Oh, but lest we forget the *first* attempt at a Star Wars television show. It might have been close to 30 years ago, and Lucas may want to officially deny it even exists, but the "Star Wars Holiday Special will forever more be burned into our collective memories. So let's hope the franchise doesn't get that out of hand again.
I built my 4 year old daughter and 2 1/2 year old son a desktop PC with the VIA artigo kit and an LCD monitor, and installed Ubuntu on it. I run the browser through the Dan's Guardian proxy server. The computer is set up in our den, where my wife and I are able to both interact with the kids, and supervise their usage. We limit them to pbskids.org, and nickjr.com. I added some code to the firefox start script that checks for a flag file/tmp/notrightnow, and plays an ogg file of me saying 'not right now kids, maybe later' before exiting, and am working on crontabs to schedule usage times. I think you'd find that a laptop is perhaps too delicate for little hands, and although the little artigo PC is small, it is not portable, so the kids have to stay where they can be supervised. One drawback is that the Nick Jr. website has flash video clips from their TV shows. When the kids get into the clips, we nudge them back to the games. Our intent is to not have the computer turn into another passive video viewing outlet. One other benefit is that I have the kid's computer configured into a print queue on one of my servers. My daughter prints out coloring pages that the different sites offer.
Before we bought the computer for the kids, we gave them the Leap Frog ClickStart, which teaches basic keyboard and mousing skills, as well as spelling, letter, and number recognition. It may be a good starting point for your 2 year-old, but of course your mileage may vary.
I did intentionally start the kids out on a Linux box, and for several reasons. It does a much better job with lower-powered hardware, it is less prone to malware, and it also is cheaper than a windows license.
Other sources of early 20th century recordings
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Digitizing Rare Vinyl
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· Score: 1
I've owned a DLP projector for 4 years now, and I've recommended Samsung and Mitsubishi DLP rear-projection televisions when asked. Some of my motivations: Plasma is subject to burn-in -- LG incorporates a 'dot-crawl' feature in their plasma displays that moves the image over one pixel, then up, then left, etc, to help mitigate this. If your panel suffers burn-in, you're out the cost of replacing the major component in your television/monitor. With DLP/LCD, you're only ongoing cost is replacement lamps, and they last quite a while./. also reported that Samsung is close to releasing a DLP display driven by an LED light source. When choosing between LCD and DLP, one thing I might recommend reading about is how well the LCD panel retains its color purity over time. Granted, I saw this on the TI DLP site, but they demonstrated degradation in color purity over time of the LCD panel vs. DLP. There's more information at http://dlp.com/dlp_technology/dlp_technology_white _papers.asp (FWIW, I am an interested consumer. I do not work for TI, nor for any manufacturer of consumer/professional electronic equipment)
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Oh, but lest we forget the *first* attempt at a Star Wars television show. It might have been close to 30 years ago, and Lucas may want to officially deny it even exists, but the "Star Wars Holiday Special will forever more be burned into our collective memories. So let's hope the franchise doesn't get that out of hand again.
I built my 4 year old daughter and 2 1/2 year old son a desktop PC with the VIA artigo kit and an LCD monitor, and installed Ubuntu on it. I run the browser through the Dan's Guardian proxy server. The computer is set up in our den, where my wife and I are able to both interact with the kids, and supervise their usage. We limit them to pbskids.org, and nickjr.com. I added some code to the firefox start script that checks for a flag file /tmp/notrightnow, and plays an ogg file of me saying 'not right now kids, maybe later' before exiting, and am working on crontabs to schedule usage times. I think you'd find that a laptop is perhaps too delicate for little hands, and although the little artigo PC is small, it is not portable, so the kids have to stay where they can be supervised. One drawback is that the Nick Jr. website has flash video clips from their TV shows. When the kids get into the clips, we nudge them back to the games. Our intent is to not have the computer turn into another passive video viewing outlet. One other benefit is that I have the kid's computer configured into a print queue on one of my servers. My daughter prints out coloring pages that the different sites offer.
Before we bought the computer for the kids, we gave them the Leap Frog ClickStart, which teaches basic keyboard and mousing skills, as well as spelling, letter, and number recognition. It may be a good starting point for your 2 year-old, but of course your mileage may vary.
I did intentionally start the kids out on a Linux box, and for several reasons. It does a much better job with lower-powered hardware, it is less prone to malware, and it also is cheaper than a windows license.
Don't forget http://www.jazz-on-line.com/. This site has 21,000 tunes available.
I've owned a DLP projector for 4 years now, and I've recommended Samsung and Mitsubishi DLP rear-projection televisions when asked. Some of my motivations: Plasma is subject to burn-in -- LG incorporates a 'dot-crawl' feature in their plasma displays that moves the image over one pixel, then up, then left, etc, to help mitigate this. If your panel suffers burn-in, you're out the cost of replacing the major component in your television/monitor. With DLP/LCD, you're only ongoing cost is replacement lamps, and they last quite a while. /. also reported that Samsung is close to releasing a DLP display driven by an LED light source. When choosing between LCD and DLP, one thing I might recommend reading about is how well the LCD panel retains its color purity over time. Granted, I saw this on the TI DLP site, but they demonstrated degradation in color purity over time of the LCD panel vs. DLP. There's more information at http://dlp.com/dlp_technology/dlp_technology_white _papers.asp (FWIW, I am an interested consumer. I do not work for TI, nor for any manufacturer of consumer/professional electronic equipment)
Anybody notice how the article featured a hyperlink for more info on Apache. Did you click it? (G)