Continuing his adventures in video contest participation, Matt Ryan of MisterFilms.com recently formed a tactical unit named "Hero Squad" and created an entry for the Insomniac video competition.

It worked like this: to compete, each video had to incorporate several elements listed in the competition rules, which were only released 24 hours before the competition ended. This ensured that everyone had but a single day to create their videos.

Those elements were:

• A park bench.
• Radio static.
• The dialog "Don't tempt me."

Matt was able to transform a script he's had in his head for awhile to incorporate these things and Hero Squad set to work creating a video that is, honestly, as good or better than Matt's other works.

Watch Melody here.

Honestly, it could be that I'm biased but I think some of the best stuff Matt ever did was with the You's All Gonna Die series. Stupid, yes, but it is still so very watchable and enjoyable to this day.

Likewise I think this movie shows Matt's developed the skills to turn around a movie that "feels" professional in but a single day. What really gets me is how many locations they managed to use, and how crisp the acting feels. Maybe there's something about the rough, unplanned nature of it all that put everyone at their best. Whatever it was, I really think Matt should just start making one of these a month.

Anyway, only the 25 highest voted entries will be eligible for phase two of the Insomniac video contest, where the folks at Apple will pick the short which best represents the kooky, zany, "look I'm so hip I did this in a day and you can totally tell and talk about how you could make something better than this if you tried using Apple brand merchandise" feel they probably want to get out of this thing for marketing reasons. As Matt and crew didn't douche it up enough they're probably screwed, but you can still vote for them here.

Voting requires registering with Apple, but you can use your i-Tunes ID if you use that service.

I entered some kind of funk where I could just not update Border-Town so this post is extremely late; the contest ends November 9th (this Friday) so you should probably vote ASAP. On the plus side, though, nobody reads this site so my tardiness probably affects little either way. I put up a banner ad for Melody awhile back, and since my wife saw the video the other day without me even telling her to so I guess it's worked somewhat.

Like with Matt's other contest, he's been doing a series of making-of videos on his MySpace blog. I find these much more interesting than with the prior making-of videos because they show the speed the video was produced. You can see them all at MisterFilms.com.

I've been fighting the temptation to write more about the One Laptop per Child Program (I already made a kind of jokey post about it awhile back) but I really can't help myself. The more I look at both the XO-1 laptop and the program itself, the more it seems to surpass the Tango as the cutting- edge, society-changing, pipe-dream technological innovation that consumes most of my thoughts. A major difference with the One Laptop per Child program is that it's already on the cusp of fulfilling it's mission and becoming a reality.

Now, pardon me if I spend a whole post regurgitating information on this program that's already well known and available the Internet.

The mission of the One Laptop per Child association (OLPC for short) is to, as the name suggests, give one laptop to each child in developing nations to fuel their educational needs.

The philosophy behind this is as follows: when we are children, up until we go to Kindergarten, all of our learning is based on curiosity. We learn the presence of the sun heralds the start of a new day and it's fall announces the night; we learn how gravity works, and how to eat dinner with our family members; etc. Human beings even teach themselves have to speak and learn the elements of language by curiosity and experimentation - think of the babbling sounds babies make attempting to form words.

Then one day, as Ivan Krstic (who I am cribbing from entirely) explains, we go to school and the paradigm for learning changes. Learning goes from something we teach ourselves through research as a response to curiosity to something that is learned in group settings, at set times, from a single authority figure. This works very well if the teacher is good, but has tragic results if the teacher is bad or unavailable. One of the reasons (and there are many) behind the OLPC program is so that kids in poor, "majority-world" countries will be able to learn on their own when traditional school is not in session or is unavailable. Open-source software designed to a ridiculous extent with transparency in mind (one button on the keyboard shows the source code), along with easy-access to the web, ensures this can occur so long as kids have an Internet connection or are in range of another XO-1.

