With the first three, my host naming lacked imagination. I called them pizero, pi3b, and pizero2. Boring! I decided to start naming them alphabetically, after actual types of pie. As pictured above (left to right) the host names and what I’m doing are:
apple: always up on my network, running Pi-hole (awesome!), Homebridge, and Home Assistant (which I still need to configure).
The theme for this week’s WordPress.com Daily Post Photo Challenge is Path. As I think back on 2016, my sabbatical stands out the most. Having 3 months off work allowed me to focus on time, which might be our most important, yet undervalued, resource. Once time is gone, it’s gone. Also an appropriate theme as I turn 37 today.
The first program I remember “writing” was on a TRS-80 connected to a TV for the display and a cassette tape recorder for the disk drive. The language used was BASIC. I did nothing more than copy the code out of a book. It made bars of different color appear on the screen. Fancy stuff! I was probably 8-10 years old if I had to guess.
I don’t remember touching a computer much after that until we had WordPerfect, the Oregon Trail, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego in one of my middle school classes. I did try writing a few choose your adventure type things on a TI-86 calculator in high school, though I mostly used it to store formulas and notes for cheating on tests.
I didn’t really get into writing code until I switched my major from Accounting to Computer Science in the first month of college. I wish I’d been more interested in those earlier years.
Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer… because it teaches you how to think.
–Steve Jobs
While browsing at Toys”R”Us to buy gifts for my nieces, I prefer to find something in the learning or creative sections because they get plenty of toys from everyone else. My mom had picked up a book of mazes for me to get Kennedy (6), because she’d been really into them lately. When I saw the Code & Go™ Robot Mouse Activity Set I was excited and didn’t hesitate to put it in my shopping cart.
Today I sat down with Kennedy and showed her how it worked. It took her a few mazes to get the hang of separating steps, but before long she had the hang of it and was even able to do her own form of debugging when there was a mistake. Here she is programming and testing card 9 after planning it out. I think this was the first one she did on her first attempt.
Like any good programmer, by card #16 she wanted to do away the planning stage and directly input her program. It worked out, but the 17th maze was long and complex. After having to start from scratch three times, she realized the planning stage was useful.We played for over 3 straight hours! After finishing all 20 cards, it was time to design her own mazes.
Yesterday I had introduced her to ScratchJr on the iPad.
With ScratchJr, young children (ages 5-7) can program their own interactive stories and games. In the process, they learn to solve problems, design projects, and express themselves creatively on the computer.
I showed her around the app and she seemed to be having fun. I’m curious to see if she’ll use the app on her own and start building stories.
I think it’s a shame programming isn’t a core class in schools yet. It opens so many doors and will only be getting more important. Writing code and making a computer do what you want makes math fun and really does teach you how to think because you have to break things down and learn about logic.
Unfortunately many adults think it’s too late to learn to write code. It’s not.
The first thing many of us write in a computer language is called a Hello World program because the goal is simply to make the words “Hello World” display on the screen. Browse through Hello World Programs in 300 Programming Languages to see how simple many of them are.
Most well-known English versions of the Hebrew Bible translate the Hebrew “Hallelujah” as two Hebrew words, generally rendered as “Praise (ye)” and “the LORD” … –Wikipedia I’m not religious, but there’s something about this song. It’s always extremely calming and beautiful to hear this time of year. Here’s a neat version by Pentatonix. What’s your favorite […]
I posted some very quick initial thoughts after about 10 minutes with the new MacBook Pro. Last week I was able to get everything installed and configured for work and spend some time with it. It’s the best computer I’ve ever used, passing the MacBook Air I had in 2011.
My two favorite things are the keyboard and Touch ID. Not only do I love the clicky sound of the keys, but the feel is completely new and makes it seem like I’m typing a lot faster. Having Touch ID in Mac OS is everything I hoped it would be. Using 1Password is a completely different experience.
I also like the trackpad and the feel of “clicking.” Admittedly, I don’t click much on the Mac since I have Tap to click enabled in System Preferences. I was worried about the increased size of the trackpad but it hasn’t been an issue; their wrist detection software is as good as people said it was.
The difference in size (all dimensions) and weight are considerable from the previous generation, which hadn’t changed much in years. The battery does seem to drain faster though, which isn’t great.
I’m not sold on the usefulness of the Touch Bar yet. It’s a neat concept and done well. Time will tell on this one. Not having a physical esc button has tripped me up more than I expected.
Being able to plug power in on any of the USB Type-C ports is very handy. The number of dongles I had to order so I could use all of my devices seems ridiculous though.
My only major complaint is not having a MagSafe power connector.
I decided to create a game I could play with my 6-year-old niece over the holiday weekend. To get her involved I wanted to have some configuration options. I came up with a dice game, similar to the card game War, because it’s very basic and easy to understand for a young kid. I got a good start on Saturday night and had a fully functional version by lunch on Sunday. I’m calling it War of Dice.
I made a little demo video to show how it works. The focus kind of sucks, but I wasn’t recording a 4th take. Not sure if the brightness of the LEDs was causing an issue with the GoPro or it was too close for my camera settings.
There have definitely been some frustrations through this whole learning process and working inside the Arduino IDE, which uses C. I learned how to code using C++ (we didn’t use any Visual) in college, almost 20 years ago! Probably haven’t touched C since though. I guess what’s old is new again.
I’ve been on a nice publishing streak here. It all started with a food post in Iceland. After a few days in a row I decided to keep it going. When I hit 14 days I was curious how it compared historically so I wrote a little script. The code is on GitHub. Here’s the output before publishing this post.
Currently on a 41 day streak, since 2016-11-10. Post today to keep it going!
This post did keep it going, so the streak is up to 42 days. Can I break my record? I think so.
This renewed focus on blogging has helped to fuel some new hobbies. It’s also a reminder of how blogging changed my life years ago. I started programming PHP after setting up WordPress to run this site. Eventually I was creating plugins and contributing back to WordPress, which of course led to me getting hired at Automattic. Maybe blogging can pay off for you too.
With the rise of social media, many of you have become content creators, but almost nobody owns their own content. If Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram disappear what happens to all of your words, pictures, and videos? Probably gone. If you use your own domain and push content to other services, you’re in control.
Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed.
