Category archives: Young Coders

Projects related to young people and computers, including young people learning to code and the One Laptop Per Child project.

RSS feed of Young Coders

Back to React Learning

I wanted to get back to doing a bit of React.js, so I started converting more of the WebToys into React (from Angular and raw Jquery). It took a bit of staring at old code to remember the React way of things. There are definitely some things I need to get sorted; how to parameterize ...

Continue reading

PyOpenGL Working on the Raspberry Pi

I decided to use a USB key root for the RPi, and with that got a standard Raspbian setup going.  The really nice thing is that the EGL, GLES, etc entry points all resolved properly with the same code used for Linux/MESA EGL and GLES, yay.

Thing is, without the broadcom graphics module they're a ...

Continue reading

Raspberry Pi BCM Window Needs Love

So as part of getting a PyOpenGL demo running on the Raspberry Pi I wrote a trivial subset of the Broadcom graphics interface api in ctypes.  There's an (abandoned? not very recent, anyway) full wrapper in Cython, but even getting that compiled just took too long for me working on the Pi (far longer than ...

Continue reading

Voice Dictation Privilege

Apparently I'm blessed with a Voice Dictation friendly accent and tone. I can pretty much use most Voice Dictation systems, including the ones on Android, Dragon Naturally Speaking, and PocketSphinx. The results aren't mind-blowing-ly good, but if it's quiet and I speak clearly and train anything that gets missed, I get reasonable results.

Watching a ...

Continue reading

Issue tracking for Linux Laptops...

Idly trying to get my (Lenovo W500) to suspend again this morning as I wait for the washing machine to finish.  Biggest problem is that there are so many sites all with outdated information so I have to filter through hundreds of posts most of which are discussing e.g. Ubuntu 8.10 (which suspended fine with ...

Continue reading

Neat, Curriculum discovery mechanism in Gates' TED Talk

Have TED talks running in the background (I'm beginning to see TED as more useful these days, it's not about new information, it's about getting a feel for how people are communicating the issues).  Interestingly, in Gates' presentation (the one where he releases the mosquitoes) he describes briefly the idea of the video-recording and migration ...

Continue reading

What to do about education?

The OLPC seems to have run off a cliff.  Sugar labs seems intent on continuing their OS UI experiments, which might bear fruit in a few years, but which for now make development for the platform untenable.  Sad to see all that wasted potential that seemed to just lack someone practical saying "hey, you need ...

Continue reading

Audio Monitor for System Load in CSound (Using CSound from Python)


To try to help out with Seneca's presentation today on the Python interface to CSound I tried to create a small demonstration application. It shows the use of CSound's "real time" Python API, that is, the API that allows you to poke notes directly into the score buffer for playing.

bzr branch http://www.vrplumber.com/bzr/csound-monitor

OLPC at PyCon Wrap-up (Back in Toronto...)


We did 3.5 days of sprinting at PyCon with ~12 people (the GASP folks were sort-of part of our sprint, as they are targeting the laptop, and we worked with them). Mostly we worked on games, with Tony leading a smaller group working on accessibility tools.

We had most people (basically all those using Win32 ...

Continue reading