They expect to mass-produce the XO-1 laptops and sell them to governments for $100 a piece in shipments of 250k. According to various interviews I'd heard, many schools (for example, China and Brazil) have a text book budget of $20 annually per child. That said, the text books are often out of date or contain factual errors.

I bring this up because the first thing people snidely say about this project is that spending money on laptops is a waste when governments could be funding libraries, medication, or food. Well the last two don't count; they basically amount to saying we should not spend money on education (you know, teach a man to fish). The first point might be valid, and I'm not an economist, sociologist or any other kind of "ist" that could know for sure if giving children laptops would lead to more positive results than better funding schools. The fact is, nothing like this has ever been done before - when students are normally given laptops, they're expensive Windows machines that are quite different from the XO-1, so there's probably no good way to tell. However, I feel that if kids in countries that don't even have electricity were given a decent laptop to play with they would spend much more time learning of their own free will then they'd spend studying in a school library that they may not have access to. Add in free e-books to this and suddenly giving every child a laptop sounds like a hell of a lot better than spending money building school facilities that may or may not get used or maintained. And as Nicholas Negroponte commented in a 60 minutes interview, some of these kids don't even have trees were teachers can stand, let alone hold a real class.

Aside from the incredible humanitarian mission of the project, the OLPC also has appeal for technology geeks. Maybe not just any technology geeks (such as the "snarky bloggers" referenced in this excellent NY Times video review), but definitely guys like me who are interested in seeing technology that is truly revolutionary - or as Wayan Vota from Geekcorps puts it, "clock stopping hot technology."

That's because these laptops will spend most of their lives in dusty, rural environments being handled by small children - a far cry from my magnum powered laptop which is always stored indoors at room temperature and travels in a backbreaking, heavy-duty case to stay away from nature and avoid the detection of children. Thus, a whole host issues that have been unconsidered by hardware manufacturer's for years had to be addressed: How can a laptop be useful in an environment without plug-in electricity? How will can a laptop survive in a dusty, sandy environment? How will a laptop be strong enough to stand getting carried around and possibly dropped repeatedly by a child for five or more years? If you read interviews with the OLPC team, a big concern of theirs is that the kids feel comfortable to just play around with the XO-1, something that won't happen if they think of it as expensive and fragile (the leading way to view portable electronics).

The technological innovation that's been summoned to answer these problems is reminiscent of the space race, albeit perhaps on a smaller scale.

For starters: because the laptop cannot depend on a traditional AC power plug, the initial prototypes featured a ridiculous looking (yet ridiculously awesome) bright yellow hand crank which could be turned to charge the machine.

Apparently this crank could've given you ten minutes of charge time for one minute of crank time. Plus it would have caused young men in all participating cultures of the world to recreate the hilarious euphemism "cranking it" in their native tongues when their dominant arms became freakishly larger (although since many of these young men are cruelly forced to spend so much time outdoors- oh, the humanity!- the effects may not have been noticeable). The crank was dropped, which, while sad for twits like me who will never legitimately need this laptop but thought the crank looked cool, was ultimately for the best.

The new versions instead can use a variety of plug in modules ranging from a typical AC power adapter to a solar power panel that could run the machine or charge the device. Additionally, the battery that is included lasts four times as many recharges longer than typical laptop batteries and costs only ten dollars to replace.

The XO-1 is also unique in that it contains no moving parts. This increases durability - if a kid drops this thing, the inert parts will be less prone to breaking. Another reason is, of course, power-consumption. Stunningly, the device spends most of it's time running on one to two watts of power, with peak usage going from four to five watts. By contrast, most US laptops run on roughly 30 to 40 watts.

See the official specs here.

Keeping with this focus on low power consumption, the CPU is dramatically slower than current industry grade tech, running at a meager 433 MHz. That doesn't seem like a lot, but I remember in the mid-nineties running Duke Nukem a hell of a lot faster when I finally got a 433 MHz processor (in contrast, my laptop has two CPUs with 1995 MHz each). Additionally, there is 256 MB of RAM, which sounds like a lot for what this is (again, my laptop has roughly eight times as much RAM).

