Learning help?

[liv]

Three topics about learning I'd like some advice on:

How do you learn from videos, especially taking notes? My current online course, which I'm really enjoying, has videos as well as texts. In theory I approve of this because people who aren't 40+ hyperlexics generally prefer and learn better from videos. But for me personally, it's a slog. It took me about 6 hours to take notes on a 2-hour documentary this week, including a lot of going back over it to get accurate quotes. That's not really sustainable, quite aside from the fact that I'm frustrated by how much less information is conveyed in 2 hours of video that I would read in that time period.

jack suggested I should try using two computers, one to screen the video and one to type and take notes, rather than tabbing between the video and my notes all the time. That seems excessive, but maybe it's the right answer.

I'm trying to teach myself Arabic. Does anyone have any good resources? I'm completely frustrated with the beta course on Duolingo; it's possible it may improve someday but right now it's too far from ready. There's a really good deck on Memrise, How to read Arabic which is logically organized and has a real human pronouncing all the words clearly. I still need more practice to get fluent at actually reading. But I also want to move on beyond just matching symbols to sounds and learn the language as a language. I think I have a leg-up because I know Hebrew, a reasonably closely related Semitic language.

I am looking for: an explanation of grammar, not just something that teaches inductively by looking at lots of examples. I get the impression Arabic is moderately complicated and also I just prefer learning rules as well as working bottom-up. Some kind of resource to practise really simple sentences, perhaps a video with very simplified language and maybe even subtitles. Or a book aimed at young children first learning to read. It doesn't need to be gamified particularly, but a series of exercises that I can work through so I get practice at applying rules and skills starting from really easy and building up. I wouldn't at all mind getting a textbook, but if there's anything free of cost online that's also great.

I'm probably more interested in Modern Standard Arabic but I have no objections to picking up some Classical or using resources aimed at building Qur'an fluency. I do want to be a bit careful to avoid either intruding on something that isn't really meant for non-Muslims, or on the other hand anything with a lot of nationalist or fundamentalist propaganda mixed in with the language learning.

The remaining two points are to do with programming and I'm not sure I even know enough to know what I'm asking for, so helping me to formulate the question would be a good start.

I want to learn how to do servers. I described this as a basic intro to sysadminning but I'm not sure it's quite that. But to be able to set up my email and web hosting properly rather than just ignorantly copying code with no idea what it does. And just having a clue about how different computers in different physical locations talk to each other, and maybe a very basic grasp of security stuff.

cjwatson suggested maybe I need some Unix programming, and I think that might be part of what I'm looking for, but mostly I want to understand principles. Otherwise I end up learning a lot of syntax for commands, but still having no idea where or in what context I'm supposed to type those commands.

Anyway I can't find courses that teach it, it all seems to be about programming languages. Which is also something I want to learn about, but I have plenty of options for learning how to code, so that's not what I'm asking about here.

Partners' kid is excited about "programming a game". And it seems like most of what he means by that is creating interactive fiction, he has some really cool descriptions of the story he wants the player to experience. I don't know if there is any kind of system that exists to allow complete beginners to put together elements to tell a story (not just text, indeed ideally not primarily text, mostly graphics). I wonder if maybe Twine is the answer? Anyone have any experience? He has some knowledge of Scratch and some of Minecraft, but I think there's too big a gap between what he can imagine and what he can implement in those environments.

Several of his adults are professional programmers so they're teaching him actual coding. But I wonder if there's a tool for creating something that might be approximately playable, without having to spend several years learning foundational skills first? Or possibly a way that an adult can relatively quickly implement some of his designs, other than actually coding an entire game? I mean, maybe not, maybe that's an unreasonable thing to hope for. But maybe someone knows of something that might be relevant?

Comments

[hilarita]

If it's a UK online course, they should bloody well be providing a transcript as well, for accessibility reasons. In theory, this should also be the case for US courses too. If all else fails, use an hdmi cable to stream the video to your tv/a separate screen, and use your laptop for notes. Also, if you can get it to play at 1.5x speed, and cope with people sounding rather more like Alvin and the chipmunks than is usual, you will at least save some time.

