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Usually stuff I’ve written personally, stuff I think is pretty good.

Brisbane 2010 wrap-up

the view from a secret location in Brisbane

Hey, look, it’s been almost a year since this happened, but I am fantastic at procrastinating such tasks like these that involve a recount of a particular event. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I have a couple of ideas for things that need to be written, but those things depend on the very existence of this post (maybe not quite that much, but this post does play an important part). If this doesn’t make sense, read on anyway. I promise things will become clear by the time you reach the end.

Like I said, it’s about a year now since Brisbane 2010 happened — around this time last year I was in sunny Queensland, doing secret things with not-so-secret people. The fact that this is only being written now is testament to the fact that I am, if nothing else, a brilliant procrastinator.

In any case, Brisbane 2010 was mostly about doing a training course with work. That’s probably about all I’ll say about the purpose of the trip, suffice to say it was exciting and pretty awesome to go to Brisbane for a work-related thing (and ALL BY MYSELF) rather than with friends or family. Considering the last time I was in Brisbane was when my family  decided to drive to Brisbane all the way from Tasmania, I felt really grown up, and it was great.

During one of the sessions, as part of the introductory-type, get-to-know-you things, the leader guy asked why we had chosen to participate in the program that we had been selected to participate in. If that reads like we were chosen, it sort of does — it was opt-in for sure in that we had to do a basic application for the position, but we were chosen on the basis of our applications. I think, anyway. I kinda got in by default, but that is neither here nor there.

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1000 Posts!


good idea

via Buttersafe – Updated Tuesdays and Thursdays » Archive » Lightning Safety.

Have you ever had an idea that made total, complete sense at the time, but looking back you see that that couldn’t have been further from the truth? Hindsight, after all, is 20/20.

That’s pretty much what the above comic illustrates.

1000 posts, huh? This doesn’t have anything to do with hindsight, apart from the fact that I’ve never regretted a moment of it. Seriously, I’ve had a blast — when this little blog started up at the end of July 2008 with a massively profound video from Steve Jobs, I had no idea what to expect.

Hopefully this blog has been a little slice of the internet as experienced by myself — from the notorious “is awesome!” posts to every post that contained a part that (usually) didn’t have a “Part I”. From all the posts that were posted via email from Posterous (that I’ve now stopped using), to the post that explained why social networking is hugely overrated (oh, wow). Through all the good times, the bad, and all the cute girls inbetween, it’s been awesome.

So, dear reader, it’s late and I have work tomorrow — here’s to the next 1000. Perhaps if I feel like it I’ll post up something a little more meaningful a little later on, but that’s it for now.

Oh, you said you wanted a pic for proof?

Minecraft — it’s not you, it’s me!

As much as I have enjoyed playing Minecraft so far, the honeymoon that we once shared is all but well and truly over. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doomed to a never-ending stream of lacklustre mining expeditions, though — read on, dear reader, to explore my Minecraft journey so far and see what turned me off.

At first, I didn’t get the point of Minecraft. “So you build stuff in an environment that’s totally made out of blocks? Cool story bro.” It just didn’t seem all that appealing. I mean, I get the whole 8-bit appeal and what Minecraft as a whole represents to indie gaming (as evidenced by Mojang going up big guns like BioWare in such showdowns like The Escapist’s March Mayhem among lots of other prestigious gaming awards that don’t quite come to mind now), but what really is the point of it?

It wasn’t until very early this year that I realised that yes, Minecraft is one of the better games  I had ever played. Some say this epic tale starts with seven friends bored with their existing repertoire of multiplayer games, wanting to try something new that all of them could play, some say that it was two of the seven introducing the others to something that they would go on to spend playing until the wee hours of the morning, forgetting things like meals or toilet breaks (that latter part may not be entirely true).

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Truly, a first world problem.

Neutral leech means one thing: downloads. Lots and lots of downloads. The rest of my quota this month has been dedicated to downloads.

Neutral leech is different to freeleech because neutral means uploads aren’t counted either (for ratio purposes). It also allows people to build up their seeding library for the future. It’s great!

Problem is, I’ve acquired heaps of stuff already.

I’ve considered the re-aquisition of stuff I already own, but there’s two problems: firstly, only about a sixth of my music library is actually in 160 or lower, and secondly, because I have a large number of smart playlists which depend on play count metadata (to tell me what I’ve listened to, how often [relatively] I listen to it), those will get messed up.

I know there’s a way to replace content within iTunes, but that relies on the fact that the metadata is exactly the same. As this won’t be the case for 99% of the stuff I get (it’ll either be tagged the same or better), this really isn’t a solution.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a first world problem.

A (mostly subjective) review of Essay, the rich text editor for iOS

Essay is more fancy. Essay isn’t perfect either, but first, here’s what it does do. Firstly, it’s a text editor. Off to a great start there. There’s no accompanying web-app for easy access to my writings away from the iPhone, but it does sync the HTML-formatted files to Dropbox which is fine. For a writing app, it has some pretty advanced features. Things like rich-text, combined with pretty standard HTML stuff like lists (ordered, unordered), sections, paragraphs, and so on like in the screenshot above. You can create hyperlinks to other files within Essay, or to actual web locations. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough — all present, all easily accessible through the custom keyboard add-on (which works brilliantly, by the way. Fluid, simple, all-round excellent implementation that could have been very convoluted indeed). The iPhone app is very new (just released today, in fact), so there’s no word count (that I can find, although I assume it is in the iPad version), and it even has a full blown web browser in-app to allow you to browse links.

The number one issue I have with Essays is that it isn’t fully native. Not that it’s a web app or anything like that, it isn’t, but that the main editor view is basically some glorified HTML interpreter. Let me tell you what I mean. While the editor tries its very hardest to appear native (at least it includes the standard text selection tools), it’s unlike any other editable text section I’ve ever seen. This is evidenced by a couple of factors:

  1. The marquee tool that appears when you tap and hold to finely place the cursor makes text look pixellated. I’ve never seen that before, on any app. Example: Essay, Simplenote. It’s not just the iPhone version that does this, it looks just as bad on the iPad too.
  2. The cursor blinks at a different rate, in a slightly different way to any other cursor I’ve seen.
  3. Selecting text is sloooow. There’s a lag associated with everything.

Points one and three lead me to the conclusion that it must be some sort of emulated HTML interpreter, not the native iOS text view that I know and love. I’m guessing it’s this non-native text view that allows such advanced features as text styling, lists, highlighting, and so on, but it’s also this non-native text view that has some serious drawbacks:

  • Selecting a part of text, hitting “select all” frequently results in the standard “cut copy paste” popup not popping up. Selecting a few words works, however.
  • Tapping the time doesn’t take you to the top of the current scroll view, like it does pretty much everywhere else.
  • Points one and three above — sure, pixellation is just a cosmetic issue, but having slow text selection is a functional one. It’s also terrible UX, that’s how much the cursor-placing lags.

It’s these small things that make Essay not what I’m looking for at the moment. Sure, it’s fancy — but when fancy comes at the cost of serious drawbacks I’ll have to turn down that particular offer.

via iOS Reviews.

Written by yours truly, of course.

Windows Phone 7 Update Insanity

In a perfect world, all our phone updates would be released when the phone manufacturer said so, not at the whims of hardware manufacturers and certainly not at the discretion of telecommunications companies. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening with the (somewhat minor) Windows Phone 7 update, with delays globally as carriers and hardware manufacturers stumble over numerous “testing and verification” stages. And even when Microsoft finally approve the update, it “might take several weeks” before users even see the update? Well, there’s a joke if I’ve ever heard one.