The bigger bummer is the hard drive is only 1024 megabytes, or 1 gigabyte (most of the hard drives we use have tens if not hundreds of gigabytes). That's because it had to be different than traditional spinning hard drives with motors that use a lot of power. Instead it uses the same kind of storage found in most MP3 players. 1024 megabytes may not be a lot for music and entertainment, but for static pictures, text documents and e-books it'll get the job done.

Now that I've talked about some of the embarrassing negatives to these specs, let me go over the good stuff - and keep in mind all of this is currently offered for about $180 and is projected to cost $100 in roughly two years.

There's an internal SD card slot which is semi-hidden - it appears you have to swivel the monitor to gain access to the slot, which is underneath the screen. That right away alleviates some of hard drive space problems.

There are also three USB slots on the sides of the machine. I don't know if it will be possible to use external hard drives or not (again, this isn't really important for kids in poor countries) but the OLPC guys have mentioned that flash drives not only work, it is possible to boot from them. Apparently Microsoft actually has XO-1 laptops and is programming a version of Windows to boot off a flash drive, for all the young Nigerian kids who are worried the XO-1 won't work with their favorite Windows 98 apps.

The 7.5" display is a completely innovative (although only useful for this application... as far as anyone knows now). By using a strange new kind of low cost LCD, the XO-1 will have access to a moderate color LCD screen that doubles as a grayscale screen with twice the resolution when the back light is turned off. This gray scale also significantly increases the battery life and allow people to read e-books. The experience of using the high- resolution, sun-lit mode is generally compared to "looking at a newspaper." According to Wikipedia, later generations of the laptop are expected to use those fancy electronic paper displays we're always hearing are "just around the corner" (maybe this project will speed up their development?).

The keyboard features a water resistant membrane (see the New York Times review linked above to watch someone splash a bucket load of water on it). This membrane also will keep out dust and crap. This is a feature I wish would become standard on laptops - my own has a ton of hair and dust that is small enough to get into the tiny seems in the integrated keyboard, despite my absolute best efforts to handle it well (I often wash my hands before using it after eating). It's sort of amazing keyboards like this aren't already the standard.

The touch pad is actually "dual mode," having a "stylus area" and a "capacitive touch pad area." I'm not actually sure what that means but I'll venture a guess- you are required to use a stylus only to draw on the entire area of the pad but can use your fingers as well in the middle section, which might work like a normal laptop touch pad.

The device features AC97-compatible audio and two stereo speakers. I'm not a hardware guy, so again, I don't have much to add here. However, "AC97" is a word that pops up frequently when you hear projects developed for FreeDos, such as the insanely incredibly MP3 player MpxPlay. Totally off-topic here, but if you have an old computer with some kind of sound card, you can install FreeDos and MpxPlay, edit the autoexec.bat a bit and have a crazy awesome (and ineffecient energy-draining) MP3 player that boots in under ten seconds. Getting back on topic, "AC97-compatible" probably means it will be easy for people to write audio software for it.

There's also a microphone port - but it's not just any microphone port. They hacked it a bit to allow people to also plug in other cheap devices as well, such as thermostats (kids could do science experiments using them).

This thing also comes equipped with a video camera with 640 x 480 resolution at 30 FPS. One one hand, you can freak out and go "OMG they're giving 5 year old children video cameras!" but at the same time this will allow kids to be creative and play with the device. It could also allow communication with parents that may be illiterate.

Then there's the already mentioned game pad, with Sony Playstation style shape identifiable buttons - I'm a bit conflicted on that. Thankfully the d-pad looks different- they're using the standard non-patented amorphous blob shape which probably means it would be any good. Damn you and your immortal d-pad patents, Nintendo!

