technonaturalist

me: We’re going to find out how people lived in the 1900s!
7yo: how long ago was that?
me: so long ago not even Great Nanny was born then.
7yo: the Stone Age?
me: …[trying not to laugh]…not that long ago.
7yo: Romans?
me: not that long ago either.
7yo: [thinking]…Tudors?
me: that’s probably closer.

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

5yo: creepers are the same as TNT just with legs and green and walking.

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

5yo likes to watch mocies on his tablets when he’s eating alone, but sometimes struggles to hold the tablet up with one hand, and often gets told off for gooping up the tablet if he uses both hands to eat for whatever reason (I’ve also tried not allowing him to have the tablet while eating but that doesn’t always work). Yesterday after watching 5yo struggling to eat a bowl of pasta while watching a movie, 9yo built him a tablet stand out of Duplo:

Latest ruby:

sudo brew update sudo brew install ruby

OSX developer command line tool thingies:

xcode-select --install

Read the EULA and agree if you agree.

Latest sass:

sudo gem install sass -V

Rails:

sudo gem install rails -V

Why yes I do like to see what’s going on.

Edit ~/.bash_profile to include:

export PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/ruby/2.1.1/bin:$PATH

so that the system doesn’t have a cry about Rails not being installed after it just told you it successfully installed it.

On two different weekends, we hit up the Aviation Heritage Museum of WA in Bull Creek and the Army Museum of WA

in Fremantle. I think the boys got more out of those trips than the girl did so next stop might have to be the Perth Museum (she has a special liking for the butterfly corridor) or Art Gallery and I suppose SciTech or the Zoo can also be considerations, somewhere she enjoys at any rate. Both these places are great, the guides are extremely helpful and are often floating not far away and are happy to answer everything about everything.

I had a problem shortly after setting up ownCloud and Piwik where forms on all of the Drupal sites on my server mysteriously stopped working.

But not all of them, only the ones with a file field. When hitting the submit button on those forms (and it didn’t matter what the form was, the presence of a file field was enough) the form validate wouldn’t trigger, the page would simply reload.

The youngest is officially “school age” because someone in their infinite wisdom decided that Preprimary should be compulsory.

We have graduated from babies and toddlers to all “school aged” kids.

I asked him if he would like to go to school this year seeing as he was old enough. No, he says, “I want to home school.” He pronounced it carefully as two separate words. He pronounces everything carefully, maybe because he knows he stammers if he tries to talk too fast or feels flustered. He has a decent vocabulary for 5, I think, probably because he copies a lot of what comes out of the mouths of his siblings (mostly good, some reminds me that I need to watch how I talk to myself).

As per usual part tutorial and mostly notes for me and anything with ridiculous names (e.g. username and domain) means replace with your information.

Ingredients

• 1 Linode (this one has my referral attached because I’m a bastard like that) or equivalent
• 1 copy of Piwik
• 1 copy of ownCloud Server (grab clients for your devices while you’re there if you like)
• 1-2 ssl certificates (depending on whether you can use wildcard certificates and are going to be running Piwik and ownCloud from the same domain, I like StartSSL but any certificate from anywhere will work)

I downloaded Piwik directly to the Linode (saves two steps of downloading it and then uploading it, plus my upload speed is crap) and ownCloud conveniently has many packages.

Yeh I’m not doing the week by week anymore.

In addition to pocket money, daily bookwork is really good for basics when I’m sick or otherwise blargh from staying up too many late nights in a row and the kids are not (if they are sick they get to veg out and I try to get them to watch docos, we have recently discovered the TED Education Youtube channel and the kids have been consuming the snippets rabidly. There are full lessons on the TED-Ed website but we haven’t really explored there yet. The animations are short (usually under 15mins) which is perfect for 5yo’s attention span, and could potentially skim a huge variety of topics in 2 hours. Just off the top of my head from passing they’ve watched clips on the Higgs-Boson field, icebergs, eel migration, vampire mythology, why glass is transparent and the Fosbury Flop.