The Week #229

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  • 🛬 I flew back to Japan. It's good to be home, to be with my family, to sleep in my bed, and to get back to familiar routines. As one would hope, everyone was excited upon my return. And everybody liked their souvenirs. Leo saw the Scratch coding book I bought him exclaimed "yattaaaaa!" (hooray) while raising his arms. 
  • 🕹️ We made our first game using Scratch. It was a simple game where you try to get a character to jump up the screen to reach a door. Scratch is too advanced for him as it requires being able to read, but maybe this will provide some motivation.

    One very cool thing I realized is with his iPad we can easily add his own drawings to his games. We can take a photo of his drawing, then in the photos app deep press the character, this will select just the drawing itself, giving us a buffer with a transparent background, which we can then and copy/paste into a new png.
    Jump Link featuring Dark Link

    One unfortunate thing I hadn't realized about Scratch was that Apple removed the app from the AppStore. So while the webapp works for making the game, he can only play the game on a proper computer with a keyboard because it requires arrow keys. Perhaps an excuse to get an iMac to act as a family computer?!
  • 🏃‍♂️ I ran my first 10km in a very long time, at least for this year. It wasn't entirely on purpose but my hotel happened to be about 5km to the Eiffel tower and I didn't want to visit Paris for the first time and not at least see it. So on my final day I went on a photo run there and back. Long slow runs are the way to see a city.
    Eiffel tower as seen from the Seine

    The tower itself is quite impressive. On the way back along the Seine I saw a fantastic eco-houseboat as well. It had a green roof, solar panels, heatpumps...the works!
    Eco houseboat

    Back in Japan and jetlagged, I went out for a run at 4am and unintentionally ran a personal best 5k at 3 seconds below 30 minutes. Compared with the last time I ran a 30 minute 5k back in August, it felt easier this time.

    Lastly, I've now got 90 runs this year in the bag. My goal of 100 runs in a year is well within my reach.  LFG.