Jay & His First Computer Assembled by Himself

Date:  Apr 20, 2015

As a parent, you are in charged of what your child can learn, will learn, would learn.

Opportunity must be given to them when you see they have slight interest in anything.

Remember Steve Jobs?  Remember Bill Gates?  What did their parents gave them when they were young?

If you have not read the book “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell, I suggest you get a copy and read it.

After Jay has attended almost 3 years of Lego Robotics programming class @ Wonders Work at Liang Court, I decided to open up a whole new arena for him this year in P3.

I made him build and make his own computer.  :) 

The other day, I saw this Kano Computer Kit while surfing the web.  It was one of the successful Kickstarter project that aims to teach kids how to program at young age.

It is marketed as “Lego Style” of building computer.

Kids love Lego.  Who doesn’t?  

Lego is easy.

Lego is like read the building instruction manual, and assemble the parts together.

So, for Kano Computer Kit, you have all the parts.

And the aim is to assembled everything together.

Of course, nowadays with Raspberry Pi around, it makes it easy for kids to learn computing.  Real computing.

NOT MICROSOFT WINDOWS.  Real computing.

Following instruction is very easy.  Everything is color coded.  And it is easy to build.

The building manual is 52 pages.  All have big huge diagram and simple English instruction.

I gave the box to Jay.  I told him to pack his school bag before doing it while I take shower.  When I come out from the Shower, he already started building his fist computer.  So, I am guessing it is easy to follow the instruction.

Now everything is done, let’s hook up the wire.  All wires and cables are color coded.  Just follow the instruction, and you know where to hook things up.

Last touch.  Hook the HDMI cable to the monitor.  

Turn on the power.  And the computer is powered.  It even comes with its own speaker.  All the instruction will be read out from this powerful speaker.  Very loud.

And the Kano computer boot up.  This is the first time Jay see so many words that he does not understand.

So, I told him, this is NOT WINDOWS.  This is not Apple MacOS.  This is KANO OS, which is a different OS, and it is derived from LINUX.

Linux lives!  This is what geeky daddy will do to his geeky son.  Exposing him to real computers.

The greeting command line come to alive.  This is Jay’s first encounter of “Command Line”.  hahahaha

Jay is learning how to use the touch pad, and keyboard.

The keyboard is a little bit small for Jay.

It is USB charged.  And bluetooth keyboard.

The USB power adapter.  Of course in red color code.

Green dongle is WiFi dongle.  

When there is WiFi activities, the green dongle will blink blink blink.

The heart of the computer.  A Raspberry Pi (first gen) B+ model.  With the casing.

The color coded cables.  HDMI and Power USB cable.

The key is to build it.

All the components.

How every thing is connected.

How you attach the mini SD card.  That is where the OS is stored.

I really love their easy follow manual.  Jay has no problem following the instructions.

Don’t forget to allow your young son to watch too.  Build up his interest.

Isn’t it great that you are greeted by the computer to tell you “Congratulations!   You made a computer!"

What’s next.  That is why the second book is provided.  To teach kids about how to make simple games using python, Scratch and many more.

Step by step, the kids learned how to connect to Internet.

And Jay now going into the Tutorial sessions to learn how to use everything.  It is a GUI so, it is easy for him to navigate.

Linux!

It comes with the lesson and course to get kid up to speed to tell them what is computer programming.  Jay is learning Snake and Pong now.  They use the most unique method to teach kids about these concepts.  By first learning what can a program do.  Using python.  How to configure or change the parameters.  Soon, next weekend, he will learn how to make Minecraft.  hahaha his own Minecraft.

It is that easy.  And he started to learn how computer come together.

How to print “Hello World!"

From simple to basic.

How computer started from text based game into colourful games we see today.

His favourite section coming up.  

Its fun 2-3 hours time for him to play this.

This is how a geeky daddy trains his geeky son about computer programming. 

Media Nightmares

July 17, 2011

Many Years ago... There is only this...

It was quite expensive to take photos.  So, you usually buy 1-2 rolls of film.  And you try to make very good and quality photos.  With very nice pose.  Like the one below... hahaha  so, no matter how you screw up your pose, you will always get 1-2 quality photos with nice pose ...

Then comes the digital era, where your camera, video cam are stored in digital format.

Wow... I can continue tirelessly take photos... and regardless of whether it is a nice or bad pose... Just take it anyway...

So, especially when you have your first child, unknowingly, after few years later, you end up with tens of thousands of photos.  Not to mention those thousands of videos you have taken...

Then, come the fantastic devices such as iPhone & iPad...

and you wanted to share your photos on all these devices... and bring them around, etc.  And if you are kind enough, you also bought a pair of those devices for your wife...

And then, Apple makes things easy for you...

You start to create fantastic home movies...

Unfortunately it does not stop there... you started to create HD 720p videos or even 1020p videos so that you can play back to your LED/Plasma TV via Apple TV 2...

And you start to talk about "Air Play" it ...

