Jon Camfield

Thinking about tomorrow’s threats against human rights and Internet Freedom. Frustrated Optimist, gardener, salsa dancer, cook, husband, dad, embarrassed Texan. Opinions here are my own. he/they.

4 minute read

Disclaimer: If you take this post seriously, you need to relax.

UPDATE:There are some LOLPCs hiding away at lolnptech!

I've been very let down by the lack of mashups between OLPC and the LOLcat sillyness. Why, you already have 2/3rds of the letters in the name. It can't possibly be any nerdier than LOL Non-Profit Technology; with captions such as "Ur nonprofit iz running on 486 PCs and Windoz 95?! No, srsly! Whut r U rly using?"; or LOLCode; which turns the traditional LOLCats "captions" into (shudder) executable code, such as this "Hello World" routine:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE


xkcd on lolcats LolCats even have a wikipedia page and an xkcd comic about them. So I think it can’t possibly sink any lower in humor value than the LOLCat phenomenon already has. If you don’t get it, don’t worry – you’re probably better off than the rest of us. It’s basically silly photos of cats with captions explaining what is going through the cat’s head at the time. Cats, evidentially, think in short, poorly-spelled, SMS-like grammar-less tidbits. Who knew?

Regardless; I've yet to see any application of this to the OLPC -- what I'll dub; LOLPCs. So, gentle readers, I present you with the first (evar1!1!eleven) LOLPC collection; and invite you to use any one of the available Lolcat creation tools to make more.




I can haz implementasun plan?Of course, even when attempting humor, we've got to get our digs in. See -- even the laptop wants a solid implementation plan!


Is it can it be free market timez now?This XO seems to be of the opinion that it’d fare better freed of any top-down approach and find its way on the free market (I think it’s been reading too much NextBillion.net)


Where mah mesh friendz??Sometimes, the laptops get lonely when you don’t bring them to mesh meetups often enough.


wifi mesh? NOM NOM NOMSaving the best for last, Britt Selvitelle gives us some “awww” factor; but also reveals the real motive: “This actually leads to better wireless reception;” begging the question – is it one laptop per child … or one child per laptop???



That's out of my system (for now).

This post will also show up over at OLPCNews.com over the weekend -- the comments (complaints? LOLThreads?) will be there.

Updates:
Ivan K's already created a LOLPC wiki page

See also Ethan Zuckerman's ETECH talk on cute cats and digital activism