My younger cousin used to live in a computer abyss, tortured by an incredible interest in computers but living in a household without one. At a recent family reunion I learned about his dire situation and tipped his mother off to the spare computer sitting in Grandpa’s closet that I had just finished fixing up. So now my cousin has his own computer, his family’s first computer and I want to make sure it has everything on it that a 10 and a half year old needs. I have the computer right now while I do some final things like installing virus software and setting up the parental controls, so far I have taken the liberty of installing LibreOffice, Construct 2, and MIT’s Scratch. Did I say he loves Minecraft? He has only gotten to play it a few times up until now, so I’m going to make sure he gets a gift code one way or another along with the address to my server. I have an older Arduino and a few electronics I’m going to pass along as well. Does anyone have any suggestions for other software I should include in the box? Games, programming software, media editors, anything. As I said he is very interested in computers and open to learning new skills, I want to help that interest grow in any way that I can.
Assuming he’s going to have internet access, some kind of password manager like Keepass. It’s a lot easier to start out creating good passwords than to try to switch everything over later on. Truecrypt. Windirstat to figure out what’s eating up all his limited disk space. He’s probably going to try torrenting something even if he’s told not to, so qBittorrent so at least he doesn’t install a client full of malware. Paint.net or Gimp.
Good idea, a password manager didn’t occur to me. I’m sure that he would love Truecrypt as well. qBittorrent it is then, he promised me himself he wouldn’t download anything himself, but I’m not so sure I believe him because I wouldn’t believe me at that age! He had asked me for some first person shooters that I happened to have as well, I haven’t included any of those because apart form the mostly M ratings they have, we have better games around like those done by Telltale, Double Fine and Braid. I have installed those as well and I can’t wait to hear what he thinks of them. Thanks for the suggestions.
