Each micro:bit has a unique serial number, built in at manufacture. This number also translates to a friendly five-character name, which is a bit easier for people to recognize; here’s how to find it out.

There are some things I didn’t enjoy in 2016. Including things whose import will continue to play out in 2017, that have been better covered elsewhere; some notably by Frankie Boyle.

But hey, here is a tiny selection of some I did…

Last month I did some travelling in Japan. Although I had a pre-arranged visit in the South for a few days, much of the time my travels across the country resembled a graph drawn as if from the output of a “travelling salesman” algorithm gone wrong. Because—visiting places I’d not been before like Matsumoto, Sendai, and maximising use of the insanely great railway system.

Scratch is a much loved visual programming application, created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group of MIT Media Lab and often used for providing a first introduction to coding. For good reason it’s one of the six coding tools displayed in the programming menu of the Raspberry Pi. There’s a common impression that visual languages are just for beginners, and have to be replaced by textual languages for ‘proper’ programming.

‘there is a limited benefit [of Scratch] in a college level education.’ ¹

Some notes from my talk at the Raspberry Pi ‘Big Birthday Weekend’; entitled ‘Two languages in twenty minutes’ it introduced a couple of programming languages—Pharo (Smalltalk) and Racket (Lisp) running on the Pi 2 Model B. And some background on why you might want to run them.

(PDF of the slides should you find it useful).

For 2014 I had just one New Year’s resolution (and that stolen from @patrickrhone). Which I failed to keep.

I updated an earlier post ‘Hearing the weather-sonification in Sonic Pi’ in the form of a ‘Learn’ resource available on GitHub.

I’ve made a start on a Racket interface to Gordon Henderson’s WiringPi C library, together with a first example of using it—driving the hardware of the ‎4tronix PiDie GPIO board. Hoping this will be useful for future projects.

I’ve been thinking more about sound ‘visualisation’ with Sonic Pi (there’s a name for it too, I discover—_sonification_). So, what about loading weather data, and listening to that. How to get some data? Why not take advantage of the fact that Raspbian now comes complete with a copy of Mathematica?

I was just writing an example for a Sonic Pi demonstration, and thought I’d show looping. But I got it wrong; and when I heard the results, it was totally obvious. This struck me as an example of where visualising code as sound can be a powerful learning tool.