Call me un-Australian, a non-conforming individual, a meta-hipster or what you will, but I just don’t see the appeal of the Triple J Hottest 100. A countdown which somehow seems to seduce both hipsters and true-blue Aussie bogans into not only participating in the voting process but also tuning into the radio station for an entire day.
A favourite past-time of many who like to celebrate Australia day with a few cold ones, an assorted selection of traditional BBQ meats (sausages, steak and chicken) and a radio tuned to Triple J in the background as people comment on songs being played so far and what will be in the top 20, top 10 and top 3.
During my relatively small amounts of down time I sometimes like to unwind with a beer, a few friends and play a game of GTA V on my PS4 (which largely collects dust). Because I do not get to play that often, I have resorted to finding ways to shortcut the process of getting money and XP.
In my travels I discovered a money glitch which nets you a nice little profit and works as of January 26th, 2015. To my knowledge it works on all platforms (last-gen and current-gen).
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.