Finally, the device has two antennas, which stick up like rabbit ears and look funny. However, the antennas actually increase the wireless range significantly. In the same lecture I linked to above, Ivan Krstic said - and I'm not sure if I heard this right - that two people in Africa were were able to get their XO-1's to communicate with each other for up to two kilometers away. Insane.

Which brings me to the next thing about the XO-1 - the crazy effort put into Internet connectivity. Of course the thing supports standard IEEE 802.11 coming from the kind of Internet routers we have in our homes, but what about when routers are in short supply? Well the XO-1's are capable of creating their own ad-hoc networks to communicate with any other XO-1's in the area. They do this using Mesh networking capabilities that are built into the device itself. This is so transparent that it works without the children doing anything at all. This means that if one kid has a connection to the internet, he can let someone else who might be just out of reach of the router piggy back off his signal and get a connection to the net as well.

The OLPC project puts much focus into the act of collaboration. It's built-in networking features allow kids to work on projects together - for example, kids can simultaneously edit text documents or draw pictures together. They can also make annotations to texts they are reading to share with the class, such as "look, the man just said a dirty word!" The only times I ever collaborated with kids in class we put curse words and lewd sexual acts into group creative writing assignments, or drew genitals on other people's papers. But since teachers also get a laptop to join in and spy on the fun, hopefully certain collaborations will be kept to a minimum.

The UI is very different as well. Rather than feature over-lapping windows, it has a single "home" screen where you can start and switch between programs. There is also a second screen accessible from the home screen, or via a button click (at least, AFAIK from the live CD I played with) that shows you the people on your mesh network and what they're doing. This last feature is a lot like how the Nintendo DS's pico-chat feature should have worked; because the XO-1 will allow kids to see who in their vicinity is doing what at any time without quiting what their working on, it should be much more successful at being a good group toy.

Something true nerds will appreciate with this project is how it heralds the return of "smartly written code." Modern computers have become so fast that the Operating Systems and applications can afford to be fat, bloated, and lazy (they can also be more flexible at the expense of speed). This is kind of a traditional bitch among geeks (along with "Windows ruins everything") and has become such a cliché I was tired of hearing it, but I think I felt the reality of such sentiment when I tried to configure an old e-machine someone had donated to my parents. Now this machine reminded me of a fine and dandy Windows 98 computer I still have, but I was horrified when I discovered someone had installed Windows XP (most likely at the advice of unscrupulous computer repair-men). The machine ran so slow at everything it was impossible to do so much as surf the web unless you were very strategic in your mouse clicks.

By the same token, the old DOS PC I used in the mid-nighties ran a number of mouse capable GUI applications - the most memorable one being "Kid-Pix" (which I'm surprised still exists) - very well. So it's no surprise to me that, given the effort and push behind the OLPC project such amazing software is being created for the device.

What DOES surprise me though is... well, you remember that one key you can press to view the source code of any project you're running? The reason that works is that almost everything on the machine, from the application to Sugar itself, runs in the high level language Python. In other words, the entire machine runs all of it's apps in their own little Virtual Machine.

In case you don't know, a Virtual Machine (or VM) is a controlled environment where computer code is analyzed by another program, interpreted, and then executed. In other words, in theory alone, it is slow. Now I don't know a thing about Python, except that I've heard Lua (my scripting language of choice) is faster and takes up less memory. I also know that Microsoft .NET and Java are both memory hogs. Java was also too slow to do much quickly even on premium computers for a number of years. Meanwhile the .NET platform runs quickly but cheats by compiling code when it first sees it. So the idea that the XO-1 not only uses Python - an interpreted language - not just for select programs, but for almost everything is mind-blowing.

Maybe I'm going overboard and just need to take a closer look at Python, but let me tell you another story to relay to you how incredible this seems to me. When I was a college Junior I remember having a big impromptu discussion with some fellow Computer Science students at UTSA after class. Everyone was talking about how Windows "Longhorn" - which would eventually become Vista - would be totally driven by Microsoft .NET. A guy went so far as to say the entire file system would be written in .NET and that, for example, the Recycle Bin would be an object you could change and manipulate. At one point someone made the crack that a group of Linux loving Microsoft haters (myself excluded) were salivating at the prospect of using the next MS OS. Of course, like most of what was initially planned with Vista, none of that stuff ever came to pass.

