Update

Just a quick unedited post of text to let you all know I'm back in the game.

After a few weeks of different issues, arising I'm know back putting more effort into my coding and my raspberry pi.

First project is to sort this print server out!

Bootstrap

 I completed another challenge on codecademy.com to create a professional looking website.

This used a new element called Bootstrap. For those of you who don’t know it’s a CSS framework that allow functions to be created faster.

Interesting element I’m going to use it in a codebit I have on codecademy at the moment.

Come check out my profile if you want.

Project

Been away for a while, unfortunately my grandmother died that put dampener on everything of the last couple of week. But on to my project.

Currently I am a customer advisor in the motor trade. Been in the motor trade now for too long but an project idea came to me today.

The company I work for has a DMS or Dealer Management System operating pretty much everything we do from invoice to vehicle history, CRM and new car sales all through this system.

Its great for the accountant but for us minions its after through products bolted on to this amazing package.

I thought could I build a simple website to do the basics of what I want.

I have customer records that I need to send an email to after every booking. However we can’t create an option to automate this so I have to copy paste a word document into a blank email, adjust the info for specific customers then send it.

I’m looking for a solution. I'm think a web form that we use as a booking prompt that emails the customer directly. we'll see.

Command line

I posted an article called “How I Taught Myself to Code in Eight Weeks”.

I have been reading this article and working through it. I’m at stage two or Learning Python the hard way. First I’m working through the command line crash course as my use of the command line is limited to my raspberry pi. Using line I have copied from tutorial from the internet and to be honest to not much success.

Currently learning about directories and their relationship with GUI and CLI and enjoying it to be honest. Not being an area I’m strong I like spreading my wings and learning new part of how things work.

Not quite feeling the eight weeks thing but I suppose if you have nothing else to do you could do it.

How to Turn a Raspberry Pi into a Google Cloud Print Server

This is the article I spoke about in my last post. Interesting , very simple!

NOT MY WORK! see the end of the post for the author name and details about him.

How to Turn a Raspberry Pi into a Google Cloud Print Server

Google Cloud Print is a fantastic way to link your printers to the cloud and enjoy print-from-anywhere access, but there’s a catch. If you don’t have one of the recent Cloud-Print-Ready printers, you need to leave your computer on to enable remote access. Read on as we configure  a tiny, energy-sipping Raspberry Pi for the task.

Why Do I Want to Do This?

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Currently there are two paths to Google Cloud Print access in your home: you can buy a Cloud Print enabled printer that links itself directly to your Google account and your Cloud Print service, or you can use a PC (that has access to the printers you wish to add to Cloud Print) to act as a Cloud Print server.

The first situation is ideal, as the printer itself connects directly to the cloud and there is no need for an intermediary. Barring that, however, it should be your goal to make sure the intermediary is wasting as few resources as possible. Leaving a desktop computer on 24/7 for the sole purpose of functioning as a Cloud Print server is a whole lot of resources for a job that requires very little horsepower.

In order to cut back on the resources wasted, we’ve opted to turn a tiny, low-power Raspberry Pi device into an ultra lightweight Cloud Print Server. The best part about this setup is that the Raspberry Pi can continue to perform other roles. For example, our Raspberry Pi Cloud Print Server is also the same device functioning as our Raspberry Pi Weather Indicator. It takes so few resources to do both jobs (spool up the occasional print job and run a simple script to check the weather and toggle an LED) that there’s no reason to not stack the tasks and get more out of our Raspberry Pi purchase. Here are some of the projects that you could easily stack with a Raspberry Pi Cloud Print Server:

• Build an LED Indicator with a Raspberry Pi (for Email, Weather, or Anything)
• How to Turn a Raspberry Pi into a Low-Power Network Storage Device
• How to Turn a Raspberry Pi into an Always-On BitTorrent Box
• How to Install NZBGet for Lightweight Usenet Downloading on Your Raspberry Pi

What Do I Need?

For this tutorial, we are going to assume that you already have the following:

• A Raspberry Pi with Raspbian installed
• Printers accessible to the Pi
• A Google Account

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If you haven’t configured your Raspberry Pi with Raspbian or added printers to it yet, definitely check out the two links above to get up to speed. It is critical that you’ve followed along with (or at least checked your own printer installation notes against) our Raspberry Pi printer guide. If your Pi doesn’t have access to printers (local or networked), you won’t have any success with this tutorial.

In addition, you’ll likely find it helpful to check out our guide to Google Cloud Print to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the system.