What about those HD 720p or 1020p movies you have downloaded...  (Each movie is >4Gbps)

what about those CD that you rip as Apple Lossless format (Each songs is > 30Mbps)

Not to mention the Apple iOS Apps for iPhone and iPad...

and the eBooks you have downloaded

and the magazines PDF files...

And after all these new tech bombing into your life... you end up with this...

What?  Where is all my hard disk space?

- iTunes apparently will chew up a lot of hard disk space, as it has to store all the movies, music and Apps

- iPhoto is equally terrifying of chewing up a lot of hard disk space, especially when you own a high price HDR camera...

- And when iTunes does a backup for your iPhone and iPad (for me, I need to backup 4 devices on a single Mac)...

So, you have finally run out of hard disk space.  What will you do?

A lot of people is slowly getting there...  when that day comes, it will be like a dooms day to that person... hahahaha

So, what will you do?

Here I would like to share a bit of what I am doing right now.

1.  First of all, invest in a good and high quality NAS.  I uses Synology.  This is the external hard disk where you want to run RAID (a configuration that uses 1 hard disk to back up for multiple hard disk.  So that when 1 hard disk is spoiled, the extra hard disk can rebuild the data and take over the spoiled hard disk).  This is where you wan to keep all your PERSONAL MEDIA FILES.  i.e. your photos, movies, music, etc.

2.  If you have budget, buy another cheapo hard disk, i.e. those external hard disk from Western Digitals.  And then, use them to do routines backup of your NAS.  Means, every now and then, do a full back up copy all the photos and movies onto these external hard disk and distribute the risk.

3.  If you really got time, then, write those datas onto the DVD ROM as back up.

4.  Always remember, even the powerful NAS may failed.  So, that is why you need multiple backup copies.

5.  For my photos, I usually keeps the RAW files on Flickr.  And keep another copy on Facebook.

6.  For my important data files, or media files, I also keep it on Me.Com from Apple.

7.  Lastly, invest another 1Gbps external hard disk to serve as Time Machine.  To back up your working iMac from time to time.  Then, you have very good confident that your majority media files are save.

8.  I even go one step further, for those photos I like, I usually will print a PHOTO BOOK out.  Just in case.  :)

9.  Then, you come back to clean up your Media Mess.  First, I moved all my iTunes BACKUP of my iOS onto my NAS.  (By the way, you also need a good Gigabits network at home to move files from servers to PC/iMac).  iPhone, iPad will keep a back up copy on iMac.  Usually it does not store the media files unless it is a non-iPhoto, non-itunes, non-iMovie files.  If you got lots of movies on your iPad, then, itunes will store a backup copy.  And your backup files can be very big.  In my case, I don't store a lot of media files in OPlayer and I also don't have lots of large PDF magazines...  So my Four iOS devices backup files are only < 25Gbps...  don't forget that iPhone is 32Gb each and iPad is 64Gb each... So, if you have a lot of those external files, your backup can go as high as 100Gb-200Gb.  Got to watch out of that...

If you are familiar with Linux, Unix or Mac OS, you can actually move these backup directory onto your NAS.  And then you do a soft link back to the NAS directory. i.e.

ln -s /Users/kenliew/Library/Application Support/MobileSync POINT TO /NAS/Backup/MobileSync (something like this)...

Doing so, the syncing of iPhone/iPad can be a bit slower depending on your home networking switch and router.

10.  For iPhoto, you got to do a major clean up.  So, go into every even, make a backup of each event folder, and then, start deleting photos, those really ugly, and shaky photos, you got to delete them away to free up space.  To do so, create a new directory on the NAS for each new event in iPhoto.  And then, just drag the event into that new folder.  Wait for it to complete copying.

11.  BEWARE.  When you delete those photos from iPhotos.  It does not mean that you had really deleted those photos.  There is a TRASHCAN folder in iPhotos too.  So, you will need to EMPTY TRASH, so to move those deleted photos onto your iMac TRASHCAN, and then, do another EMPTY TRASH on the iMac TRASHCAN.

12.  For iMovie, once you completed a project.  Import the movie into iTunes and store it there.  And then, move the .proj file on to your NAS backup.  So that you always delete the media files and the PROJECT files for the iMovie.  I usually upload this to facebook too.  And if you got time, you can also upload it to Youtube and MobileMe.com.

13.  For iTunes, always clean up your APPS directory.  But nowadays, Apple provide you a new PURCHASE folder, where you can see what kind of apps you have purchased before.  That means you do not need to backup for those Apps, simply redownload it again.  OK.  For those Jailbroken phone, every single Apps will be treated as external data.  So, if you have iPhone and iPad, then, iTunes will backup both copy.  That will grow your iOS Backup tremendously.  If you have not jailbroken the phone, then, all these media files are store on your iTunes and iPhotos.  So, it will not copied to iOS Backup.  :)

Basically that is the basic ideas.  And it is really a nightmare to me to clean up those iPhotos.  But it is a mess you actually made thru out the years, so you better clean it yourself.  Good luck!