Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I can taste victory on this mini-project, but as you can tell from the title, it shall be denied for this week. Let’s get started!
Last week, I talked about getting the PiCharm IDE running, and how it’s only as useful as the person maintaining it; as long as someone in the room knows what’s going on, things can get repaired when they break.
This week was another one where I went around building up my knowledge without feeling like I made any tangible headway. I keep telling people, “If I knew exactly what I was doing, I’d be done in two minutes,” and I still stand by that statement. Most of programming is figuring out how you want things to work overall, how your component parts were designed to work, and how the incomplete product actually works, then reconciling all three.
I spent most of my time studying how the async/await model of computing works. Before this week’s project chapter, I knew about multithreading and hyperthreading. All three are models for working on more than one thing at once in a CPU, and each has advantages and challenges. Imagine a computer thread as a guy at a workstation. Multithreading would be adding another guy at another workstation. Hyperthreading would be convincing two guys to share parts of the workstation they both aren’t using at the same time. “Coroutines” would be the first guy stepping aside from the workstation while he waits for more work to do and lets the next guy have a turn.
Other than that, I explored Redbot, some sort of bot to program for Discord. I ended up giving up on it for this project because it was a little expensive on the learning curve for me right now, and I’m not entirely sure it will suit my needs for now.
In the meantime, I’ve made the slightest of “outreach progress,” (yes, I just made that up to talk about when you aren’t ready for something, but try it anyway). I don’t know what’s going on, but hopefully I will know soon.
On the whole, a lot of my projects remind me of a few stories from doing trail work in Pathfinders, a youth club run by my church. One of our annual events involves working on trails at a local State park. While flattening the trail, everyone runs into rocks. Usually, they can just be relocated to somewhere nearby for drainage purposes, but every year, it seems, someone finds a rock in the way that just keeps going until it takes four or five teens to properly move it around once loose. Most of my projects feel like one of these boulders.
On the sad end of the spectrum, I was irresponsible with Blinky’s case. I ended up crushing it. Hopefully, I will get around to seeing to its repair.
Final Question: Windows recently updated. Among a bunch of stuff I didn’t bother reading, I spotted a Dark Mode feature I’m taking advantage of. Do you prefer to keep using the standard, bright theme, or will you be switching over to the dark theme?