Category Archives: Uncategorized

The following dates (2nd Saturday) are proposed for the Torbay Pi jam,  they should get booked in very soon.

10th Jan
14th Feb
14th March
11th April
9 May
13 June
11 July
8 August
12 September
10 October
14 November
12 December

An update from Mark Shuttleworth

Announcing Ubuntu Core, with snappy transactional updates!

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1434

Ubuntu JeOS (Just enough OS) — the smallest, (merely 63MB compressed!) functional OS image that we can still call “Ubuntu”.  In fact, we call it Ubuntu Core.

This looks interesting as a base to develop bigger systems

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/12/its-a-snap.html

The next Torbay Raspberry Pi jam is on Saturday 13th December 13:00 to 15:00 at Paignton Library.

The next Exeter Raspberry Pi jam will take place on Saturday 6th December at Exeter Library 10 – 12.

Our next meeting is due this coming Saturday 15th November at the White
Hart starting at 2 pm. As I mentioned in an earlier email this is also
the day of  Holsworthy carnival. There is usually a procession for the
young people in the afternoon, but this year this has been cancelled.

Th carnival procession itself is due to start at 7 pm so there should be
not problem for us. I have booked the meeting. Hope to see someone
there,

Coder dojo is coming to the South West,  they are looking for volunteers for Liskeard, Exeter and Torbay (Paignton).

Coderdojo is the global network of free computer programming clubs for young people.

https://coderdojo.com/

If you can help or are a young person interested in attending or a parent who has a child that is interested in attending you can e-mail  coderdojo@barclays.com however please make it clear where you are as in if you are in Torbay then please make subject header coderdojo Torbay.

you can also follow https://twitter.com/Digitaleagles or https://twitter.com/CoderDojo

There is a code club (https://www.codeclub.org.uk/) meet up coming up
in Truro, if anyone would like to get involved with after school
coding clubs the info is as follows

Monday 10th November @Vertigobar

http://www.vertigo-truro.co.uk/

Time 7:30pm

If interested PLEASE CONTACT southwest@codeclub.org.uk directly, for
more information.

With 14.10 released it will soon be time to start testing 15.04.  Please see http://www.dcglug.org.uk/ubuntu-get-involved/ for info. I will add more details as it becomes available.

Great pi jam today

Despite the low turn out, if you didn’t make you once again missed out on some cool projects,  computer science related stuff as well as demos.

1. Knights tour,   – using a chess board how do you move 1 knight so it goes over each square once, only using the valid moves a knight can make ?

2. Sort program,  this is was a demo of the article that Tom Brough wrote yesterday  You can read the info http://www.dcglug.org.uk/network-sort-algorithm-animation/ If you would like to see the demo come to the Jam on the 8th November 2014.

3. Minecraft,  one of our younger members was using a laptop to create a 8 bit adder circuit in mine craft,  yep you can build computers inside minecraft,  again if you want to know more come next time

4. We also set up another young persons Pi , downloaded xfce so we could run that instead of the default lxde desktop environment.  It worked great once we got the pi toNovember connect to the internet then figured out how to tell X to load xfce.   Tom and Mark did a great job with this.

I brought along some cards with 1’s and 0’s,  to demonstrate how binary works,  Will make some more up for next time, I also need to bring extra power supplies along.   We made great use of the laptops donated by Dan Smith at the last jam.

Once again we did more than JUST raspberry pi.  We are focussing on computer science and coding too.

Hopefully, next month we can get a full demo of the minecraft 8 bit adder,  as it’s really interesting (and kinda complex) but it should be possible to also use my binary cards to explain what is happening in a different way.  Want to know how 1 + 1 = 11  then come along next time.

Usual goodies of free stickers are still available along with gummy bears,