Resources II

Jason R. Briggs, Snake Wrangling For Kids, [Link]

A nice little book about programming in Python. Written in a try to be easy to read and understand by children (although failing to be in some of the later chapters), I think if I will ever have kids they will get this book printed out together with their first computer. It might be helpful for them. Most likely I think that because I always would have liked to have some skill in programming my PC when I was a kid.

Jeffrey Elkner, Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. Learning with Python, [Link]

Something like the former, just with an emphasis on a more mature crowd. I will definitely try to use the book to understanding  some of the concepts of programming. Somehow even after years of using these machines like a pro, I never understood some of the most basic concepts in theit programming.

bookn3rd has a howto on making your own quill [Link]. Now, where do I get feathers? She says it is harder than it looks to master it, but how would I know if I would’t try?

And lifehacker has the idea to use vintage calendars as new ones [Link]. After all the Gregorian calendar is repeating itself every 14 years or so, and some of these old calendars just look really, really good. The lazy breed of course finds another lifehack in that: just put up 14 different calendars on your wall and you will never have to buy a new one.

Howto: Install Adobe Air on Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora)

Adobe Air actually gives quite a few nice possibilities to users (nevermind all the problems it might cause…). Nice and handsome applications which take away a lot of the old hassle of using the browser for tasks instead for surfing. So installing Air on a system seems like a good idea, especially as there actually exists a Linux version of it.

Unfortunately Adobe had the bad idea of providing not .deb or .rpm files, but instead an executable .bin on their site. On the one hand this is good because it should be able to run on different distributions then. On the other hand the provided help (doubleclick on the .bin) doesn’t help at all. It just doesn’t work. If you click, it normally exactly nothing will happen.

The file first has to be made executable. No problem for experienced users, lots of problems for the new crowd. Or at least many of them think it would be a problem.

What we do:

1. Download the Adobe Air runtime as a .bin from Adobe.com (the download should appear as the right one for your OS on the page)

2. Open the terminal (Yes! The dreaded terminal!)