At the time of writing, CAS are still looking for someone to take over from Claire as South West coordinator.
In the meantime, as I have previously offered to support CAS on a local level. I am still willing to do this.
What I aim to do, is at least try and promote CAS on a local level, see if I can get more teachers / staff / educators in the CAS South Devon forum and take it from there.
I have lots of resources that I would like to share. But I also need feed back to help me improve these resources.
Today we had a busy jam, with a good few activities going on. I arrived about 9:30 am to start setting up.
Main work area, with Pi's, Minecraft server etc
Lots of stickers and other free stuff.
We now have a RetroPie set up, with games. Here I have a Pacman game ready to go.
Paul B spent most of the jam helping Lucy with refurbishing a BBC Micro computer. This seemed to go really well.
We also had a visit from Adam Shoreland from the Wikimedia foundation. Adam spent time explaining what he is doing Adam also explained to two of our younger attendees about Wikidata and how to edit this via the Wikidata website. Adam also explained how to use Wikidata:SPARQL query service
We also had a visit from Gordon Henderson come along and demonstrate a mechanical calculator, as well as a few other people who were working on their own projects etc.
We also noted down some of the network port numbers so that I can ask if more ports can be either enabled or confirmed if they are connected. This will make it easier to connect to the wider internet if required.
In all a good event and looking forward to next month.
The next jam will be on Saturday 8th February 2020
I am working on a series of $\LaTeX$ flashcards to help people learn the basics.
I am not creating a fully comprehensive set of these. LaTeX has far too many features for this.
What I want to do, is create a set, that just covers the basics:
Setting up a preamble
Document types
Sections
Table Of Contents (TOC)
Cross referencing
Bibliographies
Citations
Plus a few examples of Maths and Science typesetting.
Hopefully enough for people to get started or for myself to support the teaching of the system.
I feel confident enough to actually try and tech LaTeX, so another reason for these cards would be to help me with this, should I get the opportunity to do so. It is a good idea to prepare for this sort of eventuality.
As LaTeX is aimed at academia, once you have the basics, you can keep going and learn more depending on your usage case. There is a lot of help available too.
Despite it being aimed at academic applications, it can produce very professional looking letters, CVs / Resumes and a whole range of other documents too.
Following a conversation on the Mosaic browser. I decided to try and view my personal Journal blog in the Lynx console browser. Screenshot below.
The blog works really nicely on Lynx. I can navigate, select links and the various static pages. Lynx does not display pictures or other media, but this is fine. It should display the alt text data though.
This at least allows my website to be viewed in other browsers at least, not that I can see people moving en-masse to text based browsers.
Lynx can be installed with apt install lynx as root user of course.
My personal goals for this year are to gain meaningful employment and develop my skills and knowledge further.
Education and CPD
I intend to keep my CPD updated, keep attending courses and keep networking with people so people know who I am and what I am doing. I also intend to keep learning with OpenLearn and other platforms.
Employment
My goal is to find employment that will make use of my current skill set and experience. Even if this is just a few hours to begin with. It should open up further opportunities.
Volunteer work
STEM Ambassador
I hope to be undertaking more assignments as a STEM ambassador.
Code Club
Hopefully this will keep going, keep developing and attracting new attendees.
Tech Jam
Hopefully 2020 will see a boost in numbers. This will also increase the knowledge base available to other attendees.
Torbay Trojans
Football season does not start until about April. I anticipate being back on the side line helping out with the officiating, and the team generally.
As I have been attending seminars on e-safety, I decided to try and collate some of what I have been learning and combine this with some of my knowledge of programming websites such as:-
Scratch
Repl.it
My idea is to try and develop a resource which lists benefits, potential risks of using these websites. As these sites have a collaborative element to them.
This is still work in progress, but getting there slowly. I am using the programming website repl.it for this project.
Hopefully, I can eventually share this with people. The benefits of being able to ask for help and have other programmers help you are clear.
I hope through this project that I can share my experience and help others stay safe, ask question in the right way and consider responses to those questions carefully.
I would also hope this demonstrates, some of the skills I am learning and helps me gain meaningful employment.
The Blender Open Movie project archive, now has 10 movies to watch and enjoy. These can be found on the project website.
These are very high quality pieces of work, they also demonstrate how powerful Blender is. This is really good promotion as to what can be achieved with free software.
Cassiopeia is a constellation in the Northern Hemisphere. In this article I hope to cover some of the interesting objects that can be found in this region of space.
The constellation is recognisable from the fact it has a W shape. Cassiopeia can be found near to Perseus and Andromeda.
You can download a starmap (taken from Kstars) here
For the purpose of this article I will be using the K-stars package.
Principle Stars
These appear in Kstars. I have set the software to display objects fainter than Magnitude (m) 5.0.
The constellation also has many objects such as open clusters.
The Owl Cluster (NGC 457) is close to the star $\varphi$ Cassiopeiae.
There are no galaxies within the constellation but star $\zeta$ Cassiopeiae (3.7m) appears to be the closest to the Andromeda Galaxy (M31).
You can see the milkyway behind the constellation. This could explain the number of open clusters in the region. However this is more speculation as I am not an expert on this.
This blog post has been ported from my old blog site.
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@dhawalhshah
This is well worth checking out. All this learning and knowledge is now at the fingertips of everyone which is great for knowledge sharing and improving the skills of many people all over the world.
