Read: Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka 📚
A huge complicated baggy book. Perhaps reflecting the chaos of reality too much to read smoothly. Sometimes exciting, sometimes amusing & quite often baffling to me. I suspect some knowledge of recent Nigerian politics would help.
Liked: Scratch is a big deal
Liked: Scratch is a big deal | Bryan Braun – Frontend Developer
Interesting take on Scratch by a Developer & parent.
This recent growth has caused Scratch to break into the Tiobe index’s top 20 most popular programming languages. At the time of this post (July 2022) it ranks 21st, above Typescript, Rust, Julia, and other important languages. The Tiobe index is imperfect but there’s clearly something happening here.
Bryan points to some
It’s pretty impressive how ambitious the projects get. Scratchers often build copycats of “real” games like Cut the Rope, Super Mario Bros, and Terraria. Features like cloud variables allow them to make online multiplayer games, like Taco Burp (popular in my house)
This is quite a different degree of scratching than I’ve seen in my and other classroom recently.
The REST APIs enable third-party tooling like Turbowarp—a parallel site that can run Scratch projects 20x faster.
A bit clicking leads to Paper Minecraft v11.6 (Minecraft 2D) on Scratch!
A lot of food for thought, I never spend much time with scratch beyond preparing and experimenting with the most basic of things. I am not sure it is a rabbit hope I want to peer down for long. I think the simple types of things we do in class are enough for most of the pupils (along with micro:bits, lego and other coding). The advanced projects might be useful to point some of the more confident pupils at.
fBlog, a fake blog made from flickr
I like Flickr’s style:
we want to get photos and video into and out of the system in as many ways as we can: from the web, from mobile devices, from the users’ home computers and from whatever software they are using to manage their content. And we want to be able to push them out in as many ways as possible: on the Flickr website, in RSS feeds, by email, by posting to outside blogs or ways we haven’t thought of yet. What else are we going to use those smart refrigerators for?
I’ve just made a wee ‘blog’ from my flickr photos with the tag fblog: fBlog. It is only one webpage, not really a blog, but it didn’t take long. Sitting on my Raspberry Pi.
I do wonder if someone could make a clever flickr app that would mimic the best parts of instagram…
Small Tortoiseshell:
Meadow Brown
Had a short walk by Jaw Reservoir, yesterday. Quite a few butterflies about. These posed. A lot of ringlets, a few whites and a red admiral did not oblige.
Re: slippy
I’m curious if anyone has tried building a digital public zettelkasten on WordPress in general or using using the Slippy plugin in particular?
Hi Chris,
you would think WordPress could do this.
I installed slippy on a test blog. As far as a quick look showed it would not be useful for a public slip box. There is no published url that I could easily find. The repeated slips appear in the editor.
I'm pleased to report that our iMac is now better than ever, thanks to Raspberry Pi Desktop for PC and Mac (also known as Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop). What exactly is this operating system with an incredibly long name? It is a Linux distro based on Debian with the Raspberry Pi's desktop environment. (This is not actually the operating system that is typically installed on the Raspberry Pi devices (Raspberry Pi OS), but Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop and Raspberry Pi OS are incredibly similar.)
Looking at mum’s old intel iMac in the back room…
Reversing Gif
I was interested to read How to Reverse an Animated GIF
convert water-forward.gif -coalesce -reverse -quiet -layers OptimizePlus -loop 0 water-reversed.gif
So gave it a quick try. The result wa fine, but my 228kb gif was 1.1 MB in reverse. So I had a wee look art the gifsicle man page and ended up after a few tries with:
gifsicle -U stairs01.gif "#-1-0" --colors 32 -O3 -o downstairsR.gif
249kb
Spot the Fox:
The Fox:
Along the forth & Clyde Canal this morning.
Yesterday I walked up to Loch Oss. As the weather cleared I went on to Ben Oss. Photos, map & notes: walkmap
Yesterday I saw this wee one struggling in the grass just as drizzle stopped and the sun came out. I carefully lifted it up held it in the sunlight and it flew off. A Dark Green Fritillary I think.
