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Microsoft Math Solver review

Years ago if you wanted a program to explain steps in mathematics, algebra or other complex math as a tutor would, you would have to buy a specialized software package built for some specific operating system (I forget the name… it may still be around?) Of course there was always open source software like Maxima to do powerful symbolic (or numeric, or graphing) math, but to know what to do one almost needs a manual, and while extremely powerful it was not helpful for beginners. I recently found a similarly useful free math solver on Microsoft’s site, https://mathsolver.microsoft.com:

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Fixing Ubuntu Python-Pip

After you’ve upgraded your Ubuntu machine a few times, you might find that free disk space is low and some Python commands have issues. Programs like Bleachbit can help you clear old packages or cache that you don’t need, but sometimes you need a minor manual fix as documented here. As you may know, Pip is the main package management you’ll use to install packages you use, so this can be problematic.

After upgrading 16.04 to 18.04, I got an error on command line “pip”:

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Hacktoberfest is coming up!

Hacktoberfest is coming up, online this time (well, the core of hacktoberfest always has been online collaboration…), and there are several projects I’ve worked on that welcome contributions:

  • Repeater-START – a useful tool for any ham radio enthusiast looking for repeaters.
  • Hearham Listener – also connects to hearham.com, this is an experimental listener to listen for audible callsigns on the ham radio.
  • Anti-Auto-correct, very useful for students in these remote times!
  • Tunesviewer
  • iosTransferGUI – I had used this for transferring files to iDevices, on Ubuntu.
  • Pylympus – for certain Olympus cameras with wifi-remote, a pure Python remote program.

There are many others and probably plugins or software you use every day that may need contributions or bug fixes, so with less than a month before the start, be thinking about what projects you might contribute to! Check out the full details at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/events

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Back to School and watch out for security and your preinstalled sofware!

This may be a back-to-school like no other in recent history. Kyle Rankin, chief security officer of Purism, has an interesting article about privacy as schools start online this year. While many schools use Google docs or Chromebooks, it is important to use your school account which is legally not allowed to be tracking as much.

(If you do use Google docs for education please also check out Autocorrect remover which makes writing much better for English learners!)

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MutationObserver as a clever javascript workaround

For this weekend’s hackathon I worked on a hackathon project I had thought about for awhile… an anti auto correct that should be more like natural paper and pencil, and not automatically show the answer when you click on a misspelled word (not great for learning, Google Docs!) This should be useful for learners especially during a pandemic.

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