[QUOTE=jvang;494054]Aren't there much better 3D design suites out there? I was under the impression that Blender was for character modeling (movies and video games?).[/QUOTE]

This coming from the guy who wanted to learn Haskell because it was difficult? :wink:

There are many tools which can do this kind of work. Some cost serious coin. The nice thing about Blender is its free (as in speech) and it can do exact dimensions if asked, along with several other very cool things.

FWIW.

[QUOTE=chalsall;494056]This coming from the guy who wanted to learn Haskell because it was difficult? :wink:

There are many tools which can do this kind of work. Some cost serious coin. The nice thing about Blender is its free (as in speech) and it can do exact dimensions if asked, along with several other very cool things.

FWIW.[/QUOTE]

[B][I]I[/I][/B] didn’t really want to, but I don’t want to do much anyways. My dad thought that Haskell was the best choice for learning how to learn.

Your second point is kind of the difference between our old software and the new. AutoCAD was the old software, meant for designing individual parts to very tight tolerances. You could convert AutoCAD files directly to that which a 3D printer uses (Maya for ours). Chief Architect is more modular and drafting-oriented; parts like walls, stairs, and doors are already modeled and your job is to A) specify the properties of each (there are hundreds of different ways to put walls in) and B) lay them out in a cost-efficient, aesthetically pleasing manner. Chief Architect is building with LEGOs (Legos?) and AutoCAD is designing said building blocks from scratch.

Got my schedule changed, which took effect immediately :whee:

The projects seem geared towards younger kids (8-12 years); I suppose that we're supposed to figure it out ourselves, then teach them...? Lesson plans are a part of the silly little kits they bought, so there's little work there. The company has dozens of activities, and none of them seem interesting in any way. As a former 8-12 year old, I'm pretty sure that I'd be bored out of my mind if I was to actually complete any of the activities.

We're working with a little ball robot called Sphero, which is controlled through an app. It's a weighted gyroscope with motors, a small computer, and an accelerometer attached, and enclosed in a watertight plastic sphere. It's definitely neat and sleekly designed (4.25 in diameter, and charges wirelessly), but it's not really very functional. Maybe I'm expecting too much from it, but it just rolls around and flashes its LED.

The only sensor is the accelerometer, so it has no way of interpreting its environment or interacting with it. By my definition (which is likely wrong) it's not even a robot, since it's completely remote-controlled. The direct input system is extremely clunky, and the Scratch-like code for inputs is A) very limited and B) surprisingly confusing. It accepts JavaScript, but what 10 year old knows JavaScript well enough to write a script for the bot? There is an even more basic form of inputs than the blocks where you just draw shapes and whatnot on a 2D plane and the bot rolls around the path...

Seriously, we live in a time where any 8 year old can whip out their iPhone 9000 and play augmented/virtual reality games and watch high-quality, interactive videos, both educational and not. Why on earth would they be interested by this little ball whose useful functions can be counted on one hand? For 8 year old me, I'd be left with a really bad impression of coding/programming, which is likely the opposite effect intended by the designers. I'd rather take it apart; the engineering might almost be worth looking at. :ermm:

All that on top of the fact that the organizer of this class who ordered the little thing in the first place thought that we would be able to engage high schoolers with its lessons? Really...?

Maybe I'm wrong about the littler kids; perhaps Sphero is interesting to them. But there's no way more than a few high schoolers would think it's worth more than a minute of their attention. Fortunately, there's a nice physics/space sandbox I'm looking into that would be great for scientific learning. Physical science/chemistry classes can learn about the instrumentation that space exploration utilizes, and physics classes can do some calculations or something regarding the orbits of planets or delta-v of launch vehicles. The sandbox is similar in concept to Kerbal Space program, but much more educationally-oriented.

Tl;dr: Adults have weird intuitions regarding kids and what they would find interesting.

[QUOTE=jvang;494116]Fortunately, there's a nice physics/space sandbox I'm looking into that would be great for scientific learning.[/QUOTE]

This reminds me; the computers at school are extraordinarily old, and their iGPUs only have 64 MB of dedicated VRAM. The software does quite a bit of real-time physics, and wants at least 512 MB. Is it feasible to allocate more of the system RAM (4 GB total, and running Windows 10 :unsure:) to the iGPU? Given how little I know about computers, I wouldn't be surprised if that's not how that works...

Read a bit about file permissions in Linux, and the [C]chmod[/C] command. The mode syntax is a bit weird, but otherwise it seems pretty straightforward. I guess that, if you are superuser, permissions don't apply to you and you can ignore them, which is why giving an untrustworthy program root privileges is pretty bad?

[QUOTE=jvang;494176]
Read a bit about file permissions in Linux, and the [C]chmod[/C] command. The mode syntax is a bit weird, but otherwise it seems pretty straightforward. I guess that, if you are superuser, permissions don't apply to you and you can ignore them, which is why giving an untrustworthy program root privileges is pretty bad?[/QUOTE]

[C]chmod[/C] comes hand in hand with [c]chown[/c] which changes the ownership and group.

[QUOTE=paulunderwood;494177][C]chmod[/C] comes hand in hand with [c]chown[/c] which changes the ownership and group.[/QUOTE]

Makes sense, I was wondering how one changed who is in the group.

