Quick update everyone: all components are now here. Ram and I finished building the computers, and with the exception of the hard drives, they are done: motherboards and monitors have been individually tested, the cases are assembled with the motherboards inside, and the RAM is all installed. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m running into some problems with the cloning process on the hard drives. It’s 1:03AM on the 4th of December at the moment, and I leave on the 5th. I’m wondering if I’ll have enough time to clone all the hard drives. Even after cloning the hard disks, I will need to run “GParted” to change the partition size from 160GB to 250GB (I should have done this before cloning, but the 109MB download has been going for six hours so far). The upside is that any cloning I don’t finish can be done in the villages, but I would still like to finish as much I can before I leave.
Tomorrow I will meet with OLE Nepal to see about getting some more educational material to preload on these computers. They are Room To Read’s Nepali partner, and I am very interested in what they have done so far: they are also the OLPC representative in Nepal, with I believe 26 schools using the OLPC computers. If we distribute just one computer to each of these schools, with the preloaded educational content, the preexisting OLPCs will have access to a host of educational material that was previously unavailable: the XO laptops have small ~8GB flash storage, so by adding one of these computers with a 250GB hard drive, the amount of information the students using the laptops can access will increase dramatically. I will also try to visit the orphanage and the school in Patan, but who knows what my time constraints will be — it all depends on whether or not these hard drives can be cloned and installed in time. I will be bringing twenty computers to Pokhara, so that is the minimum number of HDDs I need to setup. So much work! Things have been really, really busy today: I woke up at 8:30AM and I’m still working even though it is past 1:00AM. I’m glad I found a nearby shop that sells two liter bottles of Mountain Dew, I wouldn’t be functioning otherwise.
I have rented a car to take me to Pokhara, rather than a bus. It is an extra $35 USD on top of the cost of a bus ticket, but I wouldn’t feel safe with twenty computers sitting in the cargo hold below the passenger component. It would be frustrating to come all this way just to have a hole poked through a hard drive on the way to the village or a mix up with the bags: I will coddle the computers and keep them on my lap the whole way!
On the down side, Shyami found out I was leaving today, and he didn’t take it well at all. I guess in the middle of the drama of delayed components and 16-hour workdays nobody told him that I’d be leaving Kathmandu in two days time, and I feel terrible about it. Earlier today I tried to cheer him up by playing carrom board, a game similar to billiards but played with the fingers and Necco-wafer shaped pucks, but he just kept saying “you Saturday no go” through tearful sobs. The worst part is that I’m not even sure if I should tell him that I’m coming back — I may not have time to come back to Kalikasthan before I leave on the 17th. Really, really heartbreaking. I think what makes it especially tough is that we really don’t have a way to keep in touch: he doesn’t have an email address or a phone number, and even if he did there’s still the problem of the language barrier.
I’ll try and have another update before I leave Kathmandu.
That’s all for now.
Charles
I was born in London, England. At the age of ten, I moved to Hong Kong, which opened up a whole new part of the world: Asia. Since then, I have enjoyed traveling to different locales around the world. Having graduated from High School, I am taking a gap year to work on a computer project in Nepal, and later a cultural immersion trip in Ghana. This is the blog I am using to keep the world notified. 
Glad to hear your gonna give a boost to OLE Nepal (give them my regards). Might you give OLPC News a Guest Post on what you’re doing? I know the readers would love to hear of your efforts.
Wayan, thanks for finding interest in my project! Currently, the OLPC computers only have 8GB of storage space, correct? Many OLPC projects aim to supplement this limitation with servers that access the XO laptops over the built-in WiFi. I know OLE for instance has done an excellent job with their E-Paath, E-Paati and E-Pustakalaya content, all of which can be run over a server.
However, these servers are generally 945GC-chipset based MSI Wind or Asus EeePC computers. This project’s computers run on the far newer 945GSEJT motherboards (also with an Intel Atom N270 processor), consuming one third of the power and adding the ability to run off 12V DC input (for instance, a solar-charged car battery). By switching to the computers I am providing, each server can save around 20-25W without sacrificing performance or increasing cost over the existing retail computers.
I was very impressed by OLE’s operation during our meeting today; they are doing a great job of running Nepal’s OLPC program.