technonaturalist

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.

As he approaches 5, the 4yo has been much less…well…4. While still prone to bouts of 4 year old raging tantrums, he is much easier to reason with and manage because he listens sometimes.

The attitudes of the bigs hae shifted dramatically from towards the end of last year where I have no idea what was going on (but the stress I was feeling at the time wouldn’t have helped) but I was fully prepared to pick up enrolment forms from the primary school down the road.

It’s moving at a frightening pace for me as I’m used to doing everything with excruciating slowness. I love bsurfaces. It is quite literally the thing that had me giving Blender a go again at that point (previously my Blender attempts were for a couple of weeks once or twice a year, end of last year was a last ditch “this thing is cool so why not let’s try it again” and that’s when I got it).

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

9yo seems to finally be over his writing hurdle. Yesterday he reported that writing seems to be a lot easier, and as a result he hasn’t actively resisted/refused doing bookwork when I’ve put out the call to come and do it. Maybe he’s also realised that if he just comes and does the two pages he can go back to what he was doing quicker than if he tries to ignore me, then has a tantrum and argues about it, then does it with all of us in a cranky mood and then isn’t in the mood to do whatever it was he had been doing beforehand because the world is obviously dead set against him having any fun whatsoever. He still needs to work on some letter formation and is occasionally writing some things backwards but it seems to be coming a lot easier to him now which is great. I’ve told him it will get easier as it goes into muscle memory and his writing will slowly get neater the more he practises.

• block the other person’s weapon (even if it is a fan) with your weapon (which may also be a fan), not with your hand. Especially if the other person’s fan has metal ribs
• when lion dance training after taking such an injury, don’t lift the head when you have to hold the mouth shut
• when walking through door frames, make sure you fit through the doorframe. Do not get distracted by small dogs attempting to run outside, and definitely do not clock the alleged “funny” bone on the doorframe to the point where you lose all feeling in your hand for a little while (preceded and followed by HOLEY SHEET THAT HURTS), especially if it’s the arm with the hand that doesn’t have aforementioned wrist injury on it

Not that this has ever happened to me, definitely not in the last week, because who would be so dumb.