Old Time Summer

Category: Computer

  • 2016 adding SSL and learning more about computers

    Not many sites use https:// but it is the future. SSL has be activated on some of my domains and I’ll be passing along that information and what it’s about to my children. It’s important, now, and in the foreseeable as well as very distant future.

    Using different sites it is curious how many do not encrypt properly. On some sites anyone can feel safe to add comments using any login allowed, nice when wanting to comment on a blog anywhere, and multiple options are supplied over an encrytped site.

     

  • August 2012 Educational Preview

    A new “school year” is beginning. We have a new family computer to use for education. It’s a nice HP TouchSmart AIO Core i5 23″ beauty, though it doesn’t have any of the features I wanted to add on, in store we had no options, only this one. HDMI input, Bluetooth, Blu-ray … none of them exist on this model. It wasn’t super important, but I did want at least a Blu-ray player. Really want a Blu-ray burner and have thought for awhile that maybe I should just get a stand-alone version, so … the other thing is a Bluetooth module … I can get a dongle, but that’s not as nice as built-in on an AIO.

    My laptop doesn’t have Bluetooth nor Blu-ray. I hated that back when I got it. Guess what I feel now? I really hate that I STILL don’t have those features on a machine. I have a dongle on my laptop for bluetooth. It doesn’t work right unless I put it on the e-Sata port. It’s a special combo port, anyhow, it provides better power, and it’s the only port on my laptop that will run it correctly, troublesome, since my keyboard and mouse use it and I have an external sata device …

    So I have a job I need to finish and that is archiving all my photos and making something out of all my video footage. I need Blu-ray disc burning for that. I refuse to use DVD’s nowadays, so I do nothing at all. I have a lot of video that I need to process and this new computer can handle it better. Which means I need to put my Sony video programs on here (the machine I’m typing on is the HP AIO.)

    As for the educational things: I have LEGO We Do software which will work with this desktop, finally a desktop! Our other things never worked with it, only my laptop. I am actually missing one of the discs, I hope I can figure out which one and find it. I have Artes Latinae installed. I’m having them ‘start over’ again, for the 2nd or 3rd time. It’s been that long since I bought it and we’ve had so many computer issues … augh! Hopefully that ends here.

    I need to get them all started on more stuff, so the main topic is how to REALLY use a computer, use programs, and create things. Also they need to learn to use their cameras better, and how to really make the photos nicer, delete when necessary, organize like crazy.

    They will have a better time on this computer writing blog posts and other documents. We have OFfice 2010 Home and Student. I’ll upgrade this computer to Win 8 and have plans to upgrade to the new Office programs.

    Years ago I had Office 95 (actually still have it, just isn’t installed). I loved it, I loved Access. I really wish they had that in H & S … but they don’t. It’s just not possible for us to buy 2 or 3 licenses for Office Pro, but I wish I could. In the old days it was easier to deal with these things, You could put it on a laptop and a desktop both. No real life restrictions. So we have H & S since it’s affordable for family use, even though it’s a lesser product, but not so bad.

    I need to get more things going than ever, and it’s hard with limited funds. I’m hoping I can get some packages of somethings for my oldest two to rip through soon … it’s a high possibility. So we need to get on point and finish the Math-U-See levels they are on and go through more than one more before the end of the year.

    Well, that’s just starting peek into what we are planning and getting done, or need to.

  • Lego WeDo Robotics

    Have a new kit to start this week with. We’ll see how it goes.

  • The year progresses with less progress

    I’ve been working with my two oldest to get them using blogs to write things about their schooling. It’s not always easy to get them doing things, and I figured this would help them. Well, it did and didn’t.

    One thing it did that is BAD is makes them think they can be on the computer all the time, or whenever they want. We have two older laptops that aren’t “owned” by an adult, so in the a.m. they open them up and search for stuff, look on their kid’s forum I let them go to sometimes before, and for my daughter, 12, she’s claiming the computer that is a tablet laptop, and draws most of the time anymore. My 14 year old loves to search for all sorts of information, but doesn’t write much of anything. He has written several things about LBP2 though. What is that? Oh, a game, Little Big Planet 2.

