Day: June 1, 2005

This is the third in a series of posts that describe how the our family uses a Linux computer as a tool for education and administration in our homeschool. We believe a Linux computer is a great option for people who would like their children to have access to the very best tools available even though they do not have a huge budget. The intent of this series of posts is to provide clear, step by step instructions for those who do not necessarily have an abundance of computer skills.

Viewing DVD’s – The ability to play a DVD checked out from the public library or rented from Blockbuster is a lot easier than it used to be. My thinking is that this functionality should be available out of the box without additional installations or modifications, but that is still not the case. Draconian legal issues still make it more hassle than it needs to be. Our discussion here will center on the setup and use of the Xine multimedia application.

Streaming audio – We mentioned in a previous post that we liked to listen to the Adventures in Odyssey radio theatre program over the internet. We use the RealPlayermultimedia streaming program from RealNetworks to do that. The RealPlayer program is a closed source program. Rightly, the Ubuntu Linux project does not include it as part of their Linux free (as in freedom) distribution. We will discuss how to install that program and provide links to some of the streaming audio content we use in our homeschool.

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Grandma Sarah and her twin sister Janet

I took this picture of Grandma Sarah and her twin sister Janet and just thought it was great. Janet is one of my favorite people in all of the world. I know I get fairly obnoxious about my kids, but when I ask her if I can tell her something about Kelly and Christian, she always says, “I wish you would!” and, best of all, she really means it. She is just a great lady. She came over to Newberg on Memorial Day for dinner at Grandpa Milo’s house. He cooked us an absolutely great steak dinner with corn on the cob and a salad with the special dressing he learned how to make from his mother Great Grandma Chapman (Ethyl). Grandpa Milo is working too hard and we are all trying to get him to slow down, but he keeps going.

I talked to my cousin Neil (Aunt Janet’s son) with whom I spent many, many hours as a boy growing up. We played together all the time at Grandma Jenkin’s (Ida) house. Grandma J was our little Finnish grandmother that we all loved so much. Janet told me that he did not have the address of my blog anymore, so I called him and we had a nice chat. I also called my little sister, Aunt Jean. We talked for about an hour. I have always loved to talk to both of my sister’s. Back when I was working at Motorola in South Florida and Jean was working for Mentor Graphics in Portland we used to send emails back and forth. Email was just brand new and we almost used it like a chat server. We felt very high tech and had some great talks that way. It was just super to talk to both Neil and Aunt Jean for awhile.