Bees have ants
11yo: the drones are the male bees. They sit around and eat honey, then they mate and die.
7yo: don’t they store honey?
11yo: the drones are the ones with wings.
7yo: some bees don’t have wings? O_o
11yo: OH! I was thinking about ants XD
7yo: bees have ants? o_O
This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
September Homeschooling Miscellany
Apparently doing bookwork with Dad is much more interesting than doing the same bookwork with Mum. I have handed off 11yo to JJ for maths as he’s too advanced for me, so J has been teaching him physics and chemistry and other related things. They started off in the computer room, and then 9yo decided to join them doing English. As he was passing the computer room 7yo happened to look in, I told him not to go in there as they were doing bookwork and he decided then that he wanted to do bookwork too.
August Homeschooling Miscellany
There were a couple of birthdays this month which of course meant birthday cards had to be made.
We welcomed a new baby cousin.
And spent a fair bit of time with my parents who were visiting. 11yo made a peg sculpture.
3D Coat/Blender notes: Getting ptex textures from 3d Coat to Blender
tl;dr: bake the damn things.
After painting, from the paint room go to Textures > Texture Baking Tool
Fill in the stuff on the dialogue box as appropriate (I have no idea how correct my settings are, I tend to take a best guess with anything I don’t know :P)
July Homeschooling Miscellany
Right at the beginning of July we went to Melbourne for 4 days to visit my 97yo grandmother. While we were there we also went to check out the city and Mum decided that we may as well go and have our first snow experience seeing as we were there in winter, and generously paid for a private tour.
On the first day we decided to go and check out the Melbourne Museum, as the kids love museums. The train took forever as there were a million stops and by the time we got there the kids were starving to death so the first thing we did was run off to look for food. We ate at a lovely Italian restaurant, and then found out that we went in the opposite direction of the museum. After a quick glance around we discovered there was a Chinese museum down the alleyway between the building the Italian restaurant was in and the next one over. After assuring 7yo that we would not get mugged walking down this alleyway (it was quite literally a gap between two buildings, not even any room for skips or fire escapes), we walked down the alleyway into the tiny little Chinatown which seemed primarily designed to house The Chinese Museum.
June Homeschooling Miscellany
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.
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
11yo’s drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard
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!).
SciTech did a class based on The Lorax and included experimenting with water saving crystals and making a paper pot. 7yo was happy as he got to partner up with his bestie
7yo digging up fossils at SciTech’s dinosaur exhibit
7yo driving what I think is a Sphero drone with an iPad at Scitech
His work was ‘bein’ a BOSS’ apparently. He also styled his hair with water
7yo got some peas and instructions for an experiment from the Lorax class. The pea near the green stick was soaked in water prior to planting and the pea near the blue stick hasn’t. The soaked pea took so long to sprout compared to the unsoaked one that 7yo was sure it had ‘drownded’. He only needed a couple of reminders to water them every few days and has been diligently doing it on his own ever since
The kids attempted to design and build towers that would withstand an earthquake. These ones didn’t work
9yo’s building design withstood the earthquake
April Homeschooling Miscellany
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
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).
Retopology of a chimaera in 3d Coat which I will rig in Blender and then draw over
Ingress character wallpaper being worked on in Krita
I changed the dimensions of the thumb and hand while affixing allulas which of course meant I had to adjust the layers. They’re getting featherier (not a real word) though. Using Blender.
Started my vaporeon sculpt in 3d Coat (contains elements of giant otter, sea lion, dolphin and possibly a frill neck lizard) for The Great Pokemon Underwater Race Collab
Wacom Cintiq Companion Hybrid/13HD and associated app settings on Ubuntu Studio 16.04LTS
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.