On Thursday evening I starteded the upgrade of my wife's computer from Kubuntu 12.10 to 13.04. Unfortunately when I finished the upgrade the next morning, it seemed that one of the DBus packages was broken, and not only could I not log into KDE, but there was no networking either.

Hrmph.

I tried to do one or two quick things before heading off to work, but ran out of time and had to leave it. My wife was very gracious and "endured" using her phone the whole day for Facebook, etc (she has a Samsung Galaxy S3 mini).

That evening when I got home, I proceeded to try to get the networking up and running from the command line, so that I could fix whatever packages seemed to be broken and restore my wife's computer to a working condition. I struggled for about an hour and a half trying to figure out various command line options for wpa_supplicant and what the error messages meant.

This is part of an ongoing series on learning the Python programming language. If you haven't read them yet, I advise you to catch up on parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine before reading this article.

In this blog post we'll learn about tuples and dictionaries, another two data structures.

A few months ago I was given a first generation Kindle Fire, Amazon's tablet version of their popular ebook reader. Since it was a heavily Amazonified build of Android (which by itself is not a bad thing) and their own application store is only available to the USA, I decided to load a custom Android distribution called Jandycane from a developer on the XDA forums.

A few months later and I can confirm that it was a good decision. I can buy and install apps from the Google Play store, I can still read Kindle books via the Kindle app for Android, and overall I have more control over my tablet.

When I first got my Kindle I was a little disappointed with its size, compared to a friend's 10 inch Galaxy Tab, but as I continued to use it I realised how awesome the 7 inch form factor is. I'm writing this blog post on my Kindle, and I can hold it in portrait orientation with my hands on each of the bottom corners leaving my thumbs free to type. With such a large surface (compared to a phone's small screen) swipe does not work well and it is essential to type instead. The size of the tablet means that it is small enough to hold and type, something my friend cannot do with his large tablet.

This is part of an ongoing series on learning the Python programming language. If you haven't read them yet, I advise you to catch up on parts one, two, three, four, five, six and seven before reading this article.

Before we delve further into Python itself, at this point it is helpful to deal with objects and classes and how Python implements them. Python and many other languages are built on objects and classes and use a particular method of programming called Object Orientated Programming (otherwise known by its TLA, OOP).