For the server stuff, I endorse cjwatson's approach. Even were you to find an intro to sysadmin course, I would be *extremely* wary about it without a solid Unix background, and a primer in security (I strongly recommend Ross Anderson's Security Engineering book in whatever its latest edition is), because you can perfectly well learn current best practice, but that doesn't defend you from whatever the problems are in five years' time. Whereas solid basic skills in this area are much more useful, and much less likely to land you in unexpected hot water, but also will take a lot longer to acquire. (Bearing in mind that most of our programming acquaintance have been doing this professionally for 20+ years, and unprofessionally for a lot longer. Just typing the magic runes may be a more effective use of your time.)

[liv]

Aha, making a fuss about accessibility is a brilliant solution to my video problems, thank you! That way I can do some social good as well as making my own life easier. Failing that, playing things speeded up might be a reasonable plan.

You're also completely right about my problem with learning the stuff I want to learn about systems and servers. It's that most of my circle have been doing this since they were little kids, so asking for a beginners' intro is like saying that I never managed to learn basic arithmetic. Not that anyone is going to be horrible to me for not already knowing, but that people can't remember what it's like to be a beginner at this stuff.

I think with security I'm not actually planning to set things up myself from scratch. That's definitely a situation for relying on experts rather than flailing about as a beginner. I just mostly want to have a vague grasp of why the most obvious security precautions are in place. Like, I don't want to end up trying to do something the most obvious way without realizing the security implications, that kind of thing.

I'm in theory fine with just typing code I don't understand. Except that because I don't grok how systems fit together, I end up never knowing literally where I'm supposed to type it. One example of a problem I have is that my email provider wants me to set up SPF and DKIM, which seems like a reasonable request, except that I've found lots of examples of how to write the appropriate commands but absolutely no clue as to which part of my setup (computer, domain host, email provider, something else?) is supposed to receive those commands. And I don't know what questions to ask to find out. So I feel like there's a stage of learning I need to go through before I even get to the 'magic runes' level, if you see what I mean?

[damerell]

FWIW VLC (and some other video players) pitch-shift to compensate, which makes watching things at 1.5x (or 2x) much more pleasant (and, at higher speeds, feasible).

I kind of think you know this but it seems pertinent to Liv's interests.

[angelofthenorth]

I think the two computers solution is a good one. What I have done is watch through a video with pen and paper and note the approximate times for quotes and then, having watched the whole thing, fast forwarded through to those bits I'd highlighted.

[liv]

Thank you, noting down times and then going back to get exact quotes may well be faster than trying to capture quotes as I'm going through.

[nou]

Quick answer because about to go to bed: you can do graphics in Twine. MazHem_ did a Queer Code London workshop on it for us a while back. I can try to find some useful resources on the weekend if that’ll help.

[liv]

Nice, thank you! Resources greatly appreciated. I think writing essentially interactive fiction is a really good bridge between being a child with ideas and actual programming, though I'm not sure it will quite match up with what this particular child wants. If I have some options I can at least suggest them.

[ewt]

Videos: If the videos are on YouTube it's usually possible to watch them at 1.25 or 1.5 times as fast as normal. I have no idea about other platforms. It also often helps me to put subtitles on, even if I can hear the video just fine.

I do not have the expertise to help with your other queries.

[liv]

Thanks for the tip about videos, I hadn't thought of the option of speeding them up. I really could do with subtitles, I must admit.

And thanks for helping with the bit you do know about. The whole reason for asking my entire diverse circle is different people will know about different topics. I feel like I've done remarkably well so far at getting suggestions for each of the disparate things I asked about.

[cjwatson]

On servers, it occurs to me that the way I learned a lot of this stuff was by essentially voraciously reading the man pages or whatever other reference material was available for any individual tool I found myself using at a shell prompt; not necessarily every word, but certainly skim-reading enough of it that I got the shape of it and understood why what I was typing did what it did. This is very much out of fashion these days maybe because a lot of people find it too overwhelming, but you might be enough of a hyperlexic systematiser that it helps you. It'd start out being quite uneven knowledge (like you end up temporarily becoming an expert on all the options to ls or something), but IME it evens out as you go.

The other thing I thought of this evening was that I've mentioned fundamentals of Unix but I wonder if what you actually need is fundamentals of internet protocols? It seems as though exactly how everything connects together might be a useful thing for you to inhale. I remember Stevens's books on TCP/IP (and you definitely want that keyword) being useful back in the day, and while they'll be dated now they might well still be useful. Or perhaps whatever O'Reilly has on SMTP and HTTP?

