Coming up with things to say? Easy. Finding the time to write them down? Moderately easy. Being able to translate those thoughts into succinct words without 10 paragraphs of waste? Not so easy.
Given the amount of posts I have published in 2015 alone, you could be forgiven for thinking that I find writing somewhat easy. I have no shortage of ideas and things to write about, I have at current count 12 unpublished ideas sitting in my unpublished documents folder, most of those probably will never see the light of day.
I recently just upgraded from a Galaxy S4 to a Galaxy S6 Edge with Optus and absolutely love it. Arguably the best Android phone I have ever owned to date. Naturally after getting it, I wanted to root it. I like to hack my way through applications and games for fun and profit.
The first time that I tried to root, I screwed up my phone. I was so close to factory resetting it, but I tried a couple of other root methods and finally got it.
Let me prefix this article with the fact I have no allegiance to any brand. I have a Samsung phone, I own a MacBook Pro, I have an iPad, I own a PC and I own a PS4. I use whatever works for me and what I like: I like.
I am a pretty big watch nerd. While I do not currently own a watch, I have my eyes set on a few watch beauties (non digital). I like reading about watches, I like looking at them and occasionally trying them on. When Apple first announced the Apple Watch I was immediately skeptical, but also intrigued.
Unless you’re reading this far into the future or a jail cell because you downloaded Dallas Buyers Club, then you would know that metadata retention laws have just been passed in the Australian senate.
Australian Parliament (with cooperation from the Coalition and ALP) passed amendments to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 requiring telecommunication service providers to retain for two years certain telecommunications metadata prescribed by regulations.
What is metadata? The analogy being thrown around is metadata is not the contents of the envelope, but rather what is on the outside of the envelope. It is pieces of descriptive information that describe or give one or more pieces of data additional context and meaning.
For far too long Australia has been reliant on mining. We have seen it rejuvenate and decimate towns. When things are good they are great and when they are bad they are dire.
The thing is, the future of Australia’s economy is not mining. Sure, it will continue to be the backbone of this country for a long while yet, but we need to realise that the good old days of mining money are over.
You have probably heard of Jay Z backed high-quality music streaming platform and Spotify rival called Tidal. The sales pitch is that Tidal will stream lossless audio to consumers for $20 a month or Spotify standard 320kbps for $10 per month.
The thing is, high bitrate audio for the general consumer is pointless. I am not an extreme audiophile nor an audio expert, but I do like listening to music through nice headphones and speakers. And to be quite honest, even through expensive headphones I cannot tell the difference between a 320kbps MP3 or a lossless FLAC file.
There are tonnes of exciting things happening in the Javascript space in 2015. The two most exciting things for me are React.js by Facebook and Aurelia by Rob Eisenberg (of Durandal fame).
Even though Aurelia still has a few months before it hits beta status, developers will once again be at a crossroads as to what they should choose for their next projects when it nears release.
We already have Angular 1.x while still being supported for a while yet before 2.0 becomes the de-facto choice and people are forced to either upgrade or move on to something else, I don’t like the look of the new syntax nor other decisions made about its design.
As if we needed anymore reasons to hate Foxtel, Australians now have yet another reason to add the list.
If you are like me and you are a fan of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, you would have realised up until recently you could watch the show on Youtube without any issue for free. Not anymore thanks in part to The Comedy Channel (solely owned by Foxtel) purchasing the rights to show the series here in Australia. Maybe not a decision that affects you if you are fortunate enough to have pockets deep enough to pay for Foxtel.
The beautiful of simplicity of React.js doesn’t only extend to components, but also mixins. Essentially mixins can extend components and all of the default lifecycle methods.
Through the use of mixins we can take repetitive tasks and break them out into their own standalone pieces of functionality that can be optionally included within one or more components.
In this post we are only going to be building a really simple React.js mixin. The purpose of this post is to get you familiar with how mixins are created so you can go on and explore them further.
With Soundwave Festival 2015 now firmly behind us, our attention now shifts to who will play Soundwave in 2016. There are too many bands I would love to see and after my previous wishlist actually partially coming through I thought I would write up another in hopes it comes true.
Thrice These guys are now back together. Before they went on hiatus they did some farewell shows, none of which came to Australia. It has been quite a while since we’ve seen Thrice in Australia, now they are touring in 2015 again, I would love to see them hit Australian shores in 2016 for Soundwave. They might even have a new album out around then, so the timing kind of makes perfect sense.