Will Knott

I suspect that I’m unusual in the LBC in that I’m childless.
Having said that, I’ve ended up working with kids thanks to CoderDojo.

And if its something they are interested in, they learn fast.
I suspect the secret to teaching kids something complicated, is the same as getting a game to work well… ramp up to a small win very quickly, then you are given the permission to grind through the hard parts.

Let them make something they can see very quickly, and then, then, you can move on to showing them how to make something else.

For example, I’m introducing my current crop to HTML5 sprite animation (thank you +Rob Stocker for the sprite sheets), and the quick win was getting the sprite on the screen, no animation, but showing them how, by hand coding, they can change which sprite shows up. Automating the changing images is how to create an animation.

But these kids are sponges. They learn fast. Show then one application of the technology, and they will try to apply it elsewhere.

And as I returned to CoderDojo Mahon recently (they have the room for computer parts to plunder), I was slightly surprised to discover that there were no adult mentors. There were adults, the parent mentors were there, but the ones teaching we all kids themselves; the ones I started teaching.

And one of them moved his ideas sideways, and this 13 year old was teaching android app development to a bunch of 10 year olds (and a few 16 year olds trying to keep their heads down).

Teach a young dog new tricks, and she will go on to teach the older dogs, like the example below.

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A special picture – CoderDojo
This is a very special picture, because it is indicative of the heart of the CoderDojo philosophy. I received it a few months ago from a mother at the NSC CoderDojo in Cork. It was…

This is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “Kids”.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.

In ancient Ireland there were three classical elements; fire, earth and a combined element we would describe as air/water. The fact that air and water used to be considered as the same element says a lot about Irish weather. And I’ve been living that combination on and off.

The weather was foggy, raining heavily and windy. Its a combination which shouldn’t exist, but it did. For a few days. Only when evening came and I ventured down the hill did the weather change, and I realised that I had spent the day inside a cloud.

So that’s where I’ve been spending my days. I’ve been quiet here. You see I’ve changed cities again, and I’m back. I’m living in the house I’ll have to pay property tax on (I’ll grumble later). And that’s where I made the simple mistake.

I thought that be getting back to my old haunts that I could get some of my old life back. I thought that I would have time denied to me while living away.

I was wrong.

I was right.

Apparently it takes 40 days for a habit to take hold. And not blogging was such a habit. I’m not actually sure where my time went. I’ll have to keep a time spending diary, unless keeping such a diary takes too much time. But in the process of trying to get a life back together, I stopped doing something which requires a bit of hard thinking.

Blogging. Some optional courses. Toy making.

Pulling this ramble back to the LBC topic; frugality is not just about cash. Frugality is not just about scrimping. Frugality is also about spending wisely. And since time cannot really be saved (unless you really have a time machine), how you spend your time matters.

Or rather you need to force yourself to spend time on what matters to you, and what matters to those around you. If you care enough you will find the time to do something.

Sometimes you’ll need to force yourself to do something, sometimes you’ll force yourself to let something lapse. Sometimes you’ll form a rigid, regimented timetable. Sometimes you’ll discover that rigidity also means fragility. Sometimes you’ll lapse thinking “I’ll do it later”, but “later” never becomes “now”.

If it matters you’ll force yourself to break the easy options (usually sleep, and boy does that compound problems for later), and  do “something” to force “now” from the loving arms of “later”.

Like finding that time to sit down in front of a keyboard and type. Eight weeks later.

Time flies away, even if you don’t spend it.

This is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “Frugality”.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox, Maxi Malone, OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Shackman and Grannymar.

I'll admit that sometimes best intentions don't work out as well as expected.
I joined the LBC, the Loose Bloggers Consortium the idea was that I'd write more.

Then life got in the way. In my case, a new job in a new city.

Well, I'm about to return home*. I have plans, and things to work out (and a new job). But I think I'll have regular time to sit down. Eventually as I don't know my time-table properly and I have at least 3 games to write for the classes I'm mentoring.
But one of my half brain-farted ideas was to write a book.
Or at least a story… so…

I'm wondering if instead of writing the usual "insight based on the topic of the week" if I could get away with writing an essay or a short story with the topic in mind.
And furthermore, string all the stories in to a (semi?) coherent narrative.

I do have the characters in mind, but I didn't have the, well, will to do it.
I can either do these as the usual LBC posts, or pull these off for a different day of the week (I might also re-wind the clock back to the start of January to give me a run up).

Besides, according to some self-help books you need to declare your intentions to do X, that way you can't back away from X.

So, any objections at this attempt to help myself to actually do something unusual?