[cjwatson]

Er, by which I mean that you are about the most hyperlexic systematiser of anyone I know, so if that approach is going to work well for anyone it might be for you :-)

[anais_pf]

If a two hour video took you six hours to take notes on, it seems as though you must be pausing and rewatching a lot of video. Is it really necessary to get every word down in exact quotes (if that's what you're doing)? Because depending on the subject matter, I think I would treat it much like a live college lecture: take what handwritten notes (not typed notes) I can while not pausing, ever, and go back only if I know I missed a very important point. Then type up my notes later. This two-step note taking process served me well in the latter portion of my college career.

[liv]

Yeah, I was trying to get exact quotes, partly because my interpretation of the related task was that I was supposed to provide direct citations to eg different scholars who contributed to the documentary. It is possible that I misunderstood the learning task I was trying to prep for, though.

The other thing is, when I take notes on written material, if I'm doing it electronically I copy and paste relevant phrases into my notes, and if I'm doing it on paper I mark the margins so I can easily go back and find the bit I want to cite. With video I can't really do that.

Treating a video as a lecture rather than a document might well be a better framing, thank you. Because I am pretty good at taking notes while someone talks at me, so I can adapt that to a bunch of different talking heads.

[altamira16]

When I am learning new material from videos, I usually take twice as long as the length of the video. One thing that my friends have taught me is that a lot of videos have an option that lets you control how fast a video is playing. See if you slow it down to 0.75 or 0.5x speed if you are taking notes more easily without stopping as much. For skimming, you can speed it up.

Here is a book on System Adminstration by a computer science professor who was lost at sea a few years ago.

viggorlijah may be having adventures with Twine and might have something to say on the topic.

[liv]

OK, twice the length of the video is more feasible than 3X, so that's something to aim for. And good idea to mix slower play so I can take notes without pausing and going back, and faster play to skim.

Thank you for the book rec and the suggestion of someone knowledgeable. Those are great.

[mathcathy]

I use a handwriting recognition device, so I can write (I think the act of physically writing helps me remember, I did the same thing with pencil and paper when studying journal articles for my PhD). Then I upload my notes.

I agree with others, though, that regular stopping is counter-productive and that any online course should already have a transcript and possibly also copies of slides.

[liv]

Thank you. I will make a fuss about why they set us a video with no subtitles or transcript, I agree that's not good practice.

I find that writing helps me, but mainly I need to do something with my hands. Highlighting a document works nearly as well, or typing. Handwriting recognition would solve the problem that I don't really want to store a lot of paper notes, which is why I've been trying to note-take electronically. Worth thinking about at least.

[lilacsigil]

Ugh, I'm so bad at understanding things from video, and not much better at understanding things from lectures. I always look for a transcript, but when that's not possible two screens is necessary - I use my tablet for the viewing and my laptop for the notes.

[liv]

It's weird, if a colleague suggested just throwing up a link to an old PBS documentary, that someone uploaded to YouTube and then it got removed so it's only available via archive.org, with no subtitles or transcript, I would be the first to jump in and point out, that's not educationally appropriate or accessible. But when I'm in the role of student I feel like I have to put up with whatever I'm offered.

I remember discussing specifically accessible design of online courses in a professional context, and I said, as a student I'm entirely privileged, I don't have any barriers to learning since I'm a native speaker of English, no disabilities, working computer and good internet access. But actually video is a massive barrier to me as a learner; it's a barrier I can overcome since I'm not also dealing with any structural barriers, but it's still a problem.

It does seem like the consensus is I need two screens to take notes, and luckily I can do that, so that's helpful, anyway.

[siderea]

I'll be interested to see what you turn up about system administration, because I could probably use a good primer myself.

Some things I know you will need to learn:

1) You're going to need to learn how to run/manage the operating system of a server. Presumably some flavor of linux. You may find – I did – that this information is easier to learn for a specific flavor of linux. Speaking of learning linux is a little bit like speaking of "learning romance languages"; most pedagogy is organized around learning one at a time, though after you've learned one or two, generalizing to the rest is pretty easy. I have a Debian linux server, so that's what I looked into, and found some nice resources I should spend more time with. And expect to soon.

