A story doing the rounds of Slashdot, OSNews et al today is this one from ComputerWorld Australia. James Cameron (no not that one) is testing the OLPC mesh networking in the Australian Outback where he lives.

In one of those small world moments - James is a former colleague of mine from Digital Australia. Though at the time we were working together he was living considerably closer to Sydney.

The mesh networking in OLPC XO is one of the features that I think sets it apart from some of the other ‘cheap’ notebooks that have become common recently. We bought an OLPC XO for Sylvie at Christmas in part because we felt it as a good donation to a worthy cause and also so she could have a computer of her own to interact with. The Mesh networking is not something we’ve tried since I don’t have a second machine or any of the other requisite hardware (and we have pretty ubiquitous WIFI at home too).