It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Computers

  • Last Few Days in Programming: Python and Arduino

    Python Spent the last few days finalizing the 5.0 release of my Extra Life Donation Tracker and then pushed ahead to get version 5.1 out. Here’s the PyPi page if you want to use it for your Extra Life live streams. Arduino I got back to my BBQ Themostat project and did some minor programming…

  • Today in Programming: Microsoft MakeCode

    With the twins, I messed around with a Neopixel strip. Not sure what I’d do with one in a future project, but at least I know how to program it in MakeCode now. Our project:

  • Today in Programming: Microsoft MakeCode

    Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of…

  • Setting up my Raspberry Pi Zero W for the Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT

    Setting up my Raspberry Pi Zero W for the Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT

    As I mentioned before, I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W to replace my Arduino MKR WIFI 1010 and ENV board in the bathroom. My Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT (or bonnet, as Adafruit calls them) finally arrived a few days ago, so I setup a git repository for my code. The Pimoroni git Enviro+/Enviro Mini…

  • Today in Programming: Python

    I noticed that something had gone screwy with the Raspberry Pi 1B in the garage that was monitoring the garage door. I restarted it and discovered that last time I was coding and working on making it more robust if it had a temporary lapse in WiFi (so it wouldn’t crash), I’d created a little…

  • Vivaldi on Windows Part 2 (plus a teeny bit about Vivaldi on Linux)

    I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for about a week now. As I said in the penultimate paragraph of the post where I mentioned exploring various browsers, I don’t really use my browser on Windows for much more than uploading YouTube videos. And I mentioned last time that it wasn’t the best setup…

  • Upgrading main computer (Supermario) to Fedora 32

    It’s been about a month since Fedora 32 was released, so I decided to try and upgrade Supermario to Fedora 32. First I had to disable the dropbox repo since they don’t have a Fedora 32 binary yet. Other conflicts included: bat in module gimp in module meson in module ninja in module pythnon3-pytest-testmon (doesn’t…

  • Raspberry Pi Zero W for new Projects

    Raspberry Pi Zero W for new Projects

    The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using: Arduinio MKR Wif i 1010 – $32.10 Arduino MKR ENV Shield…

  • Vivaldi On Windows Part 1

    This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here. For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that Iā€™m most likely to end up with Brave, so better…

  • Are Web Browsers Getting Exciting Again?

    It’s been a while since I last considered web browsers. I wrote this post in 2008 about which browsers I was using. And in 2011 I wrote this post about KDE Browsers. So that’s at least 9 years since I wrote about browsers. What is my current situation? Well, on Linux I bounced back and…

  • Yesterday and Today’s Programming: Scratch

    Stella’s Project Because last week was busy with house projects, this week I continued the ocean/water-themed programming from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The first project was a game I made with Stella (her first computer game creation), a boat race in Scratch. While we mostly stuck to the tutorial, we did partake in the challenges,…

  • Last Three Days of Programming: Python

    I’ve mostly been working on version 5.0 of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since I adopted the Semantic Versioning principle for the project, an API change means a major version change. I’ve been taking everything I’ve learned about Python programming from 2019 and 2020 and tried to make my code both more Pythonic and more…

  • Today’s Programming: Ruby and Python

    I don’t know how long I intend to keep doing this, but I decided I wanted to document my programming as I went along. So yesterday I worked on Scratch and here’s today’s entry. Ruby A while ago I got a bunch of kids’ programming books in a Humble Bundle. I tried showing Ruby to…

  • Today’s Programming: Flowers in Scratch 3

    First of all, if you’re a Linux user and would like an offline version of Scratch 3, you can get it from https://scratux.org/. They make binaries for a few Linux distros plus an AppImage which works on any of them. On the Raspberry Pi Blog I saw that this week was about making art on…

  • So Long Katello Foreman!

    Last year when I went to Red Hat Summit, I saw a lot of use of Satellite. I’d tried the 5.x series’ upstream Spacewalk and it didn’t quite work out for me. But this time I would try it out, gosh darnit! I mean, with the Katello plugin it would even include Pulp, which I’d…