hug a veteran


today is Veterans Day.

Yesterday afternoon I created a new template for Scribus so I can fit a 3″ x 5.5″ page onto a 4.25″ x 5.5″ one. I honored the ~15mm printer margin available to my Epson 4800 so I can place page numbers and running heads in such a way as to fit spreads, two-up, onto a US Letter sized sheet.

This proportion is not so emphatically vertical as a 3″ x 6″ one, but it should work okay.

I am doing laundry today.

I’ve got the film Mr. Nobody on in the background.

This morning I realized it would be good to find a Space Invaders clone made in Python. This might solve a couple of the challenges to one created in P5.js.

I would like to choose a short story to typeset, print, and bind, for my nieces and nephews. Karin agrees that the micro- and nano- role playing games are too bleak for a christmas present.

found a two hour video tutorial for (re)creating Space Invaders in pygame, a game-making library for Python. Pygame comes pre-installed on Raspberry Pi and can be compiled as a no-brainer.

Will have a conversation today with research partners on programming languages. I have not, to the best of my knowledge, been added to the zotero group. One research partner is a graduate student in CS.

Yesterday I learned that the new administrator for P5 Play is a prof in Bogotá, Colombia.

What became the Arduino programming language and project started with a graduate student, now faculty person, from Bogotá, Colombia. That project was originally called Wiring and it was a thesis project at Ivrea.

I’m not having immediate joy with importing python pygame modules on my Raspberry Pi via command-line console. I should probe from a different direction on there.

Sparkfun seems to have the most useful answer to my question about Python IDEs on the Raspberry Pi. I don’t have Python IDLE installed and I’m not about to try and learn all of the command-line arcana to be able to work. It appears that Thonny will give me what I seek.

I’ve also found out this morning that pi-top OS has been updated from Sirius to Bullseye last week. I cannot find anything that tells me what the consequences of updating my Raspberry Pi 3B+ will be. This leaves me skittish. I should update my pi-top 4, though. It’s not currently plugged in to anything.

It seems my pi-top[3] has “mu” which is a Python editor for beginners that I haven’t heard anyone else mention.

Met with research partners. Talked about tinkerability and feedback loops. Invoked Donald Schön. Shared my frictions with Python over the last couple of days.

Gonna fluff and fold laundry and watch either YouTube tutorial or The Peripheral.

Okay, fluffing and folding is completed. I watched a portion of the YouTube tutorial and my brain is pretty tired from taking in the details of this new OOP syntax. There is still about 70 minutes left to the tutorial, and there is a prerequisite tutorial that will require 4 hours to sit through. I may have to tinker for a while.