Another year have passed since the last blog in Dec 2019. What a year in 2020 with Covid19 pandemic affecting Malaysia and worldwide. My intended trip back to Malaysia in March 2020 did not materialised - instead I am in lockdown in Melbourne since Feb 2020. Despite that lots of have happen over the year which has been written in the dLEAP Kuala Gandah CheWong Website. The most recent entry is the introduction of a Wifi Internet Router with KancilBox for the community.
Instead of internet access from the resource room located inside the Elephant Centre we are locating it in the comunity Centre (Balai). As we have not been back for a few months we have no direct information as to how well it is used. In 2020 we had a number of Zoom sessions with 2 young girls who have been offered a place in a community college to continue their study. Two recycled normal laptops were given to them and money was raised to support their study. Unfortunately the Pandemic has affected their study and they had to study offline instead. The value of the internet becomes apparent with Malaysia under MCO - Movement Control Order.
dLEAP had a little publicity from the local newspaper The Star. As such we were able to get some support from people who were interested in what we are doing - getting recycled laptop and some donations.
Sustainability of dLEAP is something we have to deal with as it has been seven years. Our resources are limited and Covid has made things difficult for regular followup. We found that some publicity has positive effect if our work can get mainstream attention. With that in mind I submitted to BettAsia for an Award in mind. I hope something good can come out from this.
When life can get back to normal we hope to see how to improve the assessibility of the resource room and Internet. We still have some recycled XOs for more deployment and replacement of broken XOs.
I am aware that recent changes of not supporting older stuff. Youtube or Zoom do not support older XO's OS and browsers. Video access of youtube videos by XO is now problematic as the webpage do not show up in Browse. I see no upgrade to the XO Fedora OS is underway despite the fact that the latest linux kernel has support for XO 1.75. Lack of development fund and volunteers to make XO better in current time. Thus millions of XOs will be even less appealing in current reality. We are now left with legacy machines that will run legacy interactive flash based applications instead. Yet the future can still be in our hands if the heart is there to make a difference with what is left.
Happy 2021 and we keep safe.
