teaching machines

4-pin Buttons on Arduino

At the early stages of learning, we tend to mimic without understanding. That’s how I learned to code, and that’s how I’m learning electronics. A book presents a circuit diagram, and I copy it faithfully. And lo, it works! That small thrill carries me to the next step of understanding. Here’s a circuit that I […]

TransportException with Eclipse and EGit

Students in my introductory programming class were getting TransportExceptions when trying to pull from a remote Git repository with the EGit plugin in Eclipse. The issue was a missing line in their .git/config. The file should have looked like this: … [remote “origin”] … fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* The definition of fetch was absent. I think […]

Weighted Distribution in Unity UI

Suppose you have a Horizontal Layout Group in a Canvas-based UI in Unity, and some elements in the group should expand but not others. Or some should expand at different rates than others. Checking the Width option of Child Force Expand on the group seems like it might do what you want, but you are […]