MIT Media lab has started a project that will put $100 laptops in the hands of children who normally wouldn’t have them in countries where, in some cases, they do not even have electricity.
The students will be able to use the laptops at school and at home. One power solution possibility is a crank […]

I now have a free software FAQ posted in the Library for all visitors to view. You can download the FAQ and use it under the license terms of this site. I have both PDF format (http://www.lanterntorch.org/documents/Free%20Software.pdf) and Oasis Open Document Text (http://www.lanterntorch.org/documents/Free%20Software.odt) format (no guarantee that it will work in OpenOffice.org though, sorry […]

OK, maybe not, but at least someone advising him is. Think about it. By appointing John Roberts, a 50-year-old man, as Supreme Court Justice, he has guaranteed that one of his own will influence American law for at least the next 20 years (if Allah wills). Imagine that. Now, Dubya has […]

I’m doing something that I’ve never done with KDE (http://www.kde.org): beta testing.Â
I installed KDE (http://www.kde.org) 3.5 beta 1. Why? Because Novell released
binaries of it, and I couldn’t resist. It’s easy to resist when
you have to build from source. This was just too tempting.
The only probablems I’ve noticed are some Konqueror crashes […]

Good news! I’ve upgraded the Photo Gallery to Gallery2. It’s SO much easier than G1. Special thanks to Pedro Gilberto for the beautiful theme.

The techie news sites are lighting up with reports of Opera, the
alternative web browser, going free. Yes, that’s right. It
is now free of charge and can be downloaded from Opera’s web
site. I’m not going to provide the download link. I’m sure
you can find it on your own, but I would like […]

I just found out that I have to monitor students on a standardized test. Fortunately, this laptop has over 4 hours of battery time left on it, and I have two eyes.

A German scientist, Christian Koch, has made an amazing invention that turns waste (”paper, plastics, textiles, and rubbish”) into diesel fuel that can be used in normal diesel-powered automobiles. It is much more cost-efficient that gasoline, although I don’t know how environmentally friendly it is.
Instead of this being a major breakthrough news story, a […]

Well, we rolled in three new carts of Apple iBooks. Now each grade level has their own cart. We also got some new digital video cameras. The iBooks are a real treat for the kids to do video editing.
My real project with the iBooks, however, is blog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog)ging. I want the […]

Last night I was violently struck with a migraine. In all of my years, I have never experienced anything like it. It came at me all of sudden and without warning. It was so severe that I was standing, and it nearly knocked me to my feet. Anyway, it really opened […]