    My daughter will write something if I get on her case, she’s not so bad, but given her own way, she rarely writes much of anything, may write a post, give it a title but no body, and save it. Or write such a nothing summary of something, that’s it.

    My daughter used to be the one ahead in Math-U-See, but my son is now quite a few chapters ahead. They gave themselves a haiatus on it for a few months, for some reason, but I’ve gotten the whip out lately about it. So they are both forging ahead again. My other son, the 10 year old, is reticent to do any Math-U-See, he’s on the older level all by himself and just isn’t wanting much of anything to do with it, or with reading or writing or anything that isn’t a cartoon, video game, outdoor something or other. He can read now, but it’s so difficult to get him to do it “I already read that” is his answer when I ask him to read something aloud, or to read it by himself and tell me about it afterward. “Yes, but I want you to read it again, it’s not a bad thing to re-read something.” is my response sometimes. Of course there are a myriad of responses I could give him. He’s different, I know. He’s not into books as much as electronic usage. Thankfully he’s not into the computer much yet.

    A major thing that I’m including in their education is chores (Home Economics for ALL!)  More fun than “chores” is actual helping with cooking, and it’s a great help for me. My daughter can make a few things for dinner by herself, aide me in other things, is learning along the way. Right now she’s learning why drop biscuits are better when I make the exact same recipe as she does.Mine are light and fluffy … good really good, her’s less good, more dense, much less good.

    My 14 year old helps more than cooks. Helps with prep and taking care of some things that I’m cooking, breaking up ground meat as it browns, for example. Also gets pre-cracked spelt or kamut into a dish with the right stuff to soak it overnight for hot cereal in the morning, I pre-crack the grain and keep it in the freezer. He gets it prepped and cooks it the next day.

    The examples above are not all they do, they are becoming very capable about the kitchen, and will both be able to feed themselves and others when they are adults. That’s something that everyone, no matter what their sex is, needs to be able to do. Gender Roles aren’t so great all the time. In my case it’s exactly that. I can cook. I love to cook. I don’t love to cook all the time though. I get weary of it fast when I feel I’ve been cooking a lot. No set amount, it just is part of who I am, I enjoy it to a point, then need some time off. I would LOVE to do Dinner’s in the Freezer, but I haven’t been able to get it planned out and get the help I need to make it work at the right time to do it. It’s exactly the kind of thing I need, but I also do have lower energy than a lot of people and it is OVERWHELMING to do even three meals in a weekend to put away in the freezer.

    Sometimes I get all into it and make double of what I would for just a meal (to put half away for another day) and then it doesn’t work out, like part of it gets ruined, or my bigger guys eat more than usual, or … I’m so tired by the end and don’t get it put into the freezer, then ….

    Then I can’t cook for a couple of days and … it’s just frustrating.

    So, Spring is here. Trees are blooming early, way early, it’s been hot, chilly, warm, chilly, hot, nice, hot, chilly … just not COLD anymore. Hot and warm I could do away with. Our A/C isn’t working (not the first time) and it’s bad on the hot days. I don’t function at all when it’s hot.

    I need to function more to get more educational things done. I’m awaiting building a new desktop computer for me to use, and once that is in place I can sit at a desk with a keyboard and do much more than I can manage to do with my laptop. It’s a matter of many things, my laptop is capable of much, just not as much as my desktop will, and with a desk and desktop I’m more functional. My laptop could be on a desk, but it still doesn’t go as well for me as a desktop computer on a desk.

    I’m guessing this is the same thing as the children. The old desktop is monitorless now. I have it connected to the TV and it’s nowhere near a place to sit with a mouse and keyboard, have to stand and weirdo do stuff, so the laptops … well they need to do their Latin on the desktop, math-u-see videos … and maybe they’d be better with writing more …

     

     

     

     

  • Math

    Math-U-See Gamma is the next level of math we are conquering. The DVD’s never play on the desktop computer that I use with the children for their educational stuff. Thus I have to always make a new version of that resource for them to use. I used Handbrake yesterday to create a file they can watch in QuikTime & access the different chapters. I’ll make a better version of it sometime soon, with chapter names & also a version like I did before, a click home version kind of movie… and also may split it up into pieces so can put it on my eldest’s PSP. 

