I can't believe it's been nearly a year since I posted any blogs. So many things have crossed my mind. So many things that I haven't really wanted to put out there in public view. Things have been tough at times this year, but I have also been enjoying a lot of this year.
I've gotten into more of the Raspberry Pi/robotics stuff this year. I got a library card earlier in the year while Grace was going to a painting class at the local library. While I was there I came across a book about doing robotics with the Raspberry Pi and it looked interesting. I hadn't had a library card in years. I was happy to find that our local library doesn't even have late fees for checking out books, and it even has automatic renewal for books as long as someone else hasn't reserved the book. So I checked out a book from Matt Timmons-Brown called
Learn robotics with Raspberry Pi : build and code your own moving, sensing, thinking robots. It was a pretty good book, but even though it was published in 2019, it was already outdated since some of the code libraries are no longer supported and available code libraries weren't compatible with the latest OS. Unfortunately, that meant that I wasn't able to complete everything in the book, but I did still enjoy working on it. I even used my 3d printer to build a chassis for my robot.
I've also played a record number of boardgames this year, 78 different titles with 221 plays counted. This is only counting boardgames that I've played face-to-face, not
boardgamearena.com,
abstractplay.com, or similar digital versions. Although there is still another day to play this year, it probably won't change the games that are in the top 10 (*tied) most played games this year. There are a few on here that were played primarily against my son or my brother, but the top were favorites of my wife and daughters.
1)
Skip-Bo (played 15 times this year, including twice that I played with my grandparents)
2)
The Chameleon (played 12 times)
3*)
Do You Even Know Math? (played 9 times over just a few days)
3*)
Kingdomino (also played 9 times)
5*)
Dungeon Heroes (played 8 times)
5**)
Turing Machine (played 8 times; Update: two more plays on New Years Eve bumped this up)
6*)
Dominion (played 7 times)
6*)
Chess (played 7 times)
6*)
Quoridor (played 7 times)
9*)
Scarab Lords (played 6 times)
9*)
Roll For The Galaxy (played 6 times)
9*)
Wingspan (played 6 times)
In addition to those boardgames and digital board games, I've also enjoyed getting back into
codecombat.com, practicing with programming in Python. Many of the challenges on codecombat.com have been easy for me to complete, since they have a lot of the code already setup for each scenario along with comments of what to do next. Still, there have been a few throughout the course that were difficult. There is a lot that is only available for premium members on that site, but I'm still just going through the free stuff. Maybe next year I'll get back into
codingame.com again. That was fun when I did it before, but it's been a while since I've tried anything on there.
Lego kits have been enjoyable this year too. I've been building things with the Lego Education Spike Prime. I've tried getting my youngest daughters into it, using the suggested builds from the Lego Competition Ready lessons. I also got a really cool Optimus Prime set for my birthday from my brother. In a lot of ways, this seems like the year of the robots for me.
