Once in a while, my daughter asks me to teach her programming. We’ve done a number of little things together, including some Python, some Scratch, and other things. When I was trying to think of what I enjoyed doing with computers around that age, one of the things I remembered was drawing. We did turtle graphics with Logo in my school, and it was nice to get instant and visual feedback of what the program did. I thought this seemed like a fun idea.

Saturday, 4th day of the Frost Moon, 937

[ update: I added a bit of an update at the end, in which I find that my fundamental worries were wrong, because the system is less convenient than I hoped! So it goes. ☹ I decided to post this anyway, because the thoughts were worth thinking, so maybe somebody else will find them interesting to see. Or not. Who even reads this thing? ]

Friday, 3rd day of the Frost Moon, 937

In 2007, I wrote code to generate RTF that syntax highlights code, using Vim’s syntax highlighting. I wrote about it in an earlier post or two. After that, I didn’t think about it much, apart from fixing a couple things once in a while or running it once every year or so.

This guest entry written by Breno, Rago’s player, who deserves great praise for doing so!

I wrote a todo for 2014, which I probably stopped thinking about roughly two weeks after writing it. Here’s a summary:

I am a lousy record keeper. I actually played Planetfall quite a while ago. August, if my filesystem is to be trusted! The problem is that I played it pretty hard, and tried to get to the end, but eventually I gave up. I knew I wasn’t too far from the end, but I just didn’t have it in me to work my way to the end. It’s the same as with Starcross, actually! And, as with Starcross, I kept deluding myself with the idae that I’d really finish it, maybe by finding a walkthrough. I didn’t.

I decided quite a while ago that I’d use some of my American Express reward points to buy a next-generation console, eventually. Once the intervals between my compulsive price-checking and review-reading grew short enough, I placed an order. This Tuesday, I received:

My parents recently got new computers, and my mother’s old (but still pretty modern) Mac Mini has more or less become my daughter’s. It’s what she’s been using to play Minecraft, as I mentioned recently. OS X has a “Parental Controls” system, and I figured it would be useful. I’d tell it to use its default anti-porn web blacklist, to have a list of (say) ten allowed applications, and to limit her instant messaging to a few approved people. It was a big mess.