    Gamma is a level I want them to get through quickly then move on to next one early 2011.

  • Getting things going better

    Spring and the coming summer ALWAYS make me feel more into “schooling” for some reason, as does the Christmas Season, which is kind of strange when I think about it. Anyhow, I do know somewhat where we live has to do with it, the weather and seasons, Spring & Summer very hot and sunny, or rainy, but humid and miserable. Good for inside living, doing educational things. Christmas coming is after Thanksgiving, so I get into the stuff of Christmas, the weather may or maynot be winter-like, but the sun goes to bed early, comes up late, and that gets me feeling that education is needed to be more formal, and crafty … so when others are off, I like doing stuff. Also, I prefer weekend educational more than weekday, not that hubby has to be around, I just have a hard time motivating things along and getting anything else done at all.

    So to bring this post to a point, it’s mid-Spring, first birthday of the year is over, Mother’s Day is over, now we have a month before Father’s Day, Summer Solstice and another birthday. So now is the time to get head over heals into everything that we can educationally minded.

    One thing will be Math-U-See, I’m pushing my two oldest to complete their terribly low level (Beta) to get to the new package we are picking up today (Gamma) level & get going seriously to get up to par.

    No more messing around not getting the right stuff into our home when it’s needed. $ is needed, doing it on purpose instead of looking for extra $ when it sometimes comes around.

    There are other things I need too, literature, geography & history kinds of things to go with my Bible, History, Geography Charlotte Mason sort of program. I have some of it, need some more to really make it fly.

    I also want more literature for the sake of literature. (I mean good books, not pamphlets from some company.)

    So it’s tough too then when I have 4 children that get up at different times in the morning. Eldest sleeps too long, teen already. Second oldest doesn’t get up early, but sometimes gets up early, or too late, or something. Mostly they both are sluggish in the morning and so nothing gets done fully enough until afternoon, that doesn’t include schooling.

    My 9 year old boy is struggling to read still. He CAN do it, just hasn’t gotten to the successful stage of “I can do it!” so we are going to get him Brain Safari software, see it it can motivate and progress him.

    Right now things are between pay times, so I can’t get the program through my online co-op, hope it’ll be around when I can safely order the product.

    I don’t look at the homeschool co-op site often enough, so I miss good deals, don’t know what some of them mean since I didn’t see when it started to understand what they are doing with it near the end of it’s run “extended a month” with no dates on the page at all. FWIW

    I think I write on this blog more about trying to get going, rather than what we are doing, have done, etc. I need to change that.

  • Learning HTML to build pages plus history

    My 10-year-old daughter had expressed interest in knowing what the letters “H T M & L” stood for a few days ago. When she initially asked me I was so stretched and tired from a very long day and the letters sounded familiar but … hmmm. What was she asking about?

    I put her off, feeling really stupid, and during the night, after some rest and waking up, I clicked on what she had asked. Duh, HTML Hyper Text Markup Lang. gee whiz I must have been really tired. I mean really.

    I grew up with typewriters and fat televisions. My first contact with a computer was this strange box with a tiny window that used “floppies” to save information you typed into it. They were big soft 5″+ black things. That was in college.

    The next few years I had contact with better computing, but in the form of some network shell of WordPerfect, and I immediately grasped how to use it and loved coding nice pages to print out. Others in the office had to go to classes to learn things and they came back telling me this and that and I’d show them easier ways to do things than they had learned.

    Another office where I worked had WYSIWYG computers, in other words: macintosh computers. They were fun, but took the challenge of coding a perfect looking paper to print out.

