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I’ve never been much of a programmer. I learned some basic DOS shell scripting in the stone age because you basically had to back then. If I’d been 5-10 years older I would have had to learn BASIC to get by, and I’d likely be a bit better for it.

I took C++, COBOL, and Visual Basic at the community college about five stints at college, two majors, and 15 or so years ago. I remember genuinely enjoying COBOL, even though its pretty much limited to record processing. I haven’t done any real coding since, just the odd bash shell script to get by.

As I mentioned in the last post I’m making extensive use of Wine and its gamer sibling Proton to run games and software on my kids laptops, and honestly even more so my own laptop. I though I’d go into detail on how and why I’m doing that.

For most Linux users Wine is nothing new, its basically an essential tool whenever you’ve got to run an application that is only available for Windows. Wine emulates the API (Application Programming Interface) of various versions of the Windows operating system. The upshot of this is that it uses resources on the Linux system to provide this interface to an application designed to run on Windows so you can use that same software on Linux (Or BSD, or OSX, or whatever).

Things are scary right now (2025), Donald Trump has repeatedly stated a desire to gut the Federal Department of Education, leaving us with whatever can be provided on a state by state basis. But, instead of sitting around and seeing whats going to happen to our kids education, my wife and I both decided that getting a couple of laptops we can use as teaching aids isn’t the worlds worst idea right now.