Did a neat kata, [URL="https://www.codewars.com/kata/55f81f9aa51f9b72a200002f"]Find the unique number[/URL]. Turns out that there is a one-line solution with library functions, which is kinda lame, but I re-remembered some recursion that led to a neat solution.

[CODE]module Codewars.Kata.Unique where
import Data.List
findUnique :: [Int] -> Int
findUnique xs = elim (sort xs)
elim [x] = x
elim (x:y:xs) = if x == y then elim xs else x[/CODE]

The (x:y:xs) syntax is so useful; the program ran after only one edit, where I remembered to pattern match the single-element list :max:

Edit: While going over some kata with my dad I showed him [URL="https://wiki.haskell.org/Pointfree"]pointfree form[/URL], which blew his mind. I may write a more detailed post on how it works; I came across [URL="http://pointfree.io"]pointfree.io[/URL] which is supposed to convert normal Haskell code to pointfree form, but I was not impressed...

[QUOTE=jvang;494255]Makes sense, I was wondering how one changed who is in the group.
[/QUOTE]

[c]man usermod[/c] will tell one that [c]usermod -a -G cdrom paul[/c] adds a user to a group and much more. A user will need to log out and log back in for the change to take place.

[c]id paul[/c] lists the attributed groups or one can use [c]groups[/c].

[c]gpasswd -d paul cdrom[/c] will remove a user from the group.

One can even create and manage groups. [c]apropos group[/c]

[QUOTE=paulunderwood;494264][c]man usermod[/c] will tell one that [c]usermod -a -G cdrom paul[/c] adds a user to a group and much more. A user will need to log out and log back in for the change to take place.

[c]id paul[/c] lists the attributed groups or one can use [c]groups[/c].

[c]gpasswd -d paul cdrom[/c] will remove a user from the group.

One can even create and manage groups. [c]apropos group[/c][/QUOTE]

Oh, that's a lot of commands for file permissions. I suppose it's important! Thanks for clarifying those.

Another kata, [URL="https://www.codewars.com/kata/find-the-odd-int"]Find the odd int[/URL], is very similar to the one I did yesterday. The original code actually worked just fine, so I got some free internet points :jvang:

Also did [URL="https://www.codewars.com/kata/are-all-elements-equal"]Are all elements equal?[/URL], which was pretty easy for a level 6 kata...

Found a [URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LinuxFilesystemsExplained"]site[/URL] explaining filesystems in Linux. The writing is a bit weird :unsure: In any case, it seems that Linux filesystems are much better than those of Windows regarding usability and convenience. It's pretty crazy how large filesizes and partitions are allowed to get; the larger allowed partition sizes are measured in exabytes!

Some notes:
Journaled vs non-journaled - As I understand it, journaling filesystems write changes to the hard drive without altering the original information, and overwrite the original info once all changes are accounted for in some sort of log. This way, the filesystem's contents are always accounted for; either everything is saved, the log records that some things are not completely saved, or the log is wrong and needs fixed. Having the log also helps with running [C]fsck[/C] more quickly.

The table of common Linux filesystems is not very informative, and the differences between filesystems are not very clear. The differing max file and partition sizes are meaningless without elaboration. I do wonder why one would use a filesystem that doesn't use journaling, since it seems very useful.

[QUOTE=jvang;494339] I do wonder why one would use a filesystem that doesn't use journaling, since it seems very useful.[/QUOTE]

As you can imagine non-journaled filesystems generally came first.

[url]https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/33552/htg-explains-which-linux-file-system-should-you-choose/[/url] is a fairly good description.

[QUOTE=henryzz;494362]As you can imagine non-journaled filesystems generally came first.

[url]https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/33552/htg-explains-which-linux-file-system-should-you-choose/[/url] is a fairly good description.[/QUOTE]

Makes sense. And that link was much better than what I was looking at, thanks!

Did another level 6 kata, [URL="https://www.codewars.com/kata/find-the-missing-letter"]Find the missing letter[/URL], and got stuck on a different one, [URL="https://www.codewars.com/kata/delete-occurrences-of-an-element-if-it-occurs-more-than-n-times/"]Delete occurrences of an element if it occurs more than n times[/URL]. The first one was a bit similar to yesterday's, but I'm having trouble with the last one. I can do it without preserving the order:

[CODE]module Codewars.Kata.Deletion where
import Data.List
deleteNth :: [Int] -> Int -> [Int]
deleteNth lst n = concatMap (take n) (group (sort lst))[/CODE]

But it wants me to keep the original order. [C]nub[/C] can do that, but it only leaves the original occurrence. I saw [C]nubBy[/C] but I couldn't figure out its syntax (a lot of the non-"overloaded" functions are confusing for me; I should probably figure out what the overloading is).

[URL="https://www.codewars.com/kata/sum-consecutives/"]Sum consecutives[/URL] was rather easy, though I've been using [C]group[/C] a lot lately. Writing code in pointfree form is unusually satisfying :whee:

[CODE]module Codewars.G964.Sumconsec where
import Data.List
sumConsecutives :: [Int] -> [Int]
sumConsecutives = map sum . group [/CODE]

Edit: I read about making shell aliases in bash a bit. The process of setting it up makes sense (pretty simple actually), and it seems really nice and convenient. But whenever I make shortcuts in anything, I either forget that I have them or what I shortened the command to. Is there a way to easily see my aliases that have already been set?