technonaturalist

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June Homeschooling Miscellany

Sunday, 24 July 2016 @ 12:18pm

As it turned out the other 7yo’s pre-soaked pea (near the green stick) hadn’t “drownded”, it had just been taking its sweet time sprouting.

Sprouting pea plants in pot

He’s been doing a pretty good job of remembering to water them every few days with little to no prompting/reminding. He also decided to do some of his iPad work with an added challenge, while “disguised” in the box he’d cut holes in to make a robot/box troll/etc kind of outfit for himself.

May Homeschooling Miscellany

Sunday, 17 July 2016 @ 9:57am
11yo's drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard

11yo’s drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard

J and 7yo playing Shadows Over Camelot

JJ and 7yo playing Shadows Over Camelot. 11yo and 9yo are off frame waiting for their turn. I’m obviously taking the photo. The game is fun and a little bit involved and is cooperative rather than competitive (unless someone turns out to be the traitor!).

April Homeschooling Miscellany

Thursday, 23 June 2016 @ 10:39pm

Artificial rock climbing at the PCYC fundraiser. Didn’t get a lot of photos as we got rained out!

11yo went to a birthday party for one of his team mates and won a dancing competition not because he’s any good at dancing but because he was full of confidence and energetically went at it where a lot of his friends were too scared to even get on the floor.

Works in progress

Thursday, 23 June 2016 @ 6:25pm

Because I’m failing at making proper progblogs due to having to slog through a massive backlog (which now has a severe dent in it, unfortunately I think I also made a dent in myself XD).

Chimaera retopo

Retopology of a chimaera in 3d Coat which I will rig in Blender and then draw over

Ingress wallpaper wip

Ingress character wallpaper being worked on in Krita

Wacom Cintiq Companion Hybrid/13HD and associated app settings on Ubuntu Studio 16.04LTS

Sunday, 5 June 2016 @ 3:15pm

Downloading all the things

Add the repository for Gnome Pie Menu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:simonschneegans/testing 
sudo apt-get update

Download helper utilities:

sudo apt-get install easystroke wmctrl xdotool gnome-pie

Download apps:

3d Coat is a proprietary product. Ubuntu Studio ships with a version of Blender and Krita but they lag at least a version behind. The shipped versions may well do the job (and be easier to upgrade) unless you specifically need something in a newer version or just like being on the latest version of everything. I stashed all of these in /usr/local as that’s on its own partition on the ssd. My home directory is on a 2Tb not-ssd. I don’t know if that’s “right and proper” for Linux but everything works, I know where it is and it theoretically shouldn’t get hosed if Ubuntu explodes and requires a complete reinstall so I don’t care.

March Homeschooling Miscellany

Friday, 20 May 2016 @ 1:56pm

7yo got one of those hatching dinosaur eggs for his birthday.

The fully “grown” thing is now sitting on his shelf with all his other dinosaurs.

Octopus musings

Thursday, 5 May 2016 @ 9:04pm

7yo: do you know how an octopus would open a nut?
JJ: how?
7yo: the same way it opens a clam. AND YOUR SKULL.

Avian particle feathers take 2

Wednesday, 6 April 2016 @ 10:48pm

Yes, I did it again.

Who would have thought manually doing the hair guides would look better and render a lot faster. I’m also using linked duplicates for the feathers but not sure how much that’s helping if at all.

February Homeschooling Miscellany

Monday, 7 March 2016 @ 12:27pm

We took a fishing trip to Jurien but once again were not able to go out in the boat due to the howling winds. The boys went fishing off the jetty, JJ caught a blowfish and the same seafull four times. I caught some godrays and the kids checked out a sundial. There wasn’t enough sun to see what time the sundial thought it was, 11yo tried to take a guess based on the position of the sun while explaining how the sundial worked to 6yo.

Home Ed Program and Booklist 2016

Thursday, 11 February 2016 @ 1:37pm

We’ve had dramas with the big two for the last few months simply refusing to do their bookwork and occasionally also refusing to do anything I could use in place of that (including things that they get enthused about such as making their own books or building models, sounds too much like hard work and they’d much rather play games and chat with their friends on Skype all day). We’ve had some serious chats about entitlement and how no matter what they decide to do in life, no matter how much they enjoy it, at some point there is going to be a hard slog.