Yesterday was meeting day…a stack of three starting late afternoon and running until probably past my bed time. It’s fine: it happens that way sometimes, especially at the beginning of the school year when all those hats I wear seem to be in the air at the same time. I’m taking them off and putting them on and every so often wearing more than one.

But, yesterday, the first meeting was cancelled. Since I had planned around it, I found myself with free time! Unscheduled, unstructured and quiet in the office. And the night before, I had hooked up the Raspeberry Pi again, determined to continue on with my Python/Minecraft studies.

As a reminder, since it’s been awhile since I’ve posted, I’m using Craig Richardson’s book Learn to Program with Minecraft. Summer distractions had kept me from digging in, so last night I mostly just reviewed the early stuff and today, I headed into Chapter 3: Building Quickly and Traveling Far with Math. It’s been fun experimenting with placing blocks using code. I managed to create two lava flows before I realized I forgot the minus sign in front of the y coordinate for the lava block.

Here’s what I was supposed to do:

I also figured out how to manipulate the blocks to make what I’m calling a Rainbox rather than bow mostly because that’s the name that was created when I pressed the x instead of the w in saving.

Yesterday’s other challenge was two fold: learn how to take screen shots on the Pi and transferring those photos to my computer.

This site was one stop shopping for the screenshots information with nicely detailed but easy to follow directions and helpful links. They mentioned SSH or USB for transferring the photos and I decided to go with SSH.

Trevor Appleton led me through installing and setting up FileZilla to take advantage of SSH for transferring the photos.

Having fun learning and then riffing on that learning through the extra challenges. My swimming pool attempts led to a couple waterfalls!