Unschooling and Python || wget, tar -xvzf and for loops

Last night was a shorter run at things in general because KO6BTY, (the 13 year old known as Diaze here), and I got a later start.

We spent what felt like forever, but what was actually only 12 minutes trying to share files from the 'usual' file side of the kid's Chromebook with the Linux side using file folders and whatnot. Nothing worked. For whatever reason, the Linux folders weren't visible in the machine's 'My Files' app. Sharing folders led to the machine basically hanging. Then! Then, we handled the issue like a couple of programmers, and instead of downloading in one system and trying to copy to anther, Diaze just ran the following from her Linux terminal

wget https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/cosmic2/provisional/spaceWeather/level2/2024/203/ionPrf_prov1_2024_203.tar.gz

That was snazzy! It just brought the file right in because, well, command line interface tools are just... snazzy.

Having a chat record of our work together is also really helpful. I remember feeling like we'd wasted so much time trying to copy files over. We literally spent 12 minutes. Not. The. End. Of.The. World. Happily!

Then! The kid used tar to unzip the compressed data tarball. Watching her as the 4000 files fold out onto the drive was a lot of fun. This is a good project! I also loved the part where she caught on that this was the same Python with the same constructs she'd been using on the Project TouCan's remote Morse code key.

From there, we got back into using the netCDF4 package to look at data. We talked about Python Dictionaries and then looked at the latitutude values of a radio occultation satellite pass that measured the electron density of the ionosphere.

The goal at this point is for KO6BTY to create a map of the latitude and longitude values in Datasette to see where the satellite pass took place with respect to Earth.

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