Well, in the XO-1, the file system itself is actually written in Python. More incredibly, this is a file system that allows source- control like Journaling (basically, it saves just the changes you make to a file in a super smart way to save space yet give you ultimate "un-do" powers).

In the same lecture I keep referencing, Ivan Krstic also discusses security. As you may know from the hilarious Mac Ad about Vista's overbearing security, one way to make sure users are free from Virus attacks - or at least, can't blame the OS for virus attacks - is to constantly prop them all the time when software wishes to do something. You can also keep a list of trusted and untrusted programs, the later technique being employed in anti-virus software.

Because the XO-1 has to be open to the kiddos, it must overcomes this problem as young kids can't be relied upon to remember passwords or advanced security settings, and must also be given the freedom to do whatever they want. The XO-1 overcomes this problem (let's hope) by treating every application as untrusted and running it in it's own VM. From a VM perspective, there is thus a lot of things malware simply can't do. In fact, Bitfrost, the security platform for the XO-1, doesn't even consider anti- virus or anti-spyware software because the platform renders these issues moot.

Now, I don't mean to be beating up Vista since maintaining compatibility with twenty years worth of programs is a very difficult task well worth appreciation, but so many of these new features in the OLPC software was rumored to be in Vista ages ago. Yet, the solutions to these problems (again, knock on wood) may first see the light of day in one of the slowest new computers ever built.

Not only is the OLPC project coming from an incredibly idealistic and pure-hearted place, it is acting as a test bed for what could become the very future of computing.

Again, for two weeks starting November 12, people in America will be able to buy one of these things for $400. They're actually buying two laptops; one for themselves, and one to give to a kid. You even get a tax deduction.

Since I wrote that last post, I have been more than a little tempted... the XO-1 has nearly turned into an object of obsession. I'm hoping it will pass soon because at $400 I have other priorities. But I'm beginning to wonder if this would be more important to me, especially since the time frame to get one is a paltry two weeks.

Additional OLPC Links:

• OLPC main site
• Excellent New York Times review (with even better video review)
• Inside One Laptop per Child: Episode one
• Hardware Specs
• XO-1 pictures and videos
  (watch the 60 Minutes segment here, which addresses how Intel is using price dumping to try to eliminate the OLPC project)
• Video speech explaining security and Python environment of OLPC - very long, but worth watching if your technically minded.
• Bitfrost Security
• OLPC News
• OLPC TV
  Nicholas Negroponte keynote at Harvard
• Site where I got the picture of the prototype OLPC.
• Kind of old article about possibly bringing the laptops to the schools in the states.
• Doom on the XO-1

Let me end with a link to this video. At the end of it, a small Nigerian boy walks across his village holding the Xo-1 by it's handle.

I, myself, never got a laptop until a little over a year and a half ago. But computers (and videogames, which inspired me to learn how to use computers) definitely played a massive role in my desire to gain an education and teaching me "how to learn," as Negroponte would put it. The difference is, every computer I ever used as a child was a clunky desktop, usually so large it required it's own desk if not area of the house. The downside of this was it sort of habituated me to the requirement of going inside (and sometimes even washing my hands) to play with the computer or use electronics. To say it wasn't integrated in the kind of life I should have, by cliche, been living as a kid is an understatement. It's nice to think that in some of the poorest countries of the world, kids will have access to the same well-spring of curiosity and creativity I was lucky enough to have, but because it will be on their terms, the experience might be even better.

