Unfortunately, this website has been hit by some spammers from the Netherlands recently. They left over 100 comments yesterday. I believe the comments are unique identifiers (there were no malicious links or any of the usual spam hallmarks, which is why they got through the spam blocker) that the spammers send out randomly to all websites running Wordpress. If they find a website running Wordpress, the automated bot will leave a comment such as “as9gf7agx14k”. At a later date, they will look for that random comment to see if it posted: if it did, it means my website doesn’t have adequate spam block, so they will come back en masse and start posting links. To prevent this second wave of spam, I’ve turned up the anti-spam measures on this site: if you find your comment isn’t posted on the first try, it is because it is being held for moderation — don’t worry, I’ll get around to approving it!
On the brighter side, today was a great day for setting up Ubuntu. I’m learning how to use all the educational software, and I’m glad that it mostly only needs a few tweaks here and there to get it usable. There are all kinds of excellent programs that we have installed, from basic kindergarten up through college-level material. For instance, I was glad to find that the Geography program had a built in test to learn the regions of all the countries around the world — including Nepal (unsurprisingly, I only got one answer right — the area which Kathmandu is in, called Bagmati). Regardless, I poked around the software a little more and I was glad to see a ton of functionality included by default: learning the Oceans, labeling the states of America (which I found impossible), learning the flags of the world, learning country capitals, etc. Tomorrow I will finish setting up the rest of the programs, including getting a Devanagari script installed (Muni developed a TTF script for Devanagari script way back when, so today I read up on how to install TTF fonts on Ubuntu: it’s possible!). With the script installed, I’ll then setup some of the programs which I’ve installed to help kids learn English: flash cards, word games, touch typing on English keyboards, hangman, etc.
In regards to software for students in high school through college, there are also a number of applications which are suitable. I was playing around with the very powerful physics program I downloaded called “Step”. Everything we learned in Physics with Mr. Canham can be recreated with this program, so I thought it would be a good program to include for introductory physics classes…then I started playing around with the “example” files that come included with the software. The developers of the program had recreated Internal Combustion Engines, models of expanding gasses, demonstrations on resonance…really powerful stuff. There are also other programs to plot functions, solve chemical equations, draw schematics for circuits…the list goes on! My favorite so far is the program which reads your location and the time of day to show which stars there are in the sky if you are looking straight up: free software to teach the stars and constellations. There is so much I’ve still got to setup, but the way it looks now, these computers can be shipped with a lot of really great educational software built in. I’m putting a special emphasis on finding all the programming software I can find; as that is something that these computers really excel at. You can teach physics and mathematics without computers — all the concepts they teach in high school math classes predate computers anyway. Programming is one area of education which you cannot do without a computer, so it’s an area where these computers are really useful: I’ve installed software which lets kids learn and compile programs in everything from BASIC to C to C++ to PHP to Python.
I then realized that there were a few other applications on the web that I hadn’t yet downloaded that also looked useful, so I started the download — 400 bytes per second. Yikes. In the meantime I went up on the roof and took another timelapse. I still don’t have any editing software, but I’m glad how this one came out: much more detailed and interesting.
Click to see the 1280 x 720 video!
That’s all for now.
Charles
I was born in London, England. At the age of ten, I moved to Hong Kong, which opened up a whole new part of the world: Asia. Since then, I have enjoyed traveling to different locales around the world. Having graduated from High School, I am taking a gap year to work on a computer project in Nepal, and later a cultural immersion trip in Ghana. This is the blog I am using to keep the world notified. 
That is the view FROM YOUR ROOF?!!??
Yeah, it’s the Phulchowki mountain range, which is at least 10km away. A 1500mm equivalent lens really brings them up close and personal.