Installing Chromium

The secret sauce in our Raspberry Pi as Cloud Print Server model is the open source browser Chromium. One of the official ways to add Cloud Print capability to a PC is to use Google’s Chrome web browser as a print server. Unfortunately, even though there is an official Chrome release for quite a few distributions of Linux, it only supports x86/x64 architecture and not the ARM-based architecture that powers the Raspberry Pi and Rasbian. This is where Chromium comes in, as we can still access the relevant features in Chromium that we need to link our Raspberry Pi to Google’s Cloud Printer system.

To get started, open up the terminal on your Raspberry Pi and enter the following command:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

When prompted, type Y and hit enter to continue the installation. The installation isn’t enormous, but it’s big enough; a ten minute trip to the break room to grab a cup of coffee is certainly a reasonable way to kill the installation time.

Once Chromium is installed, we need to launch it from the desktop environment. You can find it in Raspbian’s start menu under Internet -> Chromium Web Browser:

After launching Chromium, navigate to the menu icon in the upper right corner, click it, and then select “Settings”. Scroll down in the Settings window until you see “Advanced Settings” and, after clicking that, continue scrolling down through the expanded settings options until you see the entry for Google Cloud Print:

Click “Add Printers”. You’ll be kicked over to an authorization page like so:

Fill in the Google account credentials of the account you use to manage your Cloud Printers. Make sure “Stay signed in” is checked, since this is going to be a stand alone print server we don’t regularly interact with.

After authorizing your account, you’ll see the “Add printer(s)” button. Whichever printers the Raspberry Pi has access to (be they local or networked) will be added to your Google Cloud Print account. If those printers were previously added by some other means, you’ll want to visit your Cloud Print management page to remove the older entries.

After clicking the Add button, you’ll see a confirmation page indicating that the printers were added and you’re ready to start printing. Now is a perfect time to fire off a test print:

Roughly 10 seconds or so after we fired off the print job, it spooled up on the networked printer:

While we initially had concerns that the Cloud-to-Pi-to-Printer workflow would be slow (not that blistering speed is really that critical in most printing situations), those concerns have never been validated. Even with larger PDF files, the process is only marginally longer than your typically lengthy printing-a-big-PDF wait.

After running your test print, you can close Chromium on the Pi as the print server will continue to run in the background. Now you can enjoy print-from-anywhere convenience for around a quarter a month (the Raspberry Pi consumes so little energy that the average annual operating cost is around $3).

Jason Fitzpatrick is warranty-voiding DIYer and all around geek. When he's not documenting mods and hacks he's doing his best to make sure a generation of college students graduate knowing they should put their pants on one leg at a time and go on to greatness, just like Bruce Dickinson. You can follow him on Google+ if you'd like.

Busy times

I have encountered a very busy time of my life, Fence blew down, Kids birthday and busy at work leave me very little time to put into my studies.

Hoping to get back on it after this weekend as this weekend is Hockey weekend. Although my team didn't make the playoffs I will be watching them with some friends on telly.

Back on it this week, had a little flutter with udacity course but nothing worth writing about.

Code School

Code School is another website to teach people how to code. It does this by video tutorials and exercises directly in your browser, sort of a combination of codecademy or code avengers and a udemy course.

Upon typing in codeschool.com into google and clicking the link (or click this one ). You are present with a video on the homepage. Go ahead and watch it, see if its your thing.



Codeschool.com offers a varity of courses and four paths you could follow.

Personally I have gone with the HTML/CSS path to start with but once you have made your account you will be presented with your account page.

Here you can see recently course you have done, or look at the paths you have taken.

Once you have selected a course, you will go to the overview of it then click to start the course. The first level is free of charge but to progress through the stages you are required to "enroll" or join at $29 per month. 

This site, most certainly  the HTML/CSS level 1 I did is geared up for people who have some experience with HTML/CSS. Now I have only been doing this for a month or so and I grasped the concepts and with a little reference guide, I got through the level 1 with minimal mistakes or errors.

I like this site but its not free and at this point in my life, i'm not in a position to fork out that about of money per month. I like the way its set out, I really like the way the content is presented. Very well put together and worth spending 20 mins investigating to see if its for you as it were.

if i were in a financial position too then i think this is a strong contender for my money, very nice site.

UPDATE: I received a email from code school with a free two days pass. That's pretty cool. I will be activating my free pass soon and reporting my progress.

Code Avengers

Now with Code Avengers I must stress that I have only covered the free trial section of the HTML/CSS course. However if i was to make the investment in my training at this stage, code avengers would be very high on my list. 