2) Programming and system administration have a particularly intertwined relationship in the unix/linux world, because:

• The unix command-line commands, themselves, work like tinker-toys: you can concatenate them up into meaningful expressions that are basically little programs. For example: The expression ls means "list out the files in a directory"; the expression grep means "find all lines that match this example". The expression "|" (called "pipe") means take the output of this command and make it the input of that command, so ls | grep '.html' means "get the list of files in this directory and return only those with '.html' in their names." The expression ";" means "and then next do"; the expression ls this; ls that will result in the directory listing for this followed by the directory listing for that. And there are other ways to cause commands to interact. So you can see how you can start building long complex chains of expression. And this isn't "programming", in the sense of making a document that you store and run; this is conversational code, expressing yourself to the computer at the prompt.

• Certain unix command-line commands are, themselves, programmable in weird and powerful ways. sed and awk are two famous examples. I never remember how they work, and always have to look them up. There are others; there are conventional programming languages that allow themselves to be called this way, and some other things, like the insane email client I use.

• You can write programs that function as command line commands and interact with the above. If you write a little program in perl called myprogram.pl and put it in your bin directory as is traditional, you could then say at the prompt ls | ~/bin/myprogram.pl.

• You can capture any of the above into programs, which are called "shell scripts" (also there is something called "aliases", which are like particularly simple shell scripts.)

Upshot: basic interaction with unix/linux servers, at the command line, entails some degree of speaking conversational unix/linux to the computer, which is done in something that looks a lot like a programming language, but! Which is actually a whole bunch of programming languages.

3) If you're going to want to run interesting services on your server, yourself (not a foregone conclusion; most mere mortals just configure their email that someone else runs, because running an email server is Hard these days) you will need to learn the specifics of whatever applications you're running.

4) And that will probably entail some amount of learning how computers talk to one another, which is protocols. This might be something you only need the rough outlines of to get done what you want. Like, I have a studious ignorance of how TCP/IP actually works and it has slowed me down not at all so far. OTOH, if you actually get interested in that, more power to you. And to do interesting things with webpages or email, you might actually have to know a bit more about how HTTP or SMTP works.

5) You may need to learn how to compile things from source, because that's how the applications you want to run are distributed. This is kind of considered part of "how to program" because compiling is a things programers do to programs.

6) Somewhere along the line, if you're doing a lot of work at the command line, you're probably going to need to learn vi. Or maybe emacs. These are text editors for commandline unix/linux systems. You use these to edit files. And they are full of their own quirky commands. (emacs, in particular, is famous for being/having its own language embedded within it, hence the joke, "emacs isn't a bad operating system, but it needs a better text editor".)

That's just off the top of my head.

Wow, thank you so much!

[liv]

Thank you, this is super awesome helpful, because you've done a really great job of filling in the questions I should be asking but didn't know how to formulate.

Choosing a flavour of Linux: not really a tough choice given my personal circumstances. But your comment really helped with explaining why I need to think about operating systems.

Your point 2, with the explanation of command line prompts and conversational code really goes a long way to addressing a big hole in my understanding which meant I was finding it hard to make sense even beginners' resources. You've provided me with a real lightbulb in terms of the relationship between talking to servers and programming.

I am not sure I want to run a server, because it would take probably longer than I have available to get to the level where I'm competent enough not to be actively harmful. It's more that I want to understand what's going on when I host my stuff on someone else's server.

Protocols, compiling and text editors are also really useful terms to allow me to figure out where I should be looking for more information.

[rushthatspeaks]

Re: video: yes, you do actually want two computers if you are transcribing or typing while watching. And subtitles on, if possible. If you have subtitles on, you can screenshot important portions as you go without having to transcribe them, ending up with a sort of slide deck of the highlights. Hit pause, screenshot, hit play-- faster than handwriting.

I do not myself use Twine, but everyone I know who writes games uses it for functionality quite similar to what your partners' kid would like. In fact this is literally what Twine was designed to do.

If you don't already have the Arabic alphabet down, a friend of mine wrote a book, though it might be pitched a little younger than you need.

[simont]

Video learning: I'm another voice of agreement with the idea of two computers, or at least two screens.

The only seriously long videos I've watched in the last couple of decades for educational purposes was a 22-lecture course on advanced data structures (highly recommended to anyone in the small set of people who are as much of a DS nerd as I am), and I found the sensible thing was to put the videos up on my TV, and sit in front of it with a laptop on my lap. Then I only have to press pause when my note-taking can't keep up; as long as it can, I can keep going.

