User talk:Jomegat

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Transparent backgrounds

Thanks for fixing up the SPD honors to make the backgrounds transparent. The 9 ADRA honor images have the same issue. JadeDragon 01:59, 17 April 2014 (EDT)

OK, I'll see if I can get to that tonight. It was easy compared to when the wiki first opened here and I had nearly 400 to do. That took a little longer! --Jomegat 16:00, 17 April 2014 (EDT)

New SPD Honors

each of the new spd honors has complete answers on the spd site. can we copy them in? JadeDragon 02:05, 17 April 2014 (EDT)

That depends on them. Did they license them in a way that we can do that? When they began their exercise of revamping everything a couple of years ago they asked if they could use the wiki answers. Of course the answer was "of course, you just have to keep the CC-BY-SA license." They were delighted, and they did exactly that. I don't know if they maintained the spirit of openness with their material. I'll look into it tonight (or you could). --Jomegat 16:03, 17 April 2014 (EDT)
Nope. From their website:

Copyright

The website interface layout, design and content are our copyrighted property unless otherwise specified. The content on this website may be used by you only for your personal, non-commercial use as provided for in these Terms of Use, but may not be taken out of context or presented in a misleading or discriminatory manner. Any rights not expressly granted to you are reserved by us.

CC-BY-SA requires that we be able to use it for any purpose whatsoever, including commercially. We can't change that because those are the terms we inherited from Wikibooks/Wikipedia. --Jomegat 16:11, 17 April 2014 (EDT)
Hmm I have been thinking we should delete Wikibooks as it is increasingly not complete and not the best answers anymore. Ibfound wikibooks first and started editing there - how many users end up there and find what they need?

Radio

http://www.investitureachievement.org/wiki/index.php/Adventist_Youth_Honors_Answer_Book/Vocational/Radio header should link to the Advanced honor. Can't figure out how to change it. JadeDragon 12:52, 3 April 2014 (EDT)

The honor_header template has some code in it to look for "<pagename> - Advanced". If it finds it, it links to it. The Radio - Advanced honor had been misnamed (no hyphen) so the code couldn't find it. I've moved the page now, so it works. Thanks for pointing it out! --Jomegat 21:54, 3 April 2014 (EDT)

Sharks

Can you change http://www.investitureachievement.org/wiki/index.php/Adventist_Youth_Honors_Answer_Book/Sharks to http://www.investitureachievement.org/wiki/index.php/Adventist_Youth_Honors_Answer_Book/Nature/Sharks JadeDragon 02:36, 17 March 2013 (EDT)

Hi, JadeDragon. I did that on purpose. I intend over the course of the next couple of months to move all the honors out from under their categories and place them directly under the root level. The reasons for this are that it will make it a lot easier to link between honors if we remove that level of hierarchy, and it will not really mess anything up. Another reason is that the NAD Honors Taskforce approved a new honor last week but did not yet decided on which category it will be assigned. It will probably go into a new category named "Heritage," and there are several other honors that will be moved there with it. We expect there will also be a Heritage Master Award forthcoming. --Jomegat 09:14, 17 March 2013 (EDT)
However - that's a lot of work, so I want to stew on it for a little while before I act. --Jomegat 09:17, 17 March 2013 (EDT)
Great, thanks for the insight. Agreed - much easier to interlink, but lots of work to change all the links. If you decide to proceed let me know, and how to do it. I'm happy to divide the categories up between us and tackle the job.JadeDragon 21:12, 20 March 2013 (EDT)
I think I'm going to want to stew on it longer. It would be an incredible amount of work, and I'm not sure that it would even lend itself to automation. The honors themselves wouldn't be that hard, but some honors have submodules that have relative links. I think it might be best to move Sharks into the Nature category for now (and maybe forever). --Jomegat 21:19, 20 March 2013 (EDT)
I see you copied me a bit on the honors listing :D I just felt it took up less space visually, and less scrolling to put the honor patches :) Bluescifiworm 00:35, 6 June 2013 (EDT)
Yup. I wasn't going to list mine at all, but liked the way you had done it so much I changed my mind. --Jomegat 06:28, 6 June 2013 (EDT)

Images for the radio electronics honor

I noticed that most of the images in the radio electronics honor are missing, presumably due to the transfer to the current wiki. Do you know if they are still available?

