I’ve been a middle school and high school robotics coach for a number of years. I think VEX robotics makes the best products to teach kids of any age robotics.
You buy a relatively affordable kit of parts, but then you are free to assemble and program the bit in whatever way imaginable.
VEX annually comes out with new games and challenges for your robot to be able to complete. There are teams and clubs across the US, and it’s an all around great program.
I’m looking forward to my kids being old enough to build and compete, It’s a blast for kids and adults!
I second this. Both of my children did this, my daughter started in 4th grade. The kits are deceptive, they look like Legos but you can build some remarkably sophisticated robots. With the more advanced ones you can do some pretty advanced programming too. The collaborative way the competition is run is quite clever too. They have a full spectrum of touch points that makes it fairly accessible and satisfying for the children. The other thing I like more than I thought, they provide a couple good starting points for the children to build off of, for the younger kids they are much more likely to succeed by building off of a working plan rather than cutting from whole cloth.
- you use a tablet to control the motor(s) using controls (like a remote controller) or code (like Scratch)
- the motors can be connected to different things (e.g. wheels) depending on how you put it together
- it has sensors as well as motors
I think Vex is a bit more modular in some ways. My son's Apitor kit comes with a proximity sensor and a color sensor, but I think with Vex you can choose which sensor(s) to attach to your build.
I'm a big fan of VEX IQ for elementary and middle school students. Parts are easy to work with, there is a wide variety. Decent array of sensors, and you can program in blocks or Python.
Code App is a similar app available on iOS. I've used it a bit, and it's pretty polished. It's a paid app in the app store but the testflight build is available for free.
I think they only look similar but are completely different. OP's app runs a full-featured vscode (not creating a new editor) and supposedly has access to all vscode's marketplace extensions.
You can actually edit remote files via SSH in the TestFlight build, and get a remote terminal to boot. Quite handy, although I can’t seem to be able to display two files side by side inside the app.
I think the headline is a little misleading. The way the question in the survey was worded, implied (to me at least) that I should check the box if I host any services on linux servers/containers.
I'm not sure if that is available out of the box, I haven't seen it if it is. But the killer feature of Obsidian is the community plugin ecosystem. I would be surprised if a plugin isn't available soon so make this happen.
This looks like Obsidian's first move away from using some dialect of markdown? The .canvas files appear to be human readable json, but certainly not as readable as markdown. I'm excited to try this out, but I hope this isn't a trend towards using proprietary formats.
We considered many options to use Markdown but came to the conclusion that Canvas is not something that can fit into a readable Markdown file. Either the Markdown file would so messy that it becomes pointless (i.e. you would never open it in Typora to edit), or it would severely limit the power of Canvas.
After much internal debate we chose the JSON format. We stay committed to keep it as open and easy to work with as possible. Plugin developers are already parsing and modifying the JSON file to programmatically change a Canvas view, and I think that's a fantastic start!
Now that you crossed that line, I hope the next "custom format" will be a "real" outliner. You are surely familiar with outliners ;-) It is about full block-level support really, and all what that allows (API, backlinks, query, aliases...)
Opportunity cost. I wrote on your forums about the decioson of using plain markdown. Consider other formats to stop bloating(yaml and dataview variables) markdown files. Now you have bloated md files and another format. Now i am saying you will add sqlite after one or two years. Waiting for extra file formats making existing files ugly.
Also obsidian needs multi user vaults. Start to think what extra file format needed for this.
The .canvas files are a JSON-based file format that we open-sourced under MIT license. Just like everything else in Obsidian, it's still all local files on your device.
If I understand it correctly, the use case is to link existing MD notes visually. That's a different way of looking at the data than the two-way backlink approach that was the foundation of Obsidian (and other personal wiki tools).
I'm interested in this, as I currently use a combination of Obsidian + SimpleMind, but currently SimpleMind has more features (full fledged mindmapping app), and I like having two separate spaces to sketch out ideas.
I also use both, Simplemind is a fantastic mind mapping app.
For smaller scale mindmapping though, I am finding Canvas very usable already for such an early release. The ability to easily link or embed to markdown files (or create new ones) is really nice, and I like having all my work in a common area. Community created plugins will also dramatically expand the app.
There will always be advantages for the dedicated apps as well, but this is going to be a great option for many.
I really wish that Sublime would add an integrated terminal panel. None of the packages I’ve tried that do add a terminal view, work the way the way I want them to. It’s really the one feature that’s holding me back from even trying to switch away from VS Code.
The whole set of Remote Development extensions is a game changer. You can be remote and it feels like being local with the terminal, debugger, files and language server.
It's especially useful when your laptop is running a different OS than Linux which is often the target.
I just hate the overly zealous autocomplete that fixes good words into bad words and forces me to hit Esc every time.
Agreed. Set up your terminal to automatically come to the front with a keyboard shortcut. To me this seems better than having it built in to the editor in every way.
Same here. I was a huge terminal in editor user, but VSCode crashed on me a couple of times resulting in restarting all the terminals and the processes which I was running. Since then I always use an external terminal.
https://www.vexrobotics.com/
You buy a relatively affordable kit of parts, but then you are free to assemble and program the bit in whatever way imaginable.
VEX annually comes out with new games and challenges for your robot to be able to complete. There are teams and clubs across the US, and it’s an all around great program.
I’m looking forward to my kids being old enough to build and compete, It’s a blast for kids and adults!