Posts

Background I’ve been using Minecraft Education Edition with Code Connection in my Year 7 classes this term to teach programming principles, which has been a blast* (i.e. I spend a lot of time trying to encourage students to write programs rather than run around building stuff themselves). The Agent Code Connection comes with a ton of interesting tutorials to get started with, but I’ve been writing a few things for myself to try out different features, two of which are the Agent and the Builder. The Agent is a code-controlled character that can build from its inventory, attack and destroy surrounding blocks, and do basic sensing of its environment. The builder is an invisible constructor which is used for raising structures fairly quickly; it doesn’t have an inventory and can’t interact with its environment beyond placing blocks. ...

I’ve been getting a bit antsy about continuing to pay Squarespace to host Headtilt, mostly due to the infrequent updates that I seem to be doing over the last couple of years, and partly because I think I feel the need to tinker with stuff. For ages I’ve liked the idea of static site generators, and occasionally I’ll go and play with one for a while before falling out of love with the idea of writing up posts in Markdown, having to remember its syntax for links, images, etc, and then go running back to the arms of a regular CMS. ...

When deciding to play around with Publii (after taking a dislike to Jekyll, and not finding anything else that tickled my fancy), the first problem seemed to be that despite supporting tags for posts, there was no way to create an RSS or JSON feed based on a tag. Publii creates a feed, but it contains all posts regardless of the category. Two alternatives presented themselves, neither particularly nice: ‘hide’ all posts except Microblog tagged posts from the feed. This is both kludgy, and not pleasant looking, since only Microblog posts would then appear on the front page of the site. Write a script to create a new feed from the main one with everything except Microblog tagged posts filtered out. Not very hard, but requires running the feed filter after each post. This wouldn’t be a big deal if Publii followed most other static site generators in running with command-line scripts, since I could just add another script to the chain of posting, but since it all runs through a GUI program with a shiny “sync changes” button, it means then manually (or on a schedule to check for changes with a cron job maybe) pulling the JSON feed, filtering posts, and then pushing the new file to the site again. (not a real option) figure out how to modify Publii to do what I wanted. Anyhow, I guess option 2 seems like the way to go since it’s gross but simple to do. If it turns out I care (or post!) enough, I’ll automate it later. ...

Security of Wireless Networks My previous lesson looking at wireless networks used Microbits and their Bluetooth networking to illustrate some of the problems with local wireless networks (as opposed to general internet connectivity, which we mostly did by doing speed tests and complaining about the school’s net connection :). At the end I wrote a bit about what I wanted to do with the next lesson, which was look at some basic crypto to handle the eavesdropping problem we had when someone else listened to the same channel we were communicating on. ...

Overview Part of the new Digital Technologies curriculum for year 7 and 8 involves students learning about wired and wireless networks, and methods of data transmission and security. There are activities from the Digital Technologies Learning Hub that deal with routing and issues with performance (that are pretty good unplugged activities). I use these or variations on these when I teach those concepts, but I wanted to put together something that actually involved technology in the classroom, and dealt with ideas a bit lower down the network stack. ...

A couple of weeks back I saw a link on Twitter to a post on Laura Bain’s blog about data transmission with year 4 and 5s. Go read the post, since it’s nice and short, but it’s basically kids sending binary data representing black or white pixels to each other using a OneNote Class Notebook. I was starting some of my students off on an activity that used a similar idea to (try to :) teach my kids about image data, and look at why algorithms are important while I was at it. ...

The Backstory Before Christmas I was noodling around with Affinity Designer in an attempt to be a bit better at design. Part of this has been getting more familiar with the tools by working through a bunch of the tutorials at Tuts+. Tuts+ hosts some tutorials aimed at Designer, but working through the ones aimed at other software like Illustrator has been an interesting exercise in figuring out Designer’s tools. While I was making a robot face, I was trying to make wires by putting a gradient on a stroke, but it seems Designer won’t allow you to have a gradient which follows parallel to the stroke. Instead it will apply the gradient to the stroke colour in the same manner as filling. ...

After using the new MBP for a week, I’m coming to appreciate the apps that do a good job with their Touch Bar behaviour. I wrote about Affinity Designer before. Pixelmator uses a similar approach, although it seems to be a bit inconsistent, since it allows you to choose tools, but not all of them. Pixelmator: Touch Bar tool options The real heroes that I’ve found so far are Terminal, Preview, and whatever the app is that takes screenshots behind the scenes based on ⌘-Shift-3/4/6 keyboard shortcuts. The default (and optional) buttons for these mostly seem to have been provided to give actual value to a software button, rather than just be there to show that there’s support. ...

Obligatory New Toy Post Because I have no self control, I managed to justify to myself that I needed an update on my 2012 13" Macbook Air, and bought a 13" Macbook Pro with Touch Bar (hats off to Apple for making the product names roll off the tongue on that one, by the way). 512GB SSD because I spent the last two years trying to juggle space on my Air, and 16GB of RAM because I’m not an animal. ...

Preface: Since there’s so much seemingly conflicting information out there, I’ve quite possibly gotten it wrong. If so, please let me know so I can correct this! End Use License Agreements are confusing. Most people don’t read them, even when they occasionally embed easter eggs, (according to this site, most designers don’t regularly read them when it comes to the typefaces they use), and when they do probably don’t understand them (or else why would sites like ToS;DR exist?). ...