Without fail, every single day I get multiple calls from the number 02 8015 7641 for the last week or so. They keep trying to call, yet don’t seem to leave a message on my voicemail. I keep putting off answering the call after some Googling seems to indicate that it is some kind of scam or competition.
So, after being constantly hassled day-after-day I tried calling the number back with my caller ID on private. I tried a few times and I kept getting this pre-recorded message in an English accent that said: “All of our agents are currently busy, please stay on the line, your call is important to us and will be answered shortly” – then it hangs up on you. Weirdly enough, the number doesn’t even ring which leads me to believe it is some kind of automated spam/scam.
With HTML5 came a plethora of useful API’s and added methods, one of those which didn’t really get as much visibility (ha, get it?) was the Page Visibility API.
What is the Page Visibility API? The clue is in the name. It allows you to determine if a page is visible (a tab is focused or window being shown). Historically we haven’t really been able to reliably determine if a visitor is looking at a page and as such, can cause issues when media is being played.
Yes, I play the new Candy Crush: Soda Saga game (don’t judge me), it passes the time while waiting for my bus and train ride home. In doing so I discovered a nifty little glitch in the game that allows you to get unlimited lives.
The process is a little involved, but I thought I would share it. This isn’t a Candy Crush hack, this is merely a glitch in how the game checks for lives sent to you by a Facebook friend.
I was fortunate enough to receive an early access invite to Stan, the newest contender in the Australian VOD streaming war that has just begun. While the name might be silly, they actually have a surprisingly decent catalogue of content (movies, documentaries and TV series), however it isn’t as big as I would have hoped.
What is Stan? Basically Stan is an Australian equivalent of Netflix (forgoing the fact that Netflix is about to launch in Australia and New Zealand themselves). You pay a flat monthly fee of $10 and get access to unlimited content across a multitude of devices. A similar Foxtel backed offering called Presto already exists, Stan is operated beneath a company called StreamCo which is a partnership between Channel Nine and Fairfax.
I recently went for a job interview at a company within the insurance space. This story details clashing recruiters, an interesting interview process and a bad case of the flu.
On the day I found out my contract position with the VOD platform startup in the US was ending because the project was being closed down, I went on a job applying spree. Not wanting to be idle for too long, I looked to Seek.com.au to see what was out there.
It is whinge time. As a front-end developer I am working on the Internet every day, uploading and downloading files from server, working with databases, participating in Skype and Google Hangout calls, reading documentation and pretty much relying on the Internet to do my job properly.
When Labor announced the original NBN plan all those years ago, I was excited. The promise of fibre-to-the-premise made my mouth water, not having to rely on my dismal ADSL connection (because my suburb has no fibre) even though I am 15km out from the CBD. But then LNP came into power, and doing what political parties do best, they criticised the original plan as too expensive and proposed their own solution that was actually worse.
Something I have been meaning to do for a while is create a skeleton project setup to work with Gulp for the task runner along with some basic tasks, AngularJS for the front-end framework and Browserify so we can include files the CommonJS way (like we can in Node.js).
The repository can be found here. It isn’t perfect, there are definitely flaws, but in the coming weeks, I will be documenting and making this skeleton project the perfect starter for newbies and seasoned Angular veterans alike.
After a nice opportunity to travel Canada and the US for 3 months, me and Marie are back in Brisbane. We got to see great parts of Canada and some great and (not so great) parts of the United States as well.
While I was in the US, I had the opportunity to work with a great team on a VOD platform similar to Netflix (but seriously, a million times better). It functioned well, looked great and literally would have blown competitors out of the water.
Recently whilst putting the finishing touches on my game using Construct 2 I ran into an issue using custom web fonts and the CocoonJS plugin for Construct 2.
I was trying to use web fonts which as it turns out, are not supported in CocoonJS. I didn’t want to create a sprite font as I am not a fan of their large file size and the fact most sprite fonts I have tried look horrible on retina displays.
Day #1 December 2nd, 2014 – Arrived at the hotel. The lobby interior did not look so bad. It actually had a nice historic charm about it. But then we got to our room, we had two keycards, only one of them worked. There was a big wet patch on the carpet near the fridge, the room smelt like mold. We told room service about it and their solution was to put down two towels on the floor.