(My style of note-taking was less 'take down everything the lecturer said' and more 'write down enough that I can trust myself to fill in the rest later from my existing knowledge, plus copious side notes on how the techniques he's discussing relate to things I've tried before in my own time or problems I've been looking for solutions to'. I think I ended up taking about 1.5 × the videos' nominal running time to watch the whole lot.)

Sysadmin: it's always dangerous to give advice about learning a thing for the first time when you yourself learned it so long ago that the details of how you did it have fallen out of your memory. But bearing that risk in mind, I'll make a suggestion regardless :-)

When I was learning my way round Unix, the single thing I found most useful was the Linux strace tool, which wraps another program and shows you every interaction it makes with the operating system kernel: files it opens and closes, files it tries to open and doesn't manage to, network connections it makes, changes it makes to its own state (like the current directory), and so on.

I ran across this tool quite early, and initially found its output very hard to read, because it's very copious and you start off knowing very little about what it means. (In particular, more or less every program does a huge pile of startup-time faffing around that has very little to do with its functionality, so the first thing you learn is to ignore that; generally I read strace logs starting from the bottom, where the real work happens.) But you only need to learn to look for a handful of things, like open calls, or stat ("tell me a little about this file without going as far as opening it") to get value: for example, if I want to know where some program expects to find its configuration file, I'm at least as likely to strace it and watch the locations it probes with those system calls than to look in its man page for the official documentation.

I don't mean to say that strace can teach you everything all by itself – it's a complement to other learning methods, not a self-contained study course. And it might not be to your taste at all. But I remember finding it very useful for finding out what a program was doing (especially if it prints one of those short and not-very-detailed Unix error messages like "No such file or directory" without telling you what file it failed to find), and also, most of the system-call operations it lists have man pages of their own, so it's a constant source of search terms.

(Twenty years later, I still use strace all the time, for debugging and for cross-checking my own understanding. I'm known at work for being that guy who goes on about strace all the time and suggests it as the first response to any problem. So if any colleagues of mine saw me say this, they'd probably get a giggle out of it. But I remember it being a valuable educational tool long before it became useful to me as a debugging tool!)

[cjwatson]

I learned a ridiculously huge amount from studying strace output when I was in my first job as a performance engineer for a web server company: this was not least because every interaction between programs and the operating system kernel is called a context switch and is often slow, so if you're really trying to win performance benchmarks then all other things being equal you want to have as few of them as possible, but also for the reasons Simon gives.

That said, that was after finding my way around separately for a couple of years, so I'm not sure that I would personally advise it as the absolute first place to start.

[naath]

My approach to learning systems things has been jump in at the deep end and call for help when needed. It's easier to learn (for me) with a goal in mind "I want to run an email server" is much better than "I want to learn stuff" (for me) so, start trying to make one. What's the worst that can happen? you certainly know people who can help you reinstall the OS when you've accidentally rm -rf / :) don't try it on a computer you are using for, like, work... I'm quite fond of using the cloud for "maybe this breaks things", just throw the computer away and start over :) (I do have private cloud access at work though, so it costs less).

For video learning, I watch it like a lecture, if taking computer notes you need a 2nd screen, or a really big screen you can fit both the video and your notes on. I don't think they expect word perfect quotes, if they do this format is striking inaccessible.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Taking notes from video: I was going to say the same stuff hilarita said about accessibility.
Failing that, you don't need a second computer; you could use a second monitor, or even just video on one half of the screen and notes on the other (this is what Alex does when he wants to use his computer at the same time as the kids want to watch videos on it).

Kid programming: if Scratch can't do what he wants, I suggest RenPy. It's a framework built on top of Python for making Japanese-style visual novels, i.e. interactive fiction that's mainly graphics-based with some text, rather than mainly text-based like western IF. You can add character sprites and backgrounds and make the story branch depending on what the player chooses, all without doing any actual programming. If you want to do anything more complicated you can call out to Python. Alex has written a couple of VNs in it, so he can tell you more about it than I can:

https://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?ElvenRelations
https://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?WhenIRuleTheWorld
https://www.toothycat.net/wiki/wiki.pl?CloudFairy

Cloud Fairy was a very small and quick project, so it's a simple game without any extra features (IIRC), so it shows the sort of thing RenPy can do without needing any proper programming. Elven Relations is a longer and more detailed game and definitely had a lot of hand-coded extra features. When I Rule The World is somewhere in between.