* It's complicated, but I'm not going to explain personal geography on a system that archives and logs everything I write

This is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “Self Help”.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.

She was touched to receive the exquisitely packaged chocolates.

Her next of kin discovered that crema was a hazelnut cream and not a vanilla cream. When the nuts touched her throat, it swelled from anaphylaxis shock.

This almost tweetable murder mystery is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “Touched”. And was not written in the local accident and emergency.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.

The icy weather across the country has broken for rain. And I'm playing catch-up with the Loose Bloggers Consortium, again.

The missed topics are "Rains", "Doom and Gloom" and "Music" so the song below comes to mind. "When the Rain Falls" by Eleanor McEvoy.

This song first came to my attention when the "A Woman's Heart" CD came out. This was an all female, all Irish, compilation of songs and the title song sung by Mary Black was written my Eleanor McEvoy. Unsurprising as she is one of Ireland's highly accomplished songwriters (I really hope there is a league table hidden away somewhere for this title). The album released in 1992 spawned a few sequels and spin-offs and a couple of tours. Poke around YouTube and you'll probably catch a few of the tracks.

The song its self is a jazz, well blues, influenced number. "I woke up this morning" isn't how it starts, but its a collection of minor disasters following a break-up. The coffee's run out, the milk has gone off, the heating won't start, have trouble getting on-line, and when she does, the nasty reminder awaits.

And then it rains.

But it sounds so good.

This is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on “rains”, “doom & gloom” and “music”.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.

Its a simple idea, but in Ireland I think it would need to be adapted slightly, simply by putting a closing time on the wall.
What am I talking about well…

Giving is sometimes easy, but you can make it easier. Say you set up a café where you can buy a cup of coffee. Usually you can buy a cup for yourself, but to give back you can buy a cup "for the wall". The wall gets, essentially an IOU. Where the U can claim a cup of coffee later on. Which means someone down on their luck can come in, and order a cup from the wall.

Would you donate an actual cup of coffee?

I am a terrible blogger. Not just content, but frequency. In an effort to combat this I joined with the loosely affiliated "Loose Bloggers Consortium" with the plan of using the blogging deadline to force me to blog more. It hasn't exactly worked. One of the members is Padmum in India. She brought this story from Italy to my attention on the subject of "Pleasure". She is also an excellent blogger, and its an excellent idea.

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Pleasure: Two stories
Cup of Coffee on the Wall
From the Internet
I sat with my friend in a well-known coffee shop in a neighboring town of Venice, the city of lights and water. As we enjoyed our coffee, a man entered and sat on an empty table beside us. He called the waiter and placed his order saying, ‘Two cups of coffee, one of them there on the wall.’ We heard this order with rather interest and observed that he was served with one cup of coffee but he paid for tw…

The LBC are looking at “This Will Be My Epitaph” as a topic, and Grannymar offered a tombstone generator.

So this is my epitaph, because I like puns.
Unfortunately the generator can’t take accented characters, it should read “Dearly departed, Buíochas le Dia”.

Buíochas le Dia should translate as “my the blessing of God be upon you”, but it’s usually simplified to “Thank God”.

If you know anyone in Ireland, “He’s gone, thank God” can have two very different meanings. It would be up to the viewer to decide which.

And no, I’m not putting a QR code on my tombstone. Unless it was hidden in other carving that is.

Malware is a useful catch all term, but sometimes things are nastier than viruses and auto-deleting thingamajigs.

For example; Ransomware put simply it is a nasty program which put itself on your machine and refuses you access to it unless you pay someone.

There is a version doing the rounds in Ireland purporting to be from An Garda Síochána (The Irish Police force) saying simply pay up since we found naughty files on your computer.
The give-away is that its in both Gaeilge and English, or rather badly translated versions of both. Like it or lump it, but since, legally at least, all Irish laws are written in Gaeilge and translated in to English then the Gaeilge should be correct. In practice however the laws are written in English first, translated in to Irish and sometimes translated back to make sure the meaning hasn't changed.

So its a fake. That and the fact that the Irish Authorities prefer to prosecute after a forensics team have paid a visit to your hard drive (for the moment).

Its also fairly easy to remove this version, there are nastier ones which encrypt on the go (so go and back-up your datas now).

The steps are taken from Jimmy Collins' blog (link below) who I used to work with in a computer security company that I'm not going to mention in case it gets both of us in trouble.