According to Games Are Fun, Nintendo has finally released the covetted late N64-era shooter Sin and Punishment for the Wii's Virtual Console. Sin and Punishment was originally released in Japan towards the end of the N64's life and thus never got a release in America. This was one of the games (along with Earthbound Zero and Mother 3) people would bring up back when they thought the Virtual Console would be a wonderful fantasy that would fulfill their every desire.

Even better, though, is that Nintendo's barely translated the game at all, other than the "menus along with some words that appear during gameplay," to quote Games Are Fun. If you watch the video the title screen is the same as the original Japanese version.

The half-assed translation is actually a good thing, because Sin and Punishment is being released as one of two flagship titles for the Virtual Console's new import "genre" (how import is a genre, I do not know). The limited translation might set a precedent where companies can translate only the bare essentials of previously unlocalized games and not have to take time to make changes no one gives a damn about, like creating a new title screen or getting rid of Japanese subtitles.

You may remember about a year ago when I said I would wait for the Wii and cited my dissapointment with the Virtual Console. While I still think Nintendo's staggered release was designed to squeeze as much money out of early adopter's pockets as possible (possibly causing them to get tired of paying for Virtual Console games before the good stuff came out in the process) I definately think this new "import" genre is a move in the right direction since it'll grease the wheels on letting people play rare / obscure / cool stuff that the IP holders would probably not care enough about to do a proper "traditional" release for. It's really great to see Nintendo isn't requiring Treasure to jump through any hoops in the localization process other than just translating the bare essentials.

The other game that's being released is Super Mario Bros : The Lost Levels, which anyone who played Super Mario All-Stars will know is the US term for the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2 (I'll insult my audience by mentioning the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros 2 was different from our version and was just an enhanced edition of SMB1). Other than a few changes - Mario and Luigi have slightly different skill sets, and there's a poison mushroom (the game's sole new enemy) - the game is quite similar to Super Mario Bros 1, only with excruciatingly difficult levels and a game that's twice as long with unlockable secrets if you do extremely well. The entire point of the game seems to be to give players who beat SMB1 a bigger challenge and in that it succeeds. The game is so damn mean there's a part where you can actually jump over the flagpole without touching it, and all you get for this is an unavoidable warp-zone back to the first stage.

Some people say when this game was released as part of Super Mario All-Stars too much was changed to make everything easier. I remember renting All-Stars and playing that version in the seventh grade and being frustrated as hell, but I wasn't as big of a nerd then so maybe now the changes would bother me? It'll also be nice to see the game in it's original form, which used slightly modified SMB1 graphics. I can't wait to play as the white overall version of Luigi. Hopefully the Wii will throw in the Famicom Disk system's boot-up screen to further simulate the experience.

This move, along with Super Mario Galaxy, will cause me to find some way to buy a Wii this Fall or Winter. It would probably be a little easier if I hadn't just spent $800 fixing my wife's (and really, my only) car, only to spend another $200 fixing it when the battery exploded 48 hours later. Such is life I suppose.

I'm sure by now everyone has heard about the One Laptop per Child program. I'm sure many of us have seen these dinky green things and said "Gee, I wouldn't mind getting one of those for $100."

Well the more I learn about it, the more it seems like maybe kids in developing countries could use $100 (or $180, the current price) better than buying a laptop.

Until I saw this picture:

My friends, that's not just a laptop. That's a game machine! And I want one.

As it turns out, for a short while you'll be able to buy one as part of this new "Give 1 Get 1" program, where for $400 you buy a laptop for a kid in a developing country and then get a second one "for your child."

I'm sure that many of us can think of much better uses of that laptop than learning. Such as using a Nintendo emulator to play Super Mario Bros one.

I have to admit, I'm tempted. If I just earned 50% more than I do right now I'd have already busted out the credit card.

According to the XO-1's creators, one of the goals was to stigmitize the laptop by making it look so childish that kid's wouldn't just sell them on the black market because no adult would want to be seen with one. This plan failed the moment they gave it a d-pad equipped gaming configuration. Although the d-pad might be kind of small for my tastes...