Over the last few months, I've been working with a 4-H member to develop and build a smart, simple, and elegant web-application for 4-H members to upload photos they take while participating in a youth conference. Since I'm working with a 4-H member to develop the website, everything needs to have a focus on education, and I need to spend as little time as possible fussing with the infrastructure side of things, since that's not what we're focusing on. I decided that we should make a system using my self-hosted GitLab and Jenkins instances to automagically deploy changes so that the youth doesn't have to learn how that's done, and fight with the server all the time!

I recently attended the 2022 University of Idaho, Washington State University joint Youth Swine Field day in Asotin, WA. It's been a while since I've been very involved in swine projects in 4-H, but it's been good getting back into the swing of things. Admmittedly, I'm learning new things all the time, myself, but since the ethos of 4-H is "Learn by Doing," I'm always one for good, tangible, hands-on exercises to help engage youth while teaching. I thought it about time that I share a few of my ideas!

Shadow boxes deserve a shadow... right? Well, if there's a shadow, there has to be some light! That's what I've been working on; adding a little intelligent lighting to my shadow boxes! But, I've also been going crazy in the kitchen with some lights around the cabinets.

The world we live in is congested with controversy; left-vs-right, masks-vs-maskless, us-vs-them. So many arguments, one thing that we don't need to argue about is that there are parts of the U.S. that don't have much access to water, and that there are parts of the U.S. that also face some real challenges with wildfire.

So if you're gonna use Python to help bring photos from youth together; how, exactly, do you do it? This article will look at how we're using Lychee, Python, FastAPI, and React.js to make an ultra-simple, highly effective photo upload service for a youth conference.

We know that I don't like to do anything that computers can do for me. We also know that I like Python, and am not a huge fan of Java. So how am I going to get PlantUML integrated into my blog without actually needing to install the Java packages? Let me show you...

A step back down memory-lane, I pulled out the ol' 'Quiz Board' for a presentation!

How do you get nearly one-hundred high-school age youth to collect nearly as many photos for a competition at a youth conference? Facebook? Google-Drive? How about Python...?

Python's telnetlib library doesn't like null-characters, SEL protocol does, that makes for some interesting challenges.

When it comes to wrapping Christmas gifts, I've used wrapping paper, tissue paper, even newspaper. This year, I'm going a little further up the chain though. I'm using wood!