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 when squished to a half 1080p Window while trying to upload YouTube videos with the tabs on the right. I also had to close the bar on the left. Here’s what that looks like:

Scratch

Once again I worked on some Scratch projects with the kids. This time it involved a sports theme. I let the kids choose which games they wanted to create and Sam chose to create the game where Scratch the Cat goes Skiing.

Having done this for a few weeks now, it wasn’t too much trouble to get things working and do a mod or two for Sam. The video below contains the code and a short video of Sam playing the game.

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 belong in a distupgrade repo)
• python2-beautifulsoup neds python2-lxml

The python ones are no-brainer to me. I use virtual environments now so I don’t care about the system libraries. I can get rid of those.

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 - $34.40
• 5V 2.5A power supply - $7.50

That’s a total of $74 before taxes and shipping. To get the same measurements on the Pi platform I went with:

This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here.

Running Vivaldi for the first time.

For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better to save that one for last. But as I went through the first-run process in Vivaldi and saw the nice polish the browser seems to have, it really started tugging on me, saying, “Are you sure you wouldn’t want to just stay with Vivaldi?” For this first post, I’d like to cover the first-run process and then a little video poking around the interface. This’ll be followed up in a while with any impressions I’ve come away from my usage of Vivaldi on Windows.

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 forth between Firefox and Chrome, depending on which one was getting better performance. At this point, for what I do, Firefox is the winner for me. I use it on my laptop and desktop and it gets things done without getting in my way. I don’t necessarily have the most modern GUI setup because it tends to keep your GUI settings as you upgrade. This is what it looks like:

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, including adding a shark and figuring how to have background music (which Stella chose on her own). That turned out to be really tough as my attempts to figure out how to use the loops led to stuttering. Eventually I figured it out and you can see what I did, the rest of the code, and how the game plays by watching the video below:

Scratch

Starting off with this code from the Raspberry Pi foundation, Sam made his first ever video game. I then modified it so the shark would close his mouth when he eats the fish and added a sound at the end when a score of 5 was reached. Here’s a video of Sam playing his game:

https://youtu.be/mWh-5psvDls

Python

For Python I continued to work on writing unit tests for my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Doing so helped me find a few bugs and a few functions that I was able to combine to reduce the code complexity. Overall, this has been a very productive phase for the project, even if it has been very frustrating figuring out how to mock out certain functions like those reaching out to the net or those writing to disk. Depending on what I can do with some help that someone offered me on reddit, I will either go back to the extralife_io.py file to try and finish that one up or I may declare unit testing completed for now and tackle that later when I’ve learned even more about how Python works and how to test it.

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 sophisticated. I’m also trying to move towards 100% code coverage. That is to say, I’m looking to try and make sure every line of code is covered by a test. While 100% test coverage doesn’t guarantee perfect code (after all, the test itself could be flawed or I might not be considering corner cases), striving for it usually has a few benefits:

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 my oldest, but I did it one year too soon (she wasn’t yet reading as well as she is today and couldn’t type as well as she can today) so for now she’s not into programming. But I was curious to see how it was presented since the book uses a story to present it (quite different from the Python book in the same bundle). Went through chapter 2 today and, so far, it seems that Ruby is pretty readable like Python is. That said, I’m not sure puts makes more sense than print, but maybe if I delve into the history of Ruby, I’ll understand why it’s puts? The author of this book uses snake case for variable names. I wonder if that’s because it’s the Ruby standard to use snake case instead of camel case or just to make it easier for the kids following along. I *did* really like the built in next and pred methods on numbers. Definitely more readable than a var++ or var = var + 1. Or rather, if you don’t have decades of programming experience (as I do), I think it’s just a faster bit of cognition to see var.next and understand it vs the older ways of doing the same thing.