Computer Education in Schools in the 2020s

December 2, 2024 | Comment

A little while ago I wrote about my computing education growing up in the 1980s where I learned CECIL before progressing on to BASIC. Now, some 40 years later, I am discovering what computing children are being taught.

Enter Code Club

I had decided that once I retired, I wanted to give something back to the community, and using my core computing skills seemed like an obvious place to start.

I’d seen that the Raspberry Pi Foundation ran something called Code Club which aims to teach development skills to children from about aged five and up. These are mostly run … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Ten – Adding ALT tags to Images

November 18, 2024 | Comment

I have to admit that I didn’t think I’d be back with another post on my php2Bluesky library quite so soon but Dr Paul Lee on Bluesky pointed out that while you can post images from the library you can’t also send ALT text to go with them.

But what is ALT text?

Alt text is descriptions of images added to the HTML or metadata of a post on social media or websites. They are primarily used for accessibility and SEO purposes. Here’s what they do:

1. Accessibility

  • ALT text helps visually impaired users understand the content of images through
… Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Nine – Handling Hashtags

November 17, 2024 | Comment

Bluesky has gone from a very niche platform to one that is getting more coverage and seeing explosive growth thanks in part to the actions of the overlord at Twitter. The following was the count of users when I wrote this post.

Bluesky User Count

Expanding functionality

At the same time as the user growth, the platform itself has been growing features to bring it more in line with what its competitors are offering. This includes hashtags, which are now fully supported both in the app and API. What this also means is that I can now add support for … Read the rest

Using Cursor to Generate Code

October 25, 2024 | Comment

I have written about the use of AI in programming previously but I recently came across Cursor which is Visual Studio Code with AI built in so I thought I would give it a go but what to do?

Road Trip

I have recently returned from a driving holiday around the East Coast of the US and was, as ever, amazed at the price of petrol (“gas”) compared to the UK but how much cheaper was it? I decided that this would make a simple test for Cursor.

As always, what is important is the prompt you give the AI … Read the rest

When Did I Last? (WDiL)

September 10, 2024 | 1 comment

My electric toothbrush seems to be running out of charge quicker and quicker but is it or am I just misremembering when I last charged it? This is the first world challenge that I set about to change with WDiL!

Introducing When Did I Last? (WDiL)

WDiL aims to help solve those sorts of problems by allowing you to record every time you do something and then see stats on things such as frequency and average interval.

While I have tried to make it very simple it still requires a bit of setup and hosting by you. As part of … Read the rest

Computer Education in Schools in the 1980s

July 17, 2024 | Comment

Not long after I’d published my previous post on the Computer Education in Schools Instruction Language I found a wad of paper that turned out to be my notes from the first year of my O-Level Computer Science course. I thought it might be interesting to see what was there and how computing was taught in the UK in the 80s.

Starting with CESIL

The earliest page is dated 12th September 1979 when I would have just turned 14. At this point our introduction to programming was via the CESIL language. I said in the previous post that this interpreter … Read the rest

Update to WordPress Posts to PDF – Final Version

June 29, 2024 | Comment

I have just pushed what will be the last version of my script to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file to my GitHub page.

Firstly, the good news. This version now supports BLOCKQUOTEs which means that the WordPress quote block is rendered in a way that it is more obviously a quote. There has also been an improvement in the output of code blocks but support for this is still pretty basic but does now work.

Now the bad news. While looking at the output from my own sites I found that some posts weren’t … Read the rest

Update to WordPress Posts to PDF – Code Blocks

June 5, 2024 | Comment

At the back end of last year I released a script that allowed you to export your WordPress posts to a nicely formatted PDF file. In the last update, I said that I wanted to add proper formatting for code blocks and today I have done that. You can find it on the GitHub page.

This proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. The code uses the FPDF package and extends out the “Links and flowing text” example provided. I knew I needed to convert all <pre</preblocks to be displayed as … Read the rest

Overcast Statistics

May 1, 2024 | Comment

Podcasts are huge at the moment and they are pretty much all I listen to these days when I am out walking or in the car. I do this by the (mainly) excellent Overcast app. I say mainly because it has a UI that I struggle to find things in. Anywho, the one thing that it lacks (other than an intuitive UI) are decent stats and I really wanted that for my annual Review of the Year posts over on my personal blog.

After a quick DuckDuckGo I found the following post from James Hodgkinson with a Python … Read the rest

ChatGPT as a Replacement Programmer

March 9, 2024 | 1 comment

When I left university I did so with a good grounding in several programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran and Pascal. Then, at my first job, I was given training in the language Application Master, part of ICL’s VME operating system. One of the things I was told about Application Master was that it was a “fourth generation language (4GL)” and that this would be the last generation that required a developer to write the code.

This was the late eighties and until very recently we have been still waiting for this transition to happen.

ChatGPT has Entered

… Read the rest