technonaturalist

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:

• Blender
• Krita
• 3d Coat

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.

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.

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

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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.

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.

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.

Our year started fantastically with being able to go to a performance of The Lion King Broadway Musical courtesy of mother in law who bought us tickets.

We were up in the nosebleed section so couldn’t see fine details of costumes or clear facial expressions but got an awesome view of everything going on on the stage and around the theatre (as the performers didn’t restrict themselves to the stage).

December is always an odd time of year due to having to wind up kids activities, business for the year and organising whatever is going on for Christmas so I rarely have much homeschooly to write about.

The kids had their gymnastics end of year performance, the theme was “Back to the 80s”. Costumes were fantastic, the performances were great and I completely failed at taking any good photos. The Christmas party followed directly afterwards including a visit from Santa.

Fallen a bit behind on the regular homeschool blogging! I actually started this one in early December but didn’t quite get around to finishing it so here it is now.

We started playing Ingress (we’re Resistance) and have so far discovered a myriad of portals in familiar places and three new parks. One of next year’s goals is to try to go visit a new area at least once a week. We also met up with a bunch of local players at Pioneer Park and they gave us stuff, and 10yo gave one of them a Jarvis virus that he’d managed to pick up from one of the green portals we’d hacked. We’ve been doing a lot more walking as a result which is a nice bonus as we do quite a few activities already.