Our kids seem to have the Christmas thing under control -- I remember waking my folks up at 5am to open presents, but our kids let us sleep in today until nearly 8:30am. They liked their presents heaps, so if you got something for them, well done. I'll put some pictures online later when I get a chance. [btags:]
I spent some time this morning wrapping the presets for the kids. They get two Christmases you see -- the one in Australian, and then another smaller one when they get to the US. Now, it might be the nostalgia speaking, or the fact that I haven't seen my family in nearly a month, but it occurred to me that I really like Christmas. Or to be more precise -- I really like giving my kids stuff. Although, it turns out that I am crap at wrapping. There is something really cute about the kids being excited to be moving to the US -- because daddy said there were presents waiting for them. That's cool. Oh, and next time I'm only going to buy rectangular presents so I stand a chance of being able to wrap them. Ever tried to wrap a stuffed toy? [btags:]
Herm. Twinkle Tux just had one of it's transformers fail. I'm not sure if it was because of temperature (it was a warm day and I had left Twinkle Tux on all day as I got slack), or if it was just due to fail. Luckily I had a hot spare, so Twinkle Tux is back online once more.
This page documents how I built a penguin out of fairy lights... Tux is the official mascot of the Linux operating system, to which I have made various contributions over the years. Tux was originally drawn by Larry Ewing, and looks something like: The goal was to turn this into something which worked well with fairy lights poked through holes in a piece of MDF. I guess I was thinking of pointillism when I originally came up with the idea. It seemed like a good idea, but the bit which worried me the most was to ensure that the image was clearly a penguin at the end of drilling several hundred holes in a big bit of dead tree. Being a software engineer, the obvious solution was to whip up something which could simulate Twinkle Tux. Taking the image that I had in mind, I first needed to force it into the colors which were available to me from fairy lights (red, green, blue, and yellow in the set I wanted to use). I therefore wrote a program which generated a false color Tux, in my restricted palette. This is the code I came up with, if you care about…
As a hobbyist Linux kernel hacker, it struck me as obvious that the first thing I should make is a Tux made out of fairy lights. Tux is the official Linux mascot. There's a page documenting how I made Twinkle Tux if you're interested.