Yinzer in the Shire

I know, I know, it's been a week and I've yet to finish my blog-series about Boston.  This post will be a quick one though that doesn't require much thought.  On my desktop I run a desktop customization program called GeekTool .  Using basic scripts you can completely customize your desktop to output the weather, to do lists, photos, and even your iCal events.  When I first installed it I knew absolutely nothing about code, I hadn't even learned HTML yet.  There was a bit of a learning curve, but for the most part a quick Google search will provide you with tips and tricks to customize your desktop the way you'd like. My current layout is probably the one I am most proud of, so I thought I would share it here. This particular customization uses one image shell, one file shell, and ten regular shells.  The background is a modified background I found here .  In Photoshop I moved Cookie Monster a bit further to the left to allow for more of a...

Greetings from not-Boston!  I am home after a week-long tour of Boston and boy do I have a lot to talk about!  There were cupcakes and lots of walking and snowstorms and libraries, but this particular post isn't about any of these things, oh no.  This post is about the tech. The main purpose of this trip was to attend the NE Linux Festival at Harvard.  Though I've been interested in it for quite some time, I am still pretty new to Linux and a lot of the talks were rather specialized so I spent most of my time hanging out at the Hacker Public Radio (HPR) booth. For those of you that don't know, HPR is a podcast created by you, the listener.  Though they prefer podcasts to be related to hacking or tech culture in some way, shows can really be about anything that interests you.  And no, there isn't a time limit, shows range from just a few seconds to two hours long.  Yeah, I heard that spiel a lot . At the Fedora booth I had fun playing around wi...

This morning I made the daring drive to the North Shore to attend the App Jam Educator Information Session.  I didn't even get lost!  (Sadly, the same is not true for my return trip, but alas...)  The App Jam is a part of the Mobile App Lab  (MAL) an after school program that introduces students to programming apps for Android phones using Processing , an open-source programming language that uses Java. The App Jam itself is open to all students who participated in the  Mobile App Lab during the 2012- 2013 school year.  Using the skills they have developed at MAL the students spend a day creating and designing an app that corresponds to an exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center .  To achieve this they must visit the exhibits themselves, talk to exhibit staff, and observe how visitors interact with the exhibit.  Throughout the day the students have the opportunity to talk with industry experts from companies such as Schell Games and Goog...

Devil stick practice hasn't happened in quite a few weeks, but yesterday we finally got together to practice.  We even broke out the Hummingbird to test our Devil Stick Drop robot script.   We are proud to report it was a success!  Now that we have a working sensor we are going to attempt to create a program in Snap! (think Scratch, but for robots) that tracks the amount of time elapsed in between drops. Now enough talking, on to the good stuff! -- For Christmas Grandma bought me the full-run of the short lived show, Pushing Daisies.  For the unenlightened, Pushing Daisies is a whimsical romantic comedy about everything wonderful in life: bees, cheese, and murder.  Oh, and pies!  How could I forget pies!  There's even a handsome pie maker who owns an adorable pie shaped shop called the Pie Hole! Previously upon the advice of the pie-maker's dead-not-dead girlfriend, Chuck, I picked up some gruyère to bake into my pie crust.  I do n...

Thursday evening the Learning Research & Development Center (LRDC) of the University of Pittsburgh kicked off the Distinguished Speaker Series in honor of it's 50th Anniversary. Their inaugural speaker was none other than Mitchel Resnick, a man of many titles including but not limited to, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research and Director, Lifelong Kindergarten Group, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Simply put, he's a genius.  More specifically, as head of the development team, he is responsible for Scratch , a programming language and GUI interface that allows children to program their own video games, animations, and more. I first learned about Scratch this past summer from students in my Legomation summer camp for 8 - 10 year olds.  I had already been tossing around the idea of teaching kids programming, but I still had a lot of questions about which tools should be used.  These kids made my decision abundantly clear.  Mo...