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Optus + Samsung Hmmm

beetlefeet — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:53:14 +0000

So I'm not officialy pissed but I am kind of annoyed.

My Samsung Galaxy S started going a little wonky a while ago and this weekend went crazy enough for me to take it back to the shop. The issue was the touchscreen would glitch or have phantom touches along a straight vertical line on the right hand side, and sometimes stop responding altogether.

So I went to the optus store in the city and arrived about about 12:10pm on Sunday, and they were still closed. How annoying is when you go up to a closed store and you just assume the people inside are being all smug and dicky. Anyway the lady gestured 5 minutes and so I sat outside across the 'plaza' and then went back like 15 minutes later and they opened up for me at that point. So that was freaking annoying.

I was secretly hoping they'd just hand me a new phone there and then (it's about a month and a half old) but I guess that was pretty unlikely. I that they do do that within the first 2 weeks or so. So anyway it's sent away for repair and will probably be 2 weeks. So I'm back on my Motorolla Razr and iPod touch for now. but still paying $50 / mnth even though I'll not be able to use data etc for 2 weeks :/

[PIGMI] Gamejam

beetlefeet — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 03:39:57 +0000

GameJam was good fun. The theme and asset were IMO very cool. Helped to guide ideas without being too restrictive.

Thanks heaps to Simon for all the organisation and looking after us all over the weekend. (the donuts were like mana from god)

We got to see some pretty nifty and awesome (and well realised) games on the projector.
My standout was probably Trineion (sp?) Very polished and fun looking. I didn't get around to playing it though, too busy working!

Personally, Nick and my pixely story game didn't get completed. It always seemed like we only had a few hours work to go, but then after a few hours we still had the same amount of work left! ><; We will finish it off properly though so lookout for it in a couple weeks!

Testing posterous, vegetarianism over!

beetlefeet — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:04:47 +0000

So It is August the second. One day after our 6 months experiment in partial vegetarianism (pescatarianism) has ended.

We're still meat free as of this minute (though I dunno if Chrystal has pounced on a sausage roll at some point today). We decided against having pork sausages and bacon for breakfast yesterday morning to celerbrate, even though we passed a parent-recommended butcher in Narrogin on Saturday arvo the day before. We had mushrooms, eggs and fried potatoes instead. We're not entirely sure what to do now that we're 'free'. One thing we will do is spend a restaurant voucher that Chrystal received from work. We decided to hold on to that until we can eat more than 15% of the menu.

Regarding pumpkincrumble.com
That blogging experiment didn't go crash hot. As anyone following would have noticed we neglected it pretty hard. We both really enjoyed some aspects of it. Mainly the cooking awesome food and taking photographs and writing little bits of text. We actually took photographs of probably 2 or 3 times as many meals as we ended up blogging about. So I've identified the collating and posting effort as the gating factor.

Ideally after clicking the camera button the photo would magically be in some sort of captioning queue and all we'd have to do is go to some site every couple days and type something up for any photos that weren't captioned and hit go or something like that. In fact the blog runs on wordpress and requires a significant and pretty annoying and cumbersome process in order to put together a post. Including uploading images, resizing them, etc etc. I'd love to get it up and running as a general cookery blog after sorting out those issues.

That is part of the reason I'm trying posterous with this post, seeing what simplification solutions are now available. Just emailing some text and photos seems compelling. I'll also be looking into things I've skipped over in the past like flickr etc. Ideally taking and dumping photos from whatever device and then having them backed up in full locally and available online for posting would be some magical process. Let me know if you have this all sorted out.

Samsung Galaxy S

beetlefeet — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:20:48 +0000

Samsung Galaxy S (Android 2.1) micro review as requested by more than one person (2 people).

Tech Specs at some random site (gsmarena), Comparison with other Android phones from this year.

