Archive for the 'hackerwednesday' Category

Greetings! The Rural Design Collective has been busy getting our final revision of the code ready for production. We have been doing a great deal of work testing the user interface on the XO and on the web, streamlining the HTML, commenting our code, and debugging our various libraries (and it even validates using [...]

The icon set is really beginning to take shape for our Children’s book collection!

Hello! After a brief respite to organize a phenomenal art show and enjoy the changing seasons, we are back in action for the latest work from the Rural Design Collective! We learned from our demos that we gave at our Launch Party [...]

The Rural Design Collective will be demonstrating their hard work this summer at our annual RDC Launch Party, plus we will be publishing public domain books for kids! The above book was designed by Anand Chitipothu, lead architect of infogami and Friend of the RDC.
Hello! Busy times at the RDC. Our Launch Party deadline is [...]

Levi’s illustrative talents go far beyond the icons you see here – but it takes an amazing amount of creative discipline to develop simple graphics with a distinctive personality. These are created in Adobe Illustrator using a Wacom tablet and pen, which preserves the hand-drawn quality. Our hat is off to Levi!
Greetings! It is Saturday, [...]

This week, we started defining the toolkit for our user interface. Scotty and Steven are working on the technical details of gathering the necessary metadata. We ran through a few quick flow tests on the XO, and there are some intermediary steps to the process of transferring the book from the USB stick to the [...]

Unpacking the BookMobile at RDC Headquarters. Video by Nathan Malamud. You can track the BookMobile’s northerly migration and view video outtakes on our interactive map.

The big news this week – we are getting set up for our Second Annual Launch Party (which is essentially a fun way for us to demo all of the cool [...]

The analog equivalent of a public domain book and a piece of moveable art – spotted in Cave Junction, OR. It was approximately 3 ft. tall. I wonder how big its DjVu file would be?
We had an incredibly productive week at RDC headquarters this week, working remotely and on-site. James Simmons, author of the View [...]

The RDC created these bookmarks for our 2007 BookMobile Tour. Design by Levi Thompson
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 [...]

The RDC crew working remotely in Skype. L to R: Levi Thompson and Steven McKenzie. Portions of these chats will be available on our site on an ongoing basis as tutorials.
Greetings from Rebecca Malamud on behalf of the Rural Design Collective! Apologies for this delayed #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday report – I am on the [...]

We had a productive #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday on-site at 246/Point B Studio. Steven and Scotty are plugging away, writing a Python app to download the books we need for the XOs. Ideally, we want to store these books as a collection or list that everyone can share on the web. We are also calculating [...]