"The infection itself is quite simple to remove. After booting into safe mode and checking the usual places like the Windows folder I came across a suspiciously name folder in ‘C:ProgramData’. It was a randomly named folder with a name like ‘ajklvnksnvsdfvfv’.
Inside, a 158mb HTML page, and all the necessary images, and CSS files etc. There was also an .exe in the root of the ‘C:ProgramData’ folder, the name of which I can’t remember, but it was name similarly to the folder with the HTML file, images etc. (I didn’t have a USB key handy regretfully).
Deleting these files and folders removes the infection, so it doesn’t seem too complex in the methods it employs to evade detection."

Still it would give you quite a shock to be suddenly presented with this. Automatic shutdowns rarely have an appeals process which works in a reasonable time.

Play safe out there…

This is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “Panic”.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.

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Beware – Ransomware
So this evening I was sitting at home when I get a panicked call from a friend in some distress. When he eventually explained what he was seeing on his computer screen at that moment, I immediately suspected a Ransomeware infection.
Ransomware, for those who have been living on the third moon of Jupiter for the last few years, is a type of malicious software that basically holds your PC for ransom. The user is prompted to pay a fee to ‘free’ thei…

“What does Heaven look like”?, the snark in me thinks that looks pretty much like every other nightclub once the lights are turned on. However this is a Loose Bloggers Consortium question so I suppose I should take it seriously.

The typical view of heaven is consisting of clouds with be-winged harp players sitting about the place, but that sounds boring for an eternity.

Hirokazu Koreeda may have a better take on it. The film “After Life“, which he wrote and directed, presents itself in the waiting room to Heaven. There are no Pearly Gates (or the waiting room is just inside) where the newly deceased are met by social worker types who get them to sort through their memories.

It seems that Heaven is a single minute memory, all others are deleted, played in a loop for all eternity. Come to think of it, depending on the memory, this could be Hell.

All of this begs the question, what moment of your life would you pick? A moment of contemplation, delight, passion, consummating a passion, respite or wonder. Can you create a false memory for use?

Could you create a party with all your friends and family? One that never existed, but everyone was happy at?

This is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “What does Heaven look like? “.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.

The LBC asked “What is your Earliest Memory” a few weeks ago. Well… I have three possible memories.

I can’t accurately date two of them.

One is of a copper framed round mirror that used to hang in the kitchen (and is now in my own house), however that mirror hung there for over a decade (behind some hideous wallpaper). Which means I can’t say if it was my first or not.

Another is of a brown Ford Escort with altered suspension driving across a bumpy road, then a guy with enormous flares getting out to explain this as an example of destructive harmonics. It turns out that this was an episode of the Open University physics course. That such geekery is an early example of my memories should explain a lot about me.
But I can’t date it. I didn’t even remember it as a TV programme until I caught a late night repeat decades later.

The one memory I can date accurately is my fifth birthday party. Or rather the cake for my fifth birthday party.

I had to do a bit of research on this. Mum called the train shaped cake “Lollipop Junction” as she iced lollipops to the board to form “trees”. It turns out, thanks to the lovely people at Odlums that the cake is one of their recipes (I think McDonald is the author), called “The Runaway Train”.
So I decided to recreate it.

I was either going to be a triumph, or a disaster. With cake. So all evidence could be eaten.

You can see the original in the first picture of my starting set. I’ve made a few changes… Firstly instead of pouring chocolate frosting over the entire thing (which would be messy) I went with white fondant icing. Next, since I hate licorice, I swapped the licorice allsorts with jammy dodger biscuits. I also used midget gem jelly sweets for lights and stacks.

The decoration is fairly simple. Use sponge cake as the basis for the engine, engine cab and carriages. Use a swiss roll for the fuselage. The jammy dodgers became the wheels and the jellies became the decorations.
I added a few ducks to the engine as I had a duck shaped cookie cutter, and the duck has become the logo for the TOG.ie hackerspace.

I didn’t use all the supplies I set out to use. The chocolate fingers that were to be tracks simply stayed in their packet as I couldn’t safely lift the train (and will be eaten later), & some frosting never got opened. Also the board I prepared proved to be too small.

The TOG craft night was on at the same time, and I stopped after 2 and a half hours because the craft group were brewing tea and approaching with sharpened knives. And plates.

So it wasn’t a triumph. It was my first attempt at cake decoration after all. I’ve never even tried putting frosting on a cupcake (I might have sliced the top off fairy cakes in the past, but that was a group speed thing). So is a bit of a train cake wreck.

And it tastes lovely with tea.

This is a Loose Bloggers Consortium post on the theme of “Earliest Memory”.
To find out that the others in the consortium think, check out, …
Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, The Old Fossil, Grannymar.