The Galaxy is definitely big. It’s not uncomfortably bulky or anything, and is actually quite slim (about the same thickness as the iphone4 except for a slight lump at the back of the base for the antenna). But it has a 4″ 16:9 (1.67, iphone is 1.5 aspect) screen, and needs room for it. The construction is decent but obviously more plasticy and flimsy feeling than an apple device. (definitely try one in the shop before you buy it to see if this bothers you). It is really light for its size. It’s not a really beautiful phone but it’s definitely not ugly. From the front it is blatantly borrowing the 3Gs appearance.

The screen is AMOLED and is 800×480 (iphone 4 is 960×640). It’s really nice and vivid. Text and UI elements render very smoothly.

I think I noticed some issues with the GPS, although I’m not very experienced with GPS so maybe it’s a case of expecting too much (IE inside a building etc). Also I have read that the default maps application (google maps) has an uncharacteristically long gps sync time as compared to other software on the same device so more investigation is required I guess.

Samsung (and optus) bundle some crap with the device which I’ve largely ignored. Samsung also put their own UI ‘on top of’ android. I’ve not seen a problem with it but apparently HTC custom UI is better. At some point I might have to figure out what I’m missing and see about rectifying it (this phone is easily rooted apparently, allowing you to do all sorts of unsupported things to it. ) But even out of the box you can install downloaded apps and run a file manager and it works as a mass storage device etc. It is so much more open than an iDevice just out of the box.

The down side to that is that you can definitely get it to slow down. A bad app hogging cpu while it is running in the background etc WILL hurt your battery life and slow down the UI in general and cause pauses etc so you need to be a bit technically inclined to keep things running smoothly (or don’t install anything other than stock stuff I guess). Speaking of battery life I assume it’s pretty decent, I’ve not owned a smartphone like this before so am not sure what is good. There is a nifty function in the settigns menu that shows you where you battery has been used, and it is usually 40-60% on the screen.

Swype is a keyboard input system installed on android (you can add also install others) and it blows most other soft keyboards out of the water. Basically you just drag your finger over the letters you want on a keyboard (ie don’t lift your finger up except for between words). and it just works most of the time. You can even be really sloppy and just plain miss letters and it works really well. Checkitout.

Other cool things: Divx playback, just drop movies onto it and they play, no transcoding or going through itunes, same for music. Live wallpaper (silly but nifty), change fonts system wide. Heaps of options.

So yeah, not a very structured or objective review, just a bunch of thoughts. I’m enjoying it so far. I just need a car kit so I can drop the iTouch altogether. (Though I will miss Carcassone).

Lessons learned

beetlefeet — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:20:31 +0000

Just because you can get sweet usec timestamps on Ubuntu and Vista doesn’t mean the same library will get any decent resolution times out of windows XP.

The default ruby mysql library doesn’t deal properly with > 32bit database ids.

If you want to use > 32bit database primary id’s. Sleep on it. You might not really want to (especially if you get hit by the above point -_-;)

Blueberry Garden

beetlefeet — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:25:20 +0000

Just bought and played Blueberry Garden. ($5 on steam). I’d seen a video of it like a year ago so it was a no brainer for $5.
I’ve still got the goosebumps and sad face from my first play. It will require more playing. This is a very strange game and quite unlike anything else. Well worth the $5. I feel strongly that stuff like this should go supported so we see more of it. Music is really nice. Only criticism would be the controls/physics are SLIGHTLY clunky. But it’s pretty great.
FYI: I have only played through once so still have NFI what is going on. Will play more at some point.

On steam it is described as “a relaxing, yet intense experience for people who like soaring through the sky.” Sums it up kind of well.

Official Site
On Steam

Gaming Cocktails

beetlefeet — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:12:38 +0000

XBox magazine has an article on gaming cocktails they commissioned a bar to design.

Pictured: Boomer Bile
Via Kotaku

Greets

beetlefeet — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:53:15 +0000

So I noticed a couple things in the last few months that influenced me into finally setting up a proper ‘online presence’.

So welcome to beetlefeet.net!
I would have liked monsterworks.com but turns out it’s taken by some crazy academic since 1990. :/

Currently the site is just WordPress, I don’t think I will want to do anything too fancy so I think WP will suffice.
I will do something about the theme at some point though.