Switching banks is a big deal. I have been with ANZ since I was about 14, it was my first bank that my first job salary went into. But times change and now I’ve switched to Westpac. Whom I also got a mortgage through as well. There were many deciding factors, but a couple of biggest ones were: I was stuck on a legacy account Even though my bank was Visa Debit enabled, I was told at the bank I was on a legacy account they stopped offering years ago.
I recently moved house and while I wait for my Telstra cable connection to be sorted (address issues) I got myself an Optus home wireless broadband modem which is 4G based. For $80 per month I get 200gb of data at capped speeds of 12/1mb. One problem I encountered however was Netflix wouldn’t work for me, literally wouldn’t load. I soon came to realise that basically a lot of sites were slow to load. But oddly enough OzSpeedTest, Speedtest.net and Optus’ own speedtest were all reporting 13mb speeds.
Everyone knows coming up with an idea is often the easiest part of an application. I come up with a lot of ideas on a regular basis, too many some would say. What is the best way to take an idea and actually build something usable, a working MVP (minimum viable product). I recently released a couple of quick ideas that took very little time to create, Pokego.run and Built With Aurelia. In the case of Pokego.run, I knew I needed to add in Google Maps, support authentication and ability to add markers to a map. For Built With Aurelia I knew I just needed to display submissions and allow registered users to submit projects.
As promised, I have open sourced my quick Aurelia CLI project Pokego.run which you can find here if you just want the code and don’t want to keep on reading. I am open sourcing the work I have done on this because I want to see the Aurelia Javascript framework grow and I realise there are not a lot of apps out there for reference which are public using Aurelia. Consider this a helpful learning exercise.
I work a lot, so it was nice to get some downtime to play with the Aurelia CLI. Like many others of my generation, I have been caught up in the Pokemon Go hype. So I decided to build a simple app where you can plot where you have found Pokemon called: Pokego.run. The idea stemmed from the question: what if you could determine with close accuracy what area has what Pokemon and eventually work out when they would appear.
I have been toying with an idea I have had for about 5 years now. The idea is rather simple: Airbnb meets yard advertising. The idea is to allow homeowners to rent their front yards to businesses who want to place a sign for a fee. The idea came about after seeing businesses who put their sign up while working on your house, building a pool or painting in exchange for a discount on the overall cost of the job.
As Youi’s advertisements say: At Youi, we get you. Spoken by a smug looking guy with a face you can’t help but want to punch (I’m sure he is a nice guy, maybe). After my recent experiences hunting down insurance for a brand new car, I have come to the conclusion that Youi are a bunch of scam artists who cannot compete with any other insurer out there. Considerably more expensive than any other insurer (even Suncorp) even though their ads claim they can save you hundreds.
If you are a Netflix subscriber you have probably heard that Netflix recently announced they are going to be cracking down on customers using a VPN to access content outside of their own country. You could almost hear the collective sigh of all the Australian Netflix subscribers. Instant anxiety set in, people were worried: could Netflix really block VPN users? Had Netflix’s engineering department done a deal with the devil to block VPN’s, proxies and DNS providers using techniques never before seen in tech so far?
I have been a member of Wiselike for quite sometime now, before it was even called Wiselike I was a member of CareerDean which preceded it. I have been so busy that I kind of forgot about it until recently. I realised that a lot of people asked me questions and it is kind of addicting. If you want to ask me anything, head on over to my Wiselike page and ask away. I am planning on being as active as I possibly can be. It is a good chance to not only ask code-related questions, but also my views on things and other stuff.
In the house we are currently renting until we buy next year, we have had a problem with the smoke detectors going off randomly in the early hours of the morning. I do not mean a chirping sound to indicate a flat battery; they actually go off like a fire. Nothing rouses you from bed faster than fearing for your life. So we called the real estate, and they sent someone out the same day (the 3 times we have called). The first time they thought it was the batteries, so they replaced them. A couple of days go by, and then: BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Causing the early morning panic to set in.