If you read the Australian news every so often, then you would know that we are currently going through an ice epidemic. If you’re not familiar, Ice is slang for crystal methamphetamine or crystal meth. Is Breaking Bad to blame? Who knows. However, recently I was playing Card Wars on my Samsung Galaxy S6 and the following popped up. I couldn’t help but laugh, I wonder if Cartoon Network realises how wrong this could be interpreted?
A few months ago I backed the Remix Mini project on Kickstarter, which was a massive success. Initially just looking for a modest $50k, Jide ended up raising more than $1.5 million. I backed the $80 early bird tier which got me 2 x 2G Remix Mini Android PC’s with 16gb of storage (although some is taken by the OS). The whole premise of the Remix Mini is to offer a fully featured Android powered PC (which is tiny) at a really low cost, running on a forked version of Android 5.1 aptly called Remix OS. Comparatively, there is nothing else out there like this.
Just short of a year ago, Microsoft announced anyone who had a paid Office 365 Home or Personal subscription would get unlimited cloud storage on its Dropbox competitor OneDrive as part of the subscription. Then yesterday Microsoft announced that it had decided not to offer unlimited storage. The reasoning will make you laugh. Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.
One of the much-promised features coming in the ECMAScript 2016 specification was Object.observe. It promised us the ability to watch objects for changes and react accordingly, akin to two-way binding found in frameworks like Angular 1.x. However, Adam Klein one of three people responsible for introducing the idea of Object.observe is withdrawing the proposal from TC39 which is currently at stage 2 in the process and also hopes to remove it from V8 (Chrome’s Javascript engine) by the end of the year.
Does it ever feel like everyday we are being told some food that we absolutely love is killing us? You can take away the cigarettes, you can chop down an entire rainforest in search of some rare strain of berry that only rich people can afford, but don’t you dare touch my bacon. Recently the World Health Organisation also known as The Fun Food Police announced that there is overwhelming evidence that bacon and other various types of processed meat can contribute to colorectal cancer.
I used to use Diffmerge for my merge/comparison needs, however I find the outdated interface to be unfriendly and ugly to look at. On Windows I use Sourcetree and Beyond Compare works without integration, it shows up in the appropriate dropdowns but on Mac it does not. I don’t understand why Sourcetree on Mac is different to Windows, but anyway. Fortunately, Sourcetree makes it easy to use third party comparison tools even if they are not in the dropdowns.
Not content with the small Australian Netflix catalogue I set out to look for a solution to get access to the holy grail: the American Netflix catalogue. Coming in at an almost six times the size of the Australia catalogue, the Netflix US catalogue has everything. Because I consume Netflix via a set-top box, I set out to find a solution that would work with my Optus supplied Fetch TV box.
A few months ago I came across a site called Learnsauce. The premise is simple, they offer you source code and learning material for building a few clone applications like; A Soundcloud clone, Uber clone, Buzzfeed clone, Tinder clone and a few others. They also provide tutorials for web applications as well as doing things with Android and iOS modules. For a good while they were offering all of their site content for a monthly fee. I got a few awesome apps and learned a couple of things. But then recently that all changed when they started deceiving customers.
I love Airbnb. When I travelled to the US and Canada last year for my twiddy vacation on a beach house in the USA, everywhere in Canada we stayed in Airbnb places. The experience of booking is made a lot easier than reserving a room in a hotel or motel. But there is a problem with Airbnb. Baked into its very DNA, Airbnb has become such a large enterprise they have lost touch with their customers. For you see Airbnb is destroying property markets everywhere, especially in its hometown of San Francisco.
Sometimes it feels like we let the story of the Terminator movies control our emotions when it comes to artifical intelligence. As the world seemingly becomes more advanced, self-flying drones, self-driving cars and self everything some big names in science and technology have come out warning against the potential threat of AI. Stephen Hawking thinks artifical intelligence “could spell the end of the human race”, not equally as smart Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he doesn’t, “understand why some people are not concerned” in an AMA that he did on Reddit.