with so many cool ideas that we decided to extend our own deadline until October so we can take our time and deliver a great product … plus share our discoveries with our friends in the area. We still have several laptops to retrieve – and given this is the summer months that makes this aspect of the project quite difficult! Our fallback plan is to make sticks for all 12 laptops (six granted from the OLPC, and six we donated in our local area) – but ideally we would like to meetup with everyone nearby with an XO to share our work and show them how to work with the collection.

So, our plan moving forward is to bundle the IACL collection in as many usable formats as feasible, providing a plan for graceful degradation – we know that the PDF format works in the current XO-1 bookreader on default, DjVu requires an upgrade to an XO-1, and EPUB is the wave of the future. We are starting work on mockups for a web user interface for the IACL collection, plus helping Steven map out a plan for the release of his auto-downloader program.

The excitement continues at the RDC!

We all agreed that the best plan is to deliver the bundles as DjVu so we can use the native bookreader (with some possible enhancements – more on that later), but create a target collection of 20 or so books as a research experiment for future development with EPUB. So, Levi and I are currently building a subset of those books that are an accurate representation of the different formats popular for children’s books (heavily illustrated, large type, poetry, etc). Then, we plan to experiment with mark-up. These books will be culled from our target IACL collection. EPUB is not fully supported at this time in the XO Read Activity – but we want to be ready when it is!

We are on target for our proposed deadline, Labor Day Weekend – you can see a very rough overview here – we have a more detailed production schedule that we will be posting soon.

Obviously, TXT will be the winner when it comes to file size – but we know that younger kids want to see the pictures! So we are also exploring other formats, such as .CBZ which is a format that was designed for comic books. It is very similar to the format that the Internet Archive uses to serve up JPEG2 files in their new bookreader – but there is some conversion involved, and it may not be the most effective solution from a time and storage standpoint. The DjVu format is designed specifically for documents consisting of scanned book page – and since our target collection deals with childrens books where many are decorated or illustrated, this looks like the way to go. Many thanks to James Simmons for the helpful guidance he provided, sharing with us what he learned working with View Slides Activity.

We also have our eye on the future, so we are reading up on things like Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) and EPUB. The future looks bright for ebooks!

We have our work cut out for us – it’s a fun challenge – and we like that at the Rural Design Collective!