Learning the Piano

Learning Piano app (Simply Piano) My seven year old started to learn the piano at age 6, at first it was messing around with an app (Simply Piano), though he committed to 15 minutes per day. We did that for about six months, but using an app has many drawbacks. My children like this, but ... Read more

Problems of Homeschooling

Reasons for homeschooling Homeschooling is a way for parents to take on the primary responsibility for educating their children. By primary I mean as the sole guiding source of instruction. While in many cases, state or third party curricula is used, as well as shared resources or even online courses and enrollment in distance education ... Read more

Chicken Thighs

Cooking chicken thighs quickly and easily is important. The main concept is to have the skin side down for the first half of cooking (starting with a cold unoiled pan, or wire cooking rack, for about 15 minutes), then turning over for the final 10 minutes, and broiling. Oven temperature should be about 220c. Internal ... Read more

Samba on Linux

Note: to be honest I'm a bit lost with my configuration. I've had a bit of trouble but it looks like it is ultimately due to the USB interface I'm using to connect HDDs and sharing them. In any case, Samba is working, but I'm not too sure about what kind of mapping to do, ... Read more

Tortillas

This recipe is adapted from Robert Rodriguez's 10 Minute Cooking School Ingredients Note that in the video above he only uses half of the recipe, and the use of lard means that the butter does not need to be more. Therefore: 250g flour 40g butter 1/4 tsp salt 1/4 tsp baking powder 150g (more or ... Read more

Calibre Ebook Library, De-DRM, Conversion

Calibre is an ebook management tool. It is open source and cross-platform, and has been around for a long time. This explains the rather dated interface. While it is ugly, it works fairly well, and there is nothing that competes. Calibre Functionality Calibre calls itself an ebook management tool, but really any digital document can ... Read more

The Fediverse

The Fediverse is a disparate set of social media services across many implementations, with two core elements: They use open protocols to communicate across services and instances, creating a federation of users and uses. They are primarily distributed and decentralized. This decentralization (and federation) is not in the sense of a blockchain with multiple copies ... Read more

Mastodon, Pixelfed, Fediverse

Fuck Elon Musk. So, Mastodon. I'd created accounts back when it first got started in 2016, so I'm @[email protected]. The server feels a bit slow, so it may be useful to move to another server, and there is a migration path for users in that case. The main thing is to find other people to ... Read more

Modern Pentathlon

By 2024 the Pentathlon event will likely replace horse jumping with some kind of obstacle course. But is a run + laser pistol really modern? And fencing? Perhaps a complete rethink is actually needed. I do get that shooting and running are a useful combination, much like skiing and rifle shooting of biathlons. But an ... Read more

Kodable

Kodable is a somewhat slow website (and iOS app, no Android) which teaches "coding" in a somewhat rudimentary way. It is engaging for the children (tested on ages 4 and 6) but limited in what it can teach. Navigation is problematic as there are two interfaces and so sending a task from the teacher/parent dashboard ... Read more