When you log on your met by this page, now if I'm honest I saw this and my first thought was one of disappointment but I decided to give it a whirl anyway and I'm glad I did.

Go ahead and my an account then you can choose a course to learn. The choice is limited to JavaScript or Web development ( HTML/CSS ). I decided to try HTML course and was pleasently surprised by what I found. The course contains a window where you type you code and a toolbar underneath for your complete button next task etc etc. however your preview window is in the shape of a mobile phone, which I thought was quite cool. I can't get a picture but the first picture in this post has a small preview so you can see how I mean.

The lesson themselves carry a similar direction to codecademy's but I learn some different tags and attributes from doing this course that I didn't learn in the others.

Check out the free trial, 7 lesson with 3or 4 tasks in each, I enjoyed it.

Didn't think pricing was so bad but not wanting to spend at money at the moment but my well do so in the future.

My progress so far, think I'll the free sections of JavaScript first and see how that goes.

Thanks for reading.

Javascript

I'm currently working through the Javascript course on codecademy.com.

I'm finding this more challenging but still enjoying the course. I completed a web project on the site that allows you to animate your name when your pass over it with your mouse and I thought that was amazing.

I'm currently about 23% through this course and looking forward to completing more in the future.

I have reached a section on functions where I feel codecademy.com fails. I am confused and just can't get my head round them.

I tried a couple of other options, watched some youtube video's and some other tutorials.  Even more confused now, declaring the function before the name or after the name? My brain is scrambled at the moment!

My Plan

The more I get in to coding and computer science, the more interesting it gets, the more it pulls me in.

I had the hair brain scheme of earning 400 per day with 6 months in a moment of madness the other day but came to may senses and I apologise if that if anyone feels degraded by my thought that it would be that simple. 

I do have a plan though, i want to learn as much as i can with the prefix of maybe becoming a developer of some description.

I was thinking I would complete all of codecademy's content then move on to the next site I like according to my review post.

Code.org

Code.org is a little different to codecademy.com. Code.org has a definate direction to be child friendly. take a read of their Wikipedia pages to explain why.

From Wikipedia:
Code.org is a non-profit organization and eponymous website led by brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi that aims to encourage people, particularly school students in the United States, to learn to code. The website includes free coding lessons, and the initiative also targets schools in an attempt to encourage them to include more computer science classes in the curriculum. On December 9, 2013, they launched the Hour of Code 2013 challenge nationwide to promote computer science during computer science week until December 15, 2013.

Goals

According to its website, Code.org has the following goals:

• Bringing Computer Science classes to every K-12 school in the United States, especially in urban and rural neighborhoods.
• Demonstrating the successful use of online curriculum in public school classrooms
• Changing policies in all 50 states to categorize C.S. as part of the math/science "core" curriculum
• Harnessing the collective power of the tech community to celebrate and grow C.S. education worldwide
• Increasing the representation of women and students of color in the field of Computer Science.

This website reminds me a little of The Raspberry Pi Foundation. For those who don't know ( if you don't know Why dont you! call yourself interested in computers!) check out the link above for more info but in short two guys set up a charity to create a small, cheap computer ( $35 US dollars (although a British charity I'd like to add) and the size of a credit card.) for kids to learn to code on in school or at home.

Anyway about Code.org, I feel this is what Hadi and Ali are trying to achieve also by providing this site. Basic tutorial in coding, moving a "special" (more to come) character around to achieve by placing blocks of code with certain direction on them. Very similar to Scratch if you ever had a go with it, placing blocks with if or else and move forward until etc etc. I recommend people to try it out and again its free!  Worth trying out.

This is the first page your greeted with, video for information and the invite to start an hour of code. As you can see from the picture, the likes of Ashton Kutcher (Hollywood Actor ), Mark Zuckerberg ( 1 of the 4 creators of Facebook ), Bill Gates ( creator of Microsoft ) plus others. That some wait, some high profile names in and out of the world of computer science. To top that off your use an angry bird from well Angry Birds obviously and a zombie from Plants vs Zombies i believe its called.

I'm going to leave my review here and let you decide, this site is basic but its fun. I enjoyed but to start with you won't learn to program your own programme/software or what ever for a while. Some thing I did find very cool though was this.

I think that is brillant for completing the Hour of Code!

Thanks for Reading!

Other coding sites

I'm not endorsed by codecademy.com or any other site for that matter,  this is just the first site I found and I started to use.

I have used a couple of other sites on my coding journey. 

