Sugar Labs Nonprofit Announces v2 of Sugar on a Stick with Improved E-Book Readers, Recycles Any USB Stick Into Learning Environment for Children; Partners with Nexcopy, Inc.

PARIS, December 8, 2009 — Netbook World Summit — Sugar Labs(R), volunteer-driven nonprofit provider of the Sugar Learning Platform for over one-million children around the world, announces the release of Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry. Available for download at https://www.sugarlabs.org, Sugar on a Stick can be loaded onto any ordinary 1Gb or greater flash drive to reboot any PC, netbook or recent Mac directly into the child-friendly Sugar environment without touching the existing installation. Sugar is also available for GNU/Linux distributions, runs under virtualization on Windows and Apple OS X, and features built-in classroom collaboration and automatic backup to a Journal. The latest version of Sugar offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined updating of Activities for children, easier keyboard configuration, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash content, and more. New Activities such as Physics and OOo4Kids join updated favorites such as Browse and Read, suitable for reading e-books.

“Sugar on a Stick is a great way to experience Sugar”, commented Walter Bender, Sugar Labs executive director. “In this holiday season, we wish to remind parents and teachers that e-books are not only for costly reader units for the well-to-do, but freely available as part of the open-access to knowledge movement to help children everywhere develop critical learning skills and to bridge the digital divide wherever it exists.”

Sugar on a Stick includes several e-book reader Activities to find and display e-books in PDF, EPUB, and DejaVu formats. The Read Etexts Activity can read e-books out loud, converting any old PC or inexpensive netbook into a text-to-speech aid for disabled readers. With Sugar, children can even make their own e-books. Thousands of e-books for children are available on websites such as Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive Children’s Library, epubBooks.com, Feedbooks.com, and ManyBooks.net. Other sites offer online reading, such as the International Children’s Digital Library.

Pilot Sugar projects are underway in American and European schools. School administrators wishing to deploy Sugar will be interested in OLPC’s recently updated XS school server software, which provides “safety net” and connectivity services at the school level: backup, content distribution, filtered access to the Internet, and Moodle integration. To assist schools interested in testing this technology, Sugar Labs has partnered with Nexcopy, Inc. of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, an industry leader in USB duplicator solutions, to open https://recycleusb.com. Nexcopy will collect used USB sticks, reload them with Sugar on a Stick, and forward them to Sugar Labs for distribution to schools. Nexcopy has also donated a 20-stick USB duplication unit to Sugar Labs.

Greg Morris, President of Nexcopy, commented,

“Nexcopy is proud to partner with a nonprofit organization such as Sugar Labs. We believe the Sugar Learning Platform is clearly a step in the right direction for getting children involved with personal computers. Our objective is to give Sugar Labs the back-end equipment support needed to make this philanthropy successful and help with producing the large number of Sugar Sticks needed for global deployment. I am very honored Nexcopy is a part of this process.”

For more information, please contact:

Sugar Labs: Sean Daly, Marketing Coordinator
website: https://www.sugarlabs.org
e-mail: pr!@!sugarlabs.org
telephone: +1-857-254-1100

Nexcopy Inc.: Greg Morris
website: https://www.nexcopy.com
e-mail: contact!@!nexcopy.com
telephone: +1-949-481-6478

About Sugar Labs
Sugar Labs, a volunteer-driven, nonprofit organization, is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Originally part of the One Laptop Per Child project, Sugar Labs coordinates volunteers around the world who are passionate about providing educational opportunities to children through the Sugar Learning Platform. Sugar Labs is supported by donations and is seeking funding to accelerate development. For more information, please visit https://www.sugarlabs.org.

About Nexcopy Incorporated
Nexcopy Incorporated specializes in developing and manufacturing the finest and most feature-rich flash memory duplicators in the market. Pioneering the solid-state memory duplication market, Nexcopy supplies Central and South America, Europe, India, Asia, Pacific Rim and serves the U.S. market through its headquarters in California.

Sugar Labs is a registered trademark of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Other names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Actor Morgan Freeman and his production company Digiboo are trying to break ground with sales and distribution of movies via USB. We love the idea!

USB Movie sticks might become a thing of the future as Digiboo plans to launch over 100 kiosks in Hollywood Video stores next year; the first will roll out in January. People will be able to plug a USB device into the kiosk, download movies to rent or own, and then plug them in to any USB 2.0 or 3.0-compatible devices.

Before you ask, yes, DRM is layered into the movie content so put away your ideas of bit-for-bit USB copies to pirate your movies. However, you now own the content on a portable device which will plug into just about anything including Xbox or game consoles, cars, computers, and set-top boxes. No word on how transferable the format will be to get the rented video from USB to something like an iPhone or PDA for portable playback.

About two years ago we started reporting on the USB music albums and now it appears we’ll see more articles about USB movie sticks.

UPDATE: USB Scrub by Nexcopy now supports Win7, Win10 (32/64bit) and Windows 11

USB Registry Cleaner Tool which is FREE!

Did you know Windows can make over 260 registry entries with a single enumeration of a USB stick? This means for those with multiple flash drives, your registry will get extremely cluttered and bogged down.

With flash drives dirt cheap these days, you’ll find at least a couple dozen going into your computer throughout the year. That would be over 6,240 registry entries.

USB Scrub is a free utility from Nexcopy which performs a deep cleaning of those unused drivers and registry edits.

We gave USB Scrub a try, and it worked great. We went from enumerating a single USB stick in 45 seconds to enumerating that stick in less than 12 seconds.

In addition, if you have a USB stick that doesn’t perform correctly or the Windows OS doesn’t see it, chances are the USB Scrub will clear up those problems and your drive will work once again. This is because a registry entry can become corrupt, and simply clearing it out will resolve your issue.

So let’s take a closer look.

Using RegShot (a free application which takes a snapshot before and after an event and compares only the changed registry values), I took a snapshot before and after a USB stick was connected and ejected. The result was this:

• 78 Registry Keys created
• 183 Registry Values added
• 261 Registry edits in total!

Here is a snapshot. Click the image to get the full text file:

Next, I took a snapshot of the registry before a stick was connected, then ran USB Scrub, then took the second registry snapshot. This is what I got:

• 1 Registry Key added
• 3 Registry Values added

Clearly we have a big difference. Clearly we have a great cleaning tool for USB devices in Windows.

If you have a USB flash drive not working correctly, a slow computer, or you are a heavy user of removable drives, give USB Scrub a try. You’ll see a noticeable difference in USB enumeration.

As a closing note, when the enumeration speed went from 45 seconds to 12 seconds, USB Scrub reported that it cleared over 9,000 registry entries.

USB Scrub is a free utility. There is no malware or spyware.

Unfortunately, USB Scrub only supported Windows XP in the past. The maker, Nexcopy, has now updated support for Windows 7 and Windows 10. (Does not support Windows 8.)

UPDATE: Download link now supports Windows 7 and Windows 10 (32/64bit).

Download USB Scrub. Source: EverythingUSB.com.