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

I would indeed highly recommend Ren'Py as a tool for that allows someone to, quickly and with minimal programming knowledge, write a story-driven game, especially a so-called "visual novel" where mostly-still graphics are displayed and text (dialogue, thoughts etc) appears along the bottom of the screen.

For getting started, Ren'Py requires no programming, although it does require you to write the script in a text editor. Notepad would be fine, other editors would be better, and I think the default Ren'Py install might come with a good free editor itself. I'd be happy to offer advice, though it's quite a few years out of date by now, and Ren'Py has a pretty good Quickstart tutorial (https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/quickstart.html).

[jack]

*hugs* *hugs* *hugs* I think you've heard most of my opinions on these already, but if you want some more anyway...

That seems excessive, but maybe it's the right answer.

To me it seems normal. Like, if you're watching something and taking notes, you need to see the thing you're watching AND something to take notes on. That's how it works.

It took me about 6 hours to take notes on a 2-hour documentary this week, including a lot of going back over it to get accurate quotes

I also suspect, you need much less academic rigour than you're naturally defaulting to. I'm not sure. It also depends what the video's like. If it's an intricate argument, like an advanced lecture, where every sentence takes a lot of mental effort to absorb, then it probably will take much longer. If it's more like, a narrative telling a general story, then you can probably just watch it and understand the main points, and recap any specific quotes if you need to. Or confirm what level of citation is needed, if paraphrasing that you can get from your own notes is sufficient.

I forgot the advice about seeing if you can speed it up, that's good.

Check if there are subtitles or transcripts already, just in case there are but they weren't obvious. Also maybe have a google to see if there's a transcript or subtitles anywhere else, if you haven't already, even if you shouldn't need to.

Think through what works in practice. That might be, watch it all the way through noting key points, then go back to find one or two key quotes. Or process it in chunks.

[jack]

When the children were interested before I bookmarked some "choose your own adventure" writing apps as I thought that might be a good middle ground for testing out some game stories, even if they have much functionality between branching choices, but I'd hoped one would just obviously do everything we need and instead it wasn't obvious which was best.

[green_knight]

Ooh, can you share that list? This is related to my current programming project - the first phase of this will be 'choose your own adventure - and I'm getting closer to the point where I'm happy to see how other people solved the same problems and what cool features they've implemented.

[lovingboth]

"I'm frustrated by how much less information is conveyed in 2 hours of video that I would read in that time period"

Oh yes. 20 minutes reading plus about 15 minutes of 'here's the visual bits' would cover nearly all of the two hour videos I've seen.

..

When it comes to servers, most people follow recipes. What you gain over time is the ability to go 'if I do that bit differently, this will happen' and be more or less right.

Having access to one does let you see how email and the web really work - the 'Hello, are you a webserver?', 'Yes', 'I'd like this page from this website and here's what I can understand' exchanges - from both ends.

That's the top, "application" layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. Look that up to see how low you want to go.

I am (just) old enough to remember what life was like before it became an ISO standard: my engineering / computing university course included 'to get computers to talk to each other, here's how Ethernet works on a physical level'. Now, if they hadn't closed the department, I'd be surprised if they still did that because you don't need to know unless you're designing the integrated circuits for a network card.

The main takeaway for security stuff is that anything connected to the internet is under constant attack. You can reduce the chances of the bots getting in, but if you want your actually doing something useful, you can't completely guarantee to stop them because you rely on other humans' programs.

So the Exim4 mail server has had two exploits in the past year that allow an attacker to do anything they like on the server running it. Six of the eight severs I'm responsible for run Exim4 because it's Debian's default and easier than Postfix... and it's mostly because they don't listen for any incoming email (a firewall program blocks them from doing so) that they were not hacked.

The other two run Postfix because they need to do more with email than Exim4 really wants to do. They also talk to far more outside servers and a few years ago assorted big beasts started insisting that any server that wanted to talk to their mail servers had to follow some new rules and I could find the recipes for Postfix. I am not bad at programming, but I couldn't do what was required directly without spending much more time.

The more you run on a server, the more you rely on other fallible humans. The idea is to become the source of fewer problems than they are.

..

