Technology update

There are a few interesting tech things going on right now and I just thought I would list them.

• First, Christian has pointed out a great little program named Launchy that does something called “Keystroke Launching”. It is very handy and runs on both Windows and Linux. It is funny how we are using fewer and fewer programs that run in only one of the two environments. Our expectation is moving toward compatibility with both operating systems.
• The volcano computer is moving right along. Evan brought me the GPS which he now has wired so that it can receive power from a USB port while sending positional information from the GPS to a serial port. Very cool. I am working on a code snippet for him that receives the information from the serial port and parses it.
• At the request of our buddy, Troy, we have started using phplist on our website to manage the daily mailings of Kelly’s Betty Blonde comic strip.
• I am in the process of writing a Python based program to accumulate and post Kelly’s comic strip. Right now, it takes me about ten minutes per strip using GIMP. That is down from about twenty minutes before Christian showed me David’s Batch Processor.
• We want to set up a computer on the network to serve our homeschool schedules, reports, etc, via a wiki. I am going to give that task to Christian. The way I would really like to do it is set up both a web server for the wiki and a Virtual Private Network so that we can run some programs on the server if necessary.
• Christian is deciding which technology he is going to use to prepare his Spike the Cactus graphic novel (comic book). We do not know whether he will colorize the comic on the computer or not, but he needs to both find programs to process the images and accumulate them into pages and then to display them on the web.

When I got to my computer this morning, I reminder email to do a homeschool update was waiting for me. I try to do one once per month after the year has started, but since we still have a couple of weeks of summer vacation, I will hold off writing the August homeschool update until my next reminder at the beginning of September.

April 13, 2004 (no. 3)
April 14, 2004 (no. 1)