computoman

Remember the old concentration game from many years ago. You can make your own version. you will need thirty clear plastic envelopes. They can be make from cheap clear plastic lunch bags and clear plastic tape. Poster board can be used for making the large frames. You will also need to make some blue cards with the embossed numbers for each of the bags. Of course you will need a frame to hold the puzzle background. Lastly you will need a puzzle to use as the background. You can use your favorite drawing program the will let you import pictures. Gimp is what we like to use  There are thousands on-line that you can use or even use your own. Such as: The sky is the limit with your imagination. More information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_%28game_show%29

In an earlier article we briefly discussed the start, stop, and flow symbols. Now let us add one more symbol. Now let's add the rectangle to represent process or arithmetic calculation. Computers have memory. We can represent a piece of memory with a symbol known as a variable. Variables can change value at any time we want them to. Usually when we change a variable, we assign a new value to it or we just want to define a part of memory to a particular variable. In this case, we want define part of memory to be known as "A" and then assign the value of zero to it. We could also say that "A" was assigned a starting value of zero sort of like algebra you may have learned in school. So the program above starts, then assigns the value of zero to "A", and then just stops  So far that does not seem very practical, but it is still a program. So now so far, we have four tools to work with. Let's review. Every program must have a starting an...

One of my primary concerns is how to maximize computer resources. For example if you upgrade the memory on a laptop, you usually end up removing the the old memory. If the memory is still good why chunk it?  Had an old thin client that I bought for a few bucks, but it really needed more memory. Forgotten all about the unit until I was checking out what thin clients could be used with the newer thin client server,. Low and behold, after looking inside the the client, it had a slot that looked just like the same form factor as the memory from the laptop. Awesome.  Now I can upgrade a thin client to work with my newer LTSP server!!  One more piece of equipment back to work. The memory turned from a lemon into lemonade. Or as I started with "Upgrade one and then upgrade two."  Reuses for computers III is out! See it at: http://www.instructables.com/id/Reuses-for-legacy-computers-III/