Yes, they are still available, and your guess is correct. This was one of the first honors I tried to answer at Wikibooks, so not knowing better, I uploaded the images to Wikibooks instead of to Wikimedia Commons. I will upload them to our wiki in a few minutes.
Incidentally, I designed (and tested) the circuits in these missing images, so if you have questions, feel free to ask. Thanks for pointing out that these were missing! --Jomegat 18:51, 10 March 2014 (EDT)
Thanks. It might be good to add some more resources either to requirement 8 or to a new "resources" section at the end. Places like Adafruit.com and Sparkfun.com have kits and tutorials available. In addition eBay can be a great place to order components for much cheaper than the normal sources like digikey, mouser, etc...
I would like to put together one or more new honors dealing with more modern electronics like microcontrolers and stuff. there are so many great things that can be done easily now that weren't available to most people 20+ years ago.--206.210.161.13 15:52, 11 March 2014 (EDT)
Those are good ideas. I had been toying with the concept of a few honors like that, but hadn't considered an honor based around products such as the RasPi, Arduino, or Adafruit (et al). I had been thinking more along the lines of Digital Electronics, which would deal with logic gates. I do get to sit in on the NAD Honors Task Force (though I couldn't make it this year). I'll see if I can dig up the guidelines for submitting new honors and post them here.
As for modifying the answers in requirement 8 or adding a resources section I say... go for it. This is a Wiki, and you have edit privileges already. Here are a couple of honors I had been thinking of:
  • Digital Electronics
  • Microcontrollers (well... that's your idea, but I like having one list)
  • Programming
  • Soldering (not sure that would be a whole honor, but... maybe it could be. It could also be a requirement in one).
There have been noises on writing a Robotics honor too. The one I saw was going to require Lego Mindstorms, which I think would be a mistake. Having requirements that can be met with Mindstorms is OK, but requiring a particular brand... not cool, and definitely prone to built-in obsolescence. --Jomegat 16:43, 11 March 2014 (EDT)
The problem I was having was coming up with a name for the honor. Digital Electronics was one I thought about but I wasn't sure about it since I thought microcontrollers might be beyond just digital electronics, but it was the best one I had thought of. Maybe the basic honor could deal with the simple components: logic gates, 555s, etc... and an advanced honor could deal with microcontrollers, or maybe it should be the other way around, it might be simpler to do stuff with a Pic, Stamp, or Arduino and then the advanced honor could deal with the components. The obsolescence issue is a huge one, maybe "radio electronics" should be renamed.:)
Soldering is one of the requirements for the radio electronics honor. Maybe an advanced honor could be added that included more soldering, surface mount maybe, plus other things like creating PCBs.
I always thought it would be fun to have a programming honor that could be done in any language, and have language pins like the stars and diamonds, that could be applied to the patch for different languages.
There is a proposed robotics honor requirement on the Adventist Robotics League website, but it needs some work. I also got some requirements for several proposed honors from Mark, but they all needed work in my opinion. I agree that specifying the mindstorms is an issue, though it should definitely be named as an example in the honor answers.
I haven't updated anything yet because I haven't had time, and I hadn't gotten around to creating an account on this wiki yet. Anyway I have an account now, so I'll try to make some updates. One question I did have about updates, is would it be possible for you to recreate the symbols and schematics in a format that doesn't have a black background? They are a bit harder to read that way when you try to print them. I'm not sure what you created them with so I don't know how hard it would be to recreate them.--MrJoe 00:43, 12 March 2014 (EDT)
I created them with gEda, but I don't know if I still have the source files. I'll dig around for them when I get home tonight. If worse came to worse, it would not be that hard to recreate them from scratch. They are (by design) not complicated circuits.
I like the idea of language pins, but since that deviates from any established practice, it would be a lot more difficult to get the honors committee on board.
I would prefer to have digital electronics preceed microcontrollers, as it would tend to remove the "magic." Having even a loose graps of the fundamentals would allow the student to create and/or interface peripherals to the microcontroller. --Jomegat 13:40, 12 March 2014 (EDT)
An exhaustive search of my archives came up empty. If we want schematics with a white background, we'll have to create them from scratch. --Jomegat 11:17, 13 March 2014 (EDT)