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.
The stench of weed and body odour is in the air. Homeless people and nefarious individuals sleep and loiter on benches outside of the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Downtown Los Angeles. One man comes up to us, “Hey man, have you got any spare change?”, it’s 5am and people are already asking me for money. Being near Skid Row does have its advantages though, if you are homeless or a crackhead, but fortunately we pulled up outside of the terminal and walked straight in. I would not walk here regardless of how close you are to the terminal, especially early in the morning or at night.
Can you hear that? Put your head up to your monitor. That is the collective sound of XBOX fanboys weeping over the recent announcement that Street Fighter V is a PS4 and PC exclusive. You know why? Cross platform multiplayer. This is an idea that has long been touted in the gaming world in theory but never really actually implemented in practice: until now. Street Fighter V will support cross-platform play between PS4 and PC players.