You can be your own Geordi La Forge and build yourself a fully capable GNU/Linux pocket computer with this uber inexpensive five-inch touch screen and a Raspberry Pi.
The Video Screening Room
A Raspberry Pi enthusiast in Thailand shares this video showing how you can take your Raspberry Pi on the road with a $28 five-inch HDMI touch screen available from AliExpresss.
The touch-screen capabilities of this cute device bring to mind HyperCard-like interactive stacks that youth and adults could create using the free, open source Community Edition of LiveCode. Imagine students showing their parents or guardians interactive presentations — including text, graphics, and video — from branching “cards” that the student themselves had made.
This cute little screen makes it feasible for a school to send such a presentation home with a student. For those of you too young to have witnessed it, HyperCard — which shipped free with every Mac between 1987 and 2000, unleashed a mountain of creativity. HyperCard was abandoned by Apple in 2000, but many of its capabilities live on in the product called LiveCode, created separately by a Scottish company.
LiveCode (https://livecode.com) has been a popular commercial software product for many years. In 2013, LiveCode announced an open source Community Edition available for Linux, Mac and Windows.
For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.