For the interactive fiction, if you want an illustrated book rather than 'point and click' or visual novel, Inform7 can do images amongst the text, has excellent 'how to' guides, loads of published examples, and you can very easily test as you go.

[green_knight]

You'll have to find your own software stack for this, but here's what I use:

- I run the video and the notetaking app side by side, so I watch while typing.
- I use screenshots and paste them into my app to page through later; that doesn't work for talking head videos. For this, I use a screenshot app that displays screenshots in order and lets me drag them into my app from the menu bar, so I can create a number of screenshots in sequence and put them into my document when the video gets boring.
- I frequently add timing to my notes: codable enums, how to conform, [8:27] gives me a chance to find that section again and watch only the part I need to go over again.
- most of the time, I manage to keep up with the note-taking while the video is running. I'd rather put [watch again, 25:14] into my notes than constantly stopping-and starting.

Overall, I'd say that I need to watch 1.5 times to 2x the amount of time.

Sometimes I fall into rabbit holes, but that's ok: wandering off is part of the learning process, and I consider being inspired by a video a Good Thing.

[ayebydan]

Sorry if this has been said but thought I'd throw in my ideas before reading too many others changed how I phrased things which I notice I do a lot.

With video, ask for transcripts or a subtitled version.

And/or, if you learn better from reading than take that skill. Sit with a physical notepad, or another computer (or could you play it on your phone and then use your home pc/laptop whatever to notetake?) and jot down anything that stands how. I assume given your hears in academia that you have some sort of personal shorthand or a very fast handwriting you can read but probably no one else can. Play it again, do the same. Then look up the key points in text form. Play to your own strengths.

[jadislefeu]

It depends what the kid's vision of the game is like whether this would be applicable, but if it could fit into a visual novel, I found Ren'Py a fairly intuitive system to figure out how to program a story into, and there's a very helpful forum available for questions--and it's based on Python, so if any of his adults include that in their repertoire, it may be easy for them to help him with! Ren'Py includes all the base elements of functioning as a game and having a save system and menus and stuff, and what you write is pretty much just the script for what events you want to take place, and program in what images you want to appear at what times. It's very much designed to be low-barrier-to-entry. (Also, the forums have links to a lot of free image and sound resources one can use in one's game, both generally available ones and ones that people have made specifically aimed at Ren'Py games.)

It's apparently possible to work in things like map systems where you click on regions of the screen and combat system, but I didn't have the nerve to try and figure any of those out myself--they may be more accessible to him with programming adults available!

(If he wants something more heavily focused towards being like an RPG, there are many variations of RPGMaker software, but I haven't the experience with them required to make any recommendation, and they do cost money.)

[jack]

Come to think of it, some of the explanations/courses suggested here are probably a more useful answer, but it might also be worth just web-searching "what is a domain name" or "how email works" and similar, and see if there's anything where a simple explanation just helps clarify any of the "what sort of thing is this" concepts.

[hatam_soferet]

You might find a grammar book in the library? I think those still exist. And then you'll probably do quite well with reading Quran, at least to start. You might find a MOOC of Basic Arabic, perhaps?

I hate learning from videos but they should really really have subtitles and if they don't they're NAUGHTY. Otherwise I just treat them like lectures, listen with a notebook in hand, and if I miss bits, I miss bits, too bad.

[emperor]

Sorry, can't help with video; I hate videos, and avoid them wherever possible :(

Lots of people have said wise things about sysadmin (the UCS used to do an introduction to Unix course; I don't know if they still do).

I got to learn Linux by doing it as an undergrad - my only computer ran Debian, so I sort of had to! Having people to ask when stuck is quite useful (#chiark can be good for that). I think I installed Debian and then left as much alone as I could (except the desktop environment) while I got used to it, and then looked at particular things (e.g. the web server) as I needed to use them. As has been noted, the thing you interact with in a terminal window is bash; that's also what you use for a lot of sysadmin tasks.

What we do with new people in Systems at OTW is similar - there's some initial stuff about the basics (the shell, a particular editor, and so on), and then we have training about particular tasks. So rather than trying to Understand All The Things at once, I'd be inclined to suggest picking something you're particularly interested in and beginning there? For particular protocols (e.g. SPF), Wikipedia is often a not-terrible introduction.

[emperor]

One further thought - if you dislike typing runes without understanding them, often the relevant man page will at least tell you what the rune does to some extent.