Paul Sutton

Personal Blog & website

CanSat Contest

The UK CanSat Competition 2023/24 is open for registration. Don’t miss out on your chance to enter, the deadline is the 17th of October 2023.

CanSat provides students with the opportunity to have practical experience working on a small-scale space project. Students (14+) can enter the CanSat competition and design their own satellite simulation in a soft drink can.

Note: *The above text is taken from the all about stem website. I am just reproducing here for the purpose of promoting the contest.

Tags

#STEM,#Space,#Science,#CanSat


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Some useful resources

As well as Replit, we can hopefully use some of the video resources below to help us learn a variety of skills such as coding, networking, shell scripting etc. Hopefully build up a good skillset so you can take part in a future cyber centurions competition.

Useful videos

You may also find vfsync useful for access to a command line shell too.

Mastodon instance for InfoSec industory


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Microbit and planetary transits

I am putting together a Micro:bit project to try and demonstrate how we find planets around distance stars using transits. The idea is to use the micro:bit as a light sensor and use the 5z5 LED display.

As LEDs can also detect light then it is possible to use the display to indicate the level of light in the room.

By illuminating this with a torch, and blocking some of the light, the number of lit LEDs is reduced, during the time the light is blocked. This should be visible on the display.

I need to try and construct something from LEGO WeDo to use a motor and rotate a plastic or polystyrene ball in a circular motion so that during this the ball moves between the lit torch and the display, castng a shadow and reducing the light level.

What should be produced is a graph that shows the light level at a peak, dropping for a period of time then rising up once the display is fully illuminated again.

This should provide a basic demonstration as to the common method of finding planets around stars.

I have set the Micro:bit to also send data via the serial port, so also need to figure out a way to read this data, however this is not an essential aspect to the project.

My target for this is the November stem group meeting.


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Code Club 7/10/2023 reminder

The next Paignton Library code club is on Saturday 7th October 2023, 10 am to 12:00. We will carry on with with the Code Club and hour of code projects and hopefully also the Python Projects.

We are also probably going to be making more use of Repl.it too as we can use that for collaborating on projects or at least inviting other users to our projects which is really useful generally but does encourage collaboration. We have a team on there anyway so we can make more use of that.

I have added more links below to try and reflect our current set of activities.

Useful Links

Next Code Club

The next code club is on 21/10/2023

Tags

#CodeClub,#Python,#HourOfCode,#Scratch,#Minecraft,#Themes, #Java,#Programmng


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Trojans Rookie camp week 4

Torbay Trojans Rookie camp 4

  • Date : 1st October 2023
  • Time : 10am to 13:00
  • Location; Foxhole Field, Bellfield Road, Paignton

Tags

#Trojans,#Football,#Training,#TorbayTrojans,#AlwaysTrojan


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BBC 500 Words 2023

The BBC 500 words competition for 2023 has been launched today. You can find info here. Two categories 5-7 and 8-11.

Great opportunity to put pen to paper or even fingers to keyboard and see what you can come up with.

closing date 10 November 2023 and be living in the UK.


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Predatory Science

This was posted to the Fediverse. Really interesting article given the current climate of misinformation. We now have bad academic practice which is leading to the publication of poor quality science and research.

This as the article says, undermines science that is conducted properly, peer reviewed and is robust so that quality and most importantly trust is maintained.

You can read the article here

Trust in science is essential,

The website Sense About Science has some excellent resources, including information on Peer review processes and how peer review can help science.

You can perhaps discuss further on Science forums or just perhaps join the fediverse

Tags

#Science,#Review,


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Trojans Rookie camp week 3 write-up

Torbay Trojans Rookie camp 3

Great session today and excellent progress being made. We are making progress on a number of levels, tackling, passing, catching, routes and general team game skills, along with fitness.

A few photos below

rookie 3 footwork

rookie 3 equipment

rookie 3 pads

rookie 3 routes

Rookie camp 4 is on Sunday 1st October 2023

Tags

#Trojans,#Football,#Training,#TorbayTrojans,#AlwaysTrojan


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Moonhack 2023

In 2022, Moonhack united 43,999 young coders globally for a two-week online coding event. Taking part is a fun way to learn coding skills, and participants don’t need any coding experience, as step-by-step project instructions are provided.

Register on the Moonhack website for this year's projects Pick a date from 10 to 26 October to join!

If you're a little more advanced you may want to look in to Cybercenturion

Tags

#CodeClub,#MoonHack


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Hard-disk diagnostics

I have an old SAGEM digital box, with built in pvr. Trying to see if I can copy any data from this on to my main desktop pc.

GNU / Linux has lots of tools for disks, However I am getting odd results here, according to fdisk, the device is 80gb, so here it shows 74gb, which is right if you take in to account how file systems work.

Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdg: 74.53 GiB, 80026361856 bytes, 156301488 sectors
Disk model: 0BB-55JKC0      
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xa4a88a04

Command (m for help): q

However df seems to think the device is 1.9 gb in size.

root@Desktop:~# df -h /dev/sdg
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
root@Desktop:~# fdisk /dev/sdg

Gnomedisks, has a benchmark tool which gave me the following results, however I am not sure what all the different colours mean, I would assume the red / green are indicating read / write. I am not sure what the big green mass indicates and there doesn't appear to be any sort of key to help interpret.

gnome disks benchmark

Finally I tried running the disk through testdisk, which can aid in data recovery, according to that there is no partition table The screen shot below is the basic test running, but I did run a deeper test after this. Takes about an hour on my system.

testdisk

Need to do more digging but the disk does seem to be in a working condition.


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