Scarlett (8 yrs old): So, In my Nancy Drew book, there’s this thing called a phone book. Is that real? A book with everyone’s phone number?

Somewhat without intention, I’ve ended up alternating portraits for the twins between outdoor portraits and indoor portraits. This year was time for indoor portraits. (Although, to be fair, if it hadn’t been freezing, I might have ended up breaking the tradition) Here’s the setup I used:

It’s a variant on a setup that has been very successful for me with portraits of the kids. I went back to a white background for the first time in a few years. The last time I used it with Scarlett I had an uneven white that looked horrendous to my eye and was a real pain in the butt to try and correct in Photoshop (or was it GIMP?). I never got it quite right and ended up sticking to the black background for a while. But I wanted to do something different. So this time I grabbed my two studio strobes (I believe they’re 100W strobes that someone got me as a present some 8 or so years ago) and threw them into umbrellas to make sure the light would hit the background evenly. With these lights I had to go to somewhere around 80% power in order to get a pure white background according to the spectrograph in camera. Then I posed the twins in front of those lights, so they needed a light for themselves. I used my old Canon 580EX inside of my gigantic octagon (I think it’s somewhere around 3 feet or more in diameter). I wanted to shoot at F8 to try and get the best chance of ensuring the twins would be in focus, so I had to push the 580EX to full power. After this session, I ended up buying a bracket so that next time I can throw my 430EX in there, too.

As you recall from the previous blog post, I’d installed Unity and JetBrains on my Fedora 32 computer via Flatpaks. I was going to use them for the Unity Multiplayer course I was taking on Udemy. Unfortunately it was an immediate fail and in lesson one after they have me install a new inputs library and restart Unity, it would always crash upon loading the file. I’m currently installing Unity 2020.1 on my Windows computer where I don’t expect to have that issue. Assuming I don’t, then it’s a big fat nope on using Unity on Fedora via Flatpak (at least for this class). Which, to be fair, is not on their supported OS list - which is only Ubuntu and CentOS 7. (And the latter for movie-making)

As I mentioned last year in my 2019 in Programming post, I created a bunch of 2D games in Unity by following along with the Gamedev.tv classes. I would watch the videos on Linux and jump over to my Windows computer for the programming, learning how to use SourceTree and Microsoft Video Studio in the process. But for some reason, going back and forth with the KVM when running Unity would sometimes freeze up the Windows computer. So when I saw someone on Fedora Planet running Unity Hub, I thought I’d see if there was a Flatpak - and there IS! Also, I’ve fallen in love with JetBrain’s Pycharm, so I thought I’d go ahead and use their game dev IDE, Rider. ( There’s a Flatpak for that, too!) So, let’s see how well this works!

I just found out today that PyGame 2.0 was released yesterday, on the 20th anniversary of the software. One of the first steps I took with Python was a series of games I made from tutorials in Linux Format Magazine. On Github I’ve got my shifter game and my Space Invaders clone. The shifter game is a little wonky since I haven’t touched the code in over a decade. But I was able to make the one shift needed to make the Space Invaders clone work on Python 3. So you can enjoy those and celebrate that PyGame development has picked up steam again.

It came out this Tuesday and last night I updated my laptop. The only thing I had to do for the upgrade was remove a python3-test package. Since I’m using virtual environments, for the most part I don’t care which Python packages the system has. So that was a nice, easy upgrade! Good job Fedora packagers and testers! Speaking of Python, it’ll be nice to start upgrading my projects to Python 3.9. (Fedora 33 includes the latest programming language versions as part of its “First” values)

Selenium for Automated Pool Signup

Spent the last week debugging that script. Turns out the key to getting it to run in cron is to add export DISPLAY=:0 && before your command. That’s because Chrome will not launch without a display to send Chrome to.

Python Morsels

The most recent Python Morsels exercise was to figure out if a number was a perfect square. Trey began his problem statement this way: “This week I want you to write a function that might seem simple at first, but there’s a number of ways to solve it.” It definitely took some out of the box thinking for me to figure out how I was going to solve the base case. The math.sqrt() function returns a float so that it can give answers for non-perfect squares. So I kept thinking and I realized that any perfect, non-complex square root must be an integer. So I came up with the conditional to return. (And after all this Pythonic learning, I’ve learned not to evaluate for truth and then return a variable. Just return the evaluation)

And failed and left my site offline most of the day. So I’ll have to try some stuff on the side and give it another shot.

I just moved this blog to slightly different hosting infrastructure. Because of that I had some funky issues with character encoding yesterday. I believe that’s fixed now, but there may be other things that take me time to notice and fix up. Also, I still have a couple other things to set up so that I can FINALLY have https working for this blog. As part of this infrastructure change, I discovered and fixed at least one long-running issue that was causing problems with that. So if things are offline for a bit over the next few days or weeks - that’s why.

Been quite busy with Python, keeping me away from other pursuits, like video games. (Although the kids have been requesting Spelunky 2 whenever it’s time to hang out with them)

Extra Life Donation Tracker (eldonationtracker)

For my Extra Life Donation Tracker I pushed out a new release, v5.2.2. A user of my program (man, I never get tired of how awesome that is!!) had wholly anonymous donors which was causing an issue I thought I’d handled. But it turns out that the folks that run the Donor Drive API are a little inconsistent in how they handle that in the donor endpoint vs the donations endpoint. So I pushed that fix out and now things should be dandy for game day (about 2 weeks away!!)