    Later I worked where PC’s were more common and I transferred my early WordPerfect understanding to PC Windows Word Perfect programs and setup cool forms and made pages for a company I worked at for a month.

    More and more history with computers, usually finding macs as the WYSIWYG sort, and I eventually came to Desktop Publishing for my church. It was using Adobe PageMaker and I got the job never having used any program like that before. I learned it super fast and excelled at squishing everything into the monthly paper and making it look nice.

    That job ended because I finally was expecting my first baby. That happened when I literally just started the job, unknown to me for a month. So once that was known my hubby and I went out and got our very own home PC. An HP Pavilion with 16 MB of memory. 1 Gig hard drive. It was a good computer. Sounds funny from this end of things. Anyhow with that came the internet. Before that we hadn’t gone online ever. Never.

    We had AOL to start with and as soon as I could I was up and running with a web page. I learned HTML from various sources and had different pages here and there … we moved to GA from FL and moved away from AOL to the REAL internet. I had more websites. Things changed here and there, but one constant stayed: we were online and I had websites that I made things for, wrote for, updated.

    Something called CSS started and I took to that. I love CSS but don’t understand it to the nth degree I could. One thing with that is that I started using Blogger in 2002 and then switched to Moveable Type when I had a better hosting situation. I still had my websites I did stuff with besides blogging. I eventually moved to Word Press which was pre-.7 something or other at the time. As it has grown, my site coding has diminished. I used to customize templates to the hilt, but have gone back to the simpler way as I have here, using VeryPlainText fairly stock, with plugins and some hand coding in the sidebar or for pages on the different sites I run.

    So then my daughter started bugging me about something I told her about, a good site to learn HTML from.

    I finally gave her this link: http://w3schools.com

    Yesterday she spent some time on the computer and went through all the lessons for HTML on that site. She told me when she was done, and I helped her to organize space on the computer to create with.

    I had her make a new folder and in it had her make a “new text file”. I had her open the file and coached her through what goes where at the top and bottom and talked about nesting codes and being sure to type them correctly and to always end the codes.

    I showed her to “save as …’ that file and then a new webpage will be in that folder, if she saves it with a .html extension, that is, and the “new text file” will stay there ready for a fresh start every time, as long as she uses “save as …” correctly.

    She made her first webpage, just a simple page, one line of text, no formatting. It was sense of accomplishment that she had though.

    No longer am I the only web author, she is one now too, in training, but definitely a web author.

    I spent some time making a new sub-domain for her and my eldest, Russell, and will setup blogs for them, and they’ll have space to put hand coded pages.

    I have been stimulated through this to start hand coding some things again. I really like simple web sites, they can be very rich to look at really. Simplicity in design. I had a reinventing of myself with this same thing some years ago, and Word Press has made me LAZY! I love WP still and will continue to. I just want to get some other stuff going again as well.

    It’s a decent thing to use software to make something, but it’s like knowing how to drive an automatic car only. Driving a manual car brings greater knowledge of driving to an individual, in my opinion, as does knowing how to build a basic webpage from HTML & CSS.

    So my daughter as taken the plunge in learning a new language. I’ll have my eldest son doing the same soon too.

  • Installing Artes Latinae

    I’m currently installing  Artes Latinae – Level I on our desktop computer. It looks to be quite a heavy install, saying 30 mins. to an hour for installation, depending …

    This computer isn’t the most modern, it’s not bad,  just not super recent, an Athlon 64 processor, no dual or quad … but it’s faster than a lot of peoples computers, probably. At any rate, it took about 1/2 an hour, I got taken away from writing this post for awhile.

    Something that DOES bother me about this program is that now it says that it runs under a specific version of Mozilla-Firefox and that if I use the currently running version it I could have problems with bookmarks, playing sound clips, etc. … so I have to re-start … hence finish this post to be able to shut down this instance of Firefox to start the Artes Latinae program. Just a little quibble here, if it’s only … if it doesn’t interfere with using Firefox generally day in and out. FWIW I just think the wording is not explicit enough and only talking about instances, but doesn’t state that.