Category archives: Young Coders

So of all the Web Toys, the only one that seems to have staying power so far is the trivial wrapper around espeak Say What. Something about having a robotic voice parrot back whatever you type is really exciting for kids.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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  Biggest problem is that there are so many sites all with outdated information so I have to filter through hundreds of posts most of which are discussing e.g. Ubuntu 8.10 (which suspended fine with ...

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 ...

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 ...