Week 10: Day 030 - The Majority of this Week

What have I been up to all week? Well one things for sure, I've been busy enough not to be able to post as many blog entries as I usually do. Something that's really worth noting, is that we had a short week to begin with, knowing that Wednesday was a day off for Veteran's Day. Regardless, I did quite a bit.

First, towards the beginning of the week I was given a task by Mr. Nolen outta the blue, to try an mount an image onto some type of storage, so he could do something for his students. But what, you may ask? He took me around showing me exactly what he was trying to do, which was virtually replicating a project he did a long while back. It was a wooden handheld gaming system, if that makes any sense. Basically, the image that he mounted in the past was an emulator which emulated games from the past, which I probably wasn't even alive to see released. It had stuff like N64, Gameboy, Gamecube, the works essentially. Anyways, he was using a Raspberry Pi to be the center of the thing. The SD card which was meant to store it, only had 2 GB. So we went around looking to see if any teacher had an SD card which had enough space to store the image, which was around 4 GB. Nobody did, so I started my post from earlier in the week, and did that for the remainder of the class. 

Next class, I thought I would just go to Mr. Randolph and straight up ask him for an SD Card which would match the space necessary. He gave me a 64 GB SD Card! I went out of his office going like, damn, so much space for something as little as this! Anyways, I tried to mount the image on Windows, but when I needed the password to install the necessary software for the process, Mr. Elkner told me, "Do it in Linux.", so I went on Ubuntu, and had Marco spearhead the process on there. First we needed a way of getting the SD Card into the computer, so we were given a USB by Mr. Elkner which was essentially an adapter from USB to SD. We then put it into the computer, and were met with error messages when trying to mount the actual device to the computer. After trying to troubleshoot the problem, Marco decided to install drivers which were compatible with "exfat" the format of the USB. It then successfully mounted it, but we still had trouble getting the image to mount. Then after searching a lot, I accidentally came over the solution, which was to do a data dump. Data Dumping, really is just giving raw data from the computer to the device at hand. It's important to remember, all that data is just a bunch of bits, all in binary (which is important to learn!) However, we had no clue how to do it, so Mr. Elkner asked one of his friends to come in early to the Career Center and show us how we go about doing it.

The following day, someone who Mr. Elkner referred to as Kevin Cole came in, and he was that guy. He showed us how to data dump, but he met some trouble in the process as well, leading me to start writing a new entry for my Network + Textbook, which should be finished by tomorrow, as a way to wait until they figured out the problem. It wasn't really that I had no interest, it was that I had no knowledge to be able to help in the situation; so that's why I started writing my entry, to be efficient with my work time. They were able to solve the problem in the end, and did a data dump, but it turns out the Mr. Nolen already did all that on his own (he probably used Windows haha!)

To conclude, I really spent a lot of time on that issue, more than I probably should have, but in the end I learned about data dumps, and when they should be used. My Network + Textbook kind of ignores Linux in a lot of cases, so it's really up to me to be learning these things, so I think it would be smart to start posting entries on my learnings of Linux commands, and how I fare with the terminal. That really sums up my week, lots of stuff, but not so many blog entries. Thanks for reading nevertheless!