Minutes - 2008 01 29

Students sign in at 2:50pm and 3:00pm

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Downloaded Open Source (Public Domain) MPEG video files for integration with a video slide show presentation class. The idea is to learn how to make really good "Powerpoint" type presentations, and then teach students, faculty, and anyone else who'd like to learn, how to do the same. One of the teachers (who is also helping us with the Lego Mindstorms) asked us to show him how to put video files into a presentation. We got a few videos from the Internet Archive (a free, public domain, on-line storage facility).

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While Seth took care of the video end of things, Chad learned a bit about the Aggie Tech Club by reading through our blogs, and he decided he'd like to learn about robotics (using the Lego Mindstorms Stuff). We took apart our robot and discovered that one of the sensors (or maybe one of the cables) was malfunctioning. We built a new version of the robot, and I showed Chad how to program it. We investigated the LOGO programming language to help us understand the basics of robotics, and then I challenged Chad to program the robot to navigate around different objects and in different patterns (not unlike LOGO's turtle).

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Ms. Swartz's iPod
Ms. Swartz brought in an iPod Mini and her laptop so we could show her how to put songs from her computer and her cd's onto the iPod. This was much more of a challenge than we had anticipated. Her Microsoft-infected machine had an outdated Windows Operating System that needed Service Pack 2 in order for the iPod software to work properly. Argh! It took the entire 2 hours just to download a portion of the software needed to get her machine up to speed.

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At 4:45, Chad and Seth blogged about what we did and they were on the Late Bus shortly thereafter. -- Mr. P.

What we did today...

today at 1-29-08 we did lots of fun stuff like work on robots and working on our new computer. with the robot we were trying to find out how we could improve how it works. when we worked on the computer we were downloading a bunch of cool stuff and talk to us on learning how to things on working wit computer --- chad

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we downloaded some videos and music so we can make a powerpoint vwith video in it --- by sethb1

Success, Success, Success!!!

Well... I just heard the good news from Seth! The video game controller that we operated on yesterday is back to it's original working condition! We should check on the splicing job in a month or so just to make sure it's holding up.

Minutes

Sign in at 2:55pm

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First we tried to use some of the audio capabilities of our beloved machine. Needless to say, they were lacking, so we decided to install the software that would give us the functionality that we wanted. We decided to go to Yoper.com for the latest updates. After a bit of reading on the Yoper website, we realized that Yoper has its own self-update system built into it, so we tried that. Easy as pie. We got tons of apps that we didn't have before (including the sound drivers needed to use the Speakers that Mr. Vercellone loaned us!)

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While that was all installing (probably 2 gigs worth of apps), Seth proposed we learn how to splice wires while fixing his Game Cube Controller. Apparently he has a dog that likes to chew up wires. So I gave a brief lesson on wire splicing, and we had at it. I discovered that we as a club need some wire-cutters and some electrical tape, but we got by with some scissors and clear plastic tape for now. We won't know if the controller survived the operation until tomorrow.

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Seth also got a bit of time on Wikipedia.org looking up information.

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Another thing we did was a bit of research on TTS (Text to Speech) technology. Using the website: www.research.att.com we were converting all sorts of school related text to speech (with the help of our recently upgraded audio software and recently loaned speakers!)

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At 4:55pm, Seth blogged and headed for the late bus. -- Mr. P.

Today we did...

we saw what resident evil is about on wikipedia. wikipedia is website that people can edited information about everything we upgraded our computer softwere by going yoper.com we fix my game cube controller by cutting it and attach the 5 diffrent colored wires we use att text to speech, we downloaded a sound system and we got speakers and we did other things too. sethb1

Even though there's no meeting...

... I thought I'd leave a blog.

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I've been playing around with the lego mindstorms software (for linux of course) at home, and have been pretty successful at getting the machine to do what I want. Mr. V. recently went to a Mindstorms conference and has come back with all sorts of new tricks up his sleeves. The most important of which is the patch for the Windows version of the Development Environment for the NXT! Next week (after academic midterms) we should install the development environment on a new machine (after we build it) that (much to my dismay) has a version of Microsoft's Windows operating system on it. I believe that Microsoft will allow Windows 98/se to be installed freely because they no longer support it.

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In other news, I was using NOAA's website to track this passed Sunday's storm. I think there was something wrong with their Doppler because (to me) it looked like the storm was going to be mostly rain and be just north of Hathorne. Instead, we got several inches of snow and it hit us dead on.

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I'll see you all next week. --- Mr. P

KDE 4.0.0

I just found some screenshots from the new version KDE (the Desktop Environment on our machine) and I think we should maybe try to upgrade from our KDE3 to this newer one. It looks fantastic! drowstar.blogspot.com

Minutes

Sign-in at 3:00pm

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First things first... we had to fix the machine. The KDE login Manager (KDM) wasn't running during the boot process, so we had to go into /etc/rc5.d and add a script to run kdm, we also added it to /etc/inittab.

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We rebooted and forgot to take the Yoper install CD out of the cd-drive so we learned how to eject a cd from a cd-rom drive using a paper-clip.

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Then we decided to install a few much needed apps. Mozilla's Firefox withe the Flash Plug-in. We learned about Gnu because we needed to install the GCC (Gnu's Compiler Collection).

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GCC: The Gnu compiler collection is a collection of software tools that allow a developer to build customized applications for specific platforms.

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Once we got gcc, we downloaded some source code for an old video game called Doom (freeware of course) to test it all out. This is where we ran into a snag. There was no existing compiler on our machine, so we couldn't build gcc.

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Time was running out, so we decided to change directions slightly. Seth thought it would be a good idea to look around the web (using Firefox) for different freeware apps that might improve our Aggie Tech machine. While he was doing this I inventoried some new tools that I brought in (different size screwdrivers, screws, pliers, and a soldering iron with solder).

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At about 4:45, we made our daily blog and called it a day.

What did we do today?

we signed in than we had to fix the problem for login than we got it to work than we got gcc than other things than fire fox and two games. mr.pellegrino brought his tool but seth forgot his controller. The end.... sethb1