Below I have listed the sites and I will be doing a post of  my individual experiences using them.

1. Codecademy.com (already done)
2. Code.org
3. Code Avengers
4. Code School
5. Udacity
6. Tree House

I'll try and do them in the order of this list.

Thanks for reading.

Codecademy.com

As you may have read in my first post, I have started to learn to code using codecademy.com (not Code Academy like I said I'm my first post, sorry). Thought I'd do a bit of a review. I find the content on the site very easy to use, easy to follow lessons and an achievement system that for me help me stay motivated.

From Wikipedia:
Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in six different programming languages like Python, PHP,jQuery, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages includingHTML and CSS. As of June 2012, the site had over 5 million users who had completed over 100 million exercises. The site has received positive reviews from many blogs and websites, including the New York Times and TechCrunch.

Codecademy was founded in 2011 by Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski.^[9] Sims dropped out of Columbia University to focus on launching a venture, while Bubinski graduated from Columbia with a degree in computer science andbiophysics.^[10] The company, headquartered in New York City, raised $2.5 million in Series A funding in October 2011 and $10 million in Series B funding in June 2012.^[9][11] The latest round of funding was led by Index Ventures.

Bit of background info on the site for you.

Anyway the site, When you type in codecademy.com ( or click the link) then you are present with a console that asks you to follow the instruction.

This console is actually taking you through maybe your first steps in coding, working out math questions, the date and measure the length of a string.

It then ask you to make an account. If your a Google, Facebook or Twitter user then your can use them to log in or if your like me and use all three but can't decide which one to use, you can create your account with your email, which will be neatly already filled in from the console earlier ( providing you use a genuine email).

After you have joining these elite club ( worth a try) you will be presented with the learn page. Where you can start projects ( using code to build an end product ) called code-bits or pick a language to start learning. As I mention i started with Python but became frustrated with it, now don't get me wrong here. This is frustration with myself not codecademy.com, I have since gone back and carried out but I'm try to concentrate on my current language ( more in a later post ).

Again from Wikipedia:
Codecademy also provides a forum where enthusiasts, beginners, and advanced coders can come together and help each other. For some courses, there are 'sandboxes' where users can test out their code. There are four main topics: Web (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP), Ruby,Python, and Miscellaneous.

I like how this site goes together and how things work. I find the lesson easy to follow but could have a little information when explaining current sections. 

Lessons are in a console format, so your instruction is on the left with your script in the middle and a preview window to the top right.

This particular lesson is my next one, but you can see how the lessons are set out.

Lessons work how lesson work ready, start with the basics and work up. HTML courses started by building a basics HTML social media profile. Basic stuff but important lessons. 

One of if not the best thing is codecademy.com is 100% totally utterly and undeniably FREE, ZERO COST, NOTHING. Cant argue with that!

So this completes my review of codecademy.com, I urge people to try it, as it doesn't cost anything other than time it's a no brainer. Codecademy.com may not be to everyone's taste but not everything is ( I can't stand Marmite! ).

Current Progress

Thought I'd do a quick post to show you a screen shot of my progress so far on Codecademy.com.

Sorry the picture is not the best quality, next post I'll talk about my current course. 

Starting my journey

I started my journey back at the beginning of February.

I have always had an interest in computers, computing and computer science but never drew me to pursue it as a career. I choose to be a car mechanic instead. I worked through my apprenticeship to fully qualified then moved into a more administration role.

I have been pondering my career direction for many years, what I want to do, how I can do it etc etc. I have reached a point where being moaned at and dealing with the general public has become very tedious. However it all comes down to one thing, this is what I know and it’s easy to me.

During 2013, I brought a raspberry pi, the $35 computer. It comes with Python preloaded on to it and I thought I’d like to have a go at coding/programming (with ever is down with the kids these days).

I downloaded MagPi through NewsStand for my iPad. I started reading about coding and raspberry pi, all the things and projects that could be done. Then one day I was sat at work and I “googled” “learning to code” and Code Academy was the first that came back. I clicked the link, took me to a website with a console in it, followed these tasks and started to enjoy myself. Code Academy offers many different languages, but I was there for python so I started working through the python course until I got to about 23%. I reached the section of Booleans (hence the blog name) but got very frustrated with it and ended up turning it off. Over the next couple of hours I found myself logging back in.

I was still frustrated with python so I decided I’d try HTML/CSS and was surprised about how easy it was to understand. I flew through the course in 5 days and actually felt like I had achieved something. I was proud of myself and my new skills, I can now write basic HTML and CSS.