I have been experimenting recently with Roon. It is a very good system for playing music, both from your own collection and from Tidal, Qobuz etc.. It also focuses on high quality playback, as if my ears can tell the difference :P One of the fun things that it does is split out the display, player and music source (core), so that you can have multi-zone houses with music streaming everywhere.

So in an earlier post I mentioned outlined how I use a central dev machine with remote VSCode to keep one checkout of my code and develop on it, no matter what device I’m using, while maintaining a good developer experience (low latency). There’s a couple of issues that I needed to overcome while developing this approach. When developing it is common to fire up a development server that you can hit with a browser to see how the final product will behave.

I’ve been playing with using an iPad Pro as my daily driver machine recently. This is hardly new. There’s heaps of people out there doing this. I’m a coder however, so getting access to a decent development machine is important. I thought I’d collect some of the tools that I’ve been using to use the machine as effectively as possible. The iPad pro is so close to being a perfect machine.

UPDATE May 8 2020: Since writing this post, I have discovered that AWS offers a simplified deployment process called Amplify Console. Setting up a deployment pipeline for one of the supported platforms (including hugo) is much more straightforward, and you end up with exactly the same result. While what I document here is still valid, I would recommend looking at Amplify Console instead. As with all “magic” solutions, Amplify console won’t be quite as flexible as a full pipeline built yourself (for example, no Lambda@Edge), but it will be a lot easier to manage.

I’m back! Am I back? We’ll see. I haven’t updated my website in 7 years. Apart from being lazy, this is because I haven’t been working in a public facing role. I have been working as a software development engineer for Amazon.com in Seattle. Last October, The Jewellist and I moved back to Perth, Australia. My manager was nice enough to let me try working remotely, but that experiment failed, mostly due to the tyrany of timezones and the way the development team was structured.

I’ve now been in Seattle for almost a full day. The flight was great, except that I couldn’t sleep properly. I’ve got a car (Toyota Corolla) and an apartment (200m from work :-/), but I’ve managed to bust the internet already and I have to wait until tomorrow to get it fixed. Luckily they have free WiFi in the guest lounge as well, so thats where I am right now

Happy New year! With the formalities now over, I turn my attention to my favourite subject: Me. I jet off tomorrow for the United States, where I will be taking up a position with Amazon, working on Amazon Fresh. Melissa will join me in a few months. We’re very excited by the opportunity to live and work in a new place, and to work with one of the world’s top tech companies.

I’m posting this little snippet up because I spent ages trying to work out how to do this, and thought that other googlers might benefit from this. I’ve got an Android application that stores some of its information on the SDCard which has some commercial value, and we don’t want our competitors simply walking away with the information. The security doesn’t need to be too tight, so I’m happy to have a password based encryption scheme which has the password in the code of the application.

I’m not a very good graphics artist/web designer. That doesn’t stop my trying though, as you’ll see through this site, and a plethora of others. I’m getting better all the time, but I’m still not up to a decent grade. This article is about one of those “getting better” moments, and I thought I’d share. One of the things I like my sites to do is to behave differently on different sized screens, mobiles in particular.

As I am presenting to MobSIG on tuesday about Android Widget programming, I thought I should put together a slide pack. The session will be mostly coding, so there’s not too much to it, but here are the Slides anyway. I’ve decided to do the slide pack totally in HTML5. The skeleton for the slides was shamelessly stolen from HTML5 Rocks. I hope that in the future, I’ll be able to tweak the presentation a bit more to make it work really well, and fit in with the theme of the site.

As I mentioned the other day, I am moving on from Unico and becoming an independent consultant (a grandiose title I give myself… Really I’m a contractor). To coincide with this, I am also revamping the layout of my site, with additional information about the sort of work that I do, community engagement, and how to get in touch. The site should now render better on mobile devices as well.

I have been asked to present a talk to the Melbourne Mob SIG, to be held at the Telstra Conference Centre on the 2nd of August. It will be a technical presentation, where I open up eclipse and show people how widgets work on the Android platform. This could be considered a basic topic, but it is one of the most requested topics on the Build Mobile site, so I thought it’d be a good topic.

After four years working at Unico Computer Systems, I handed in my resignation this morning. I have been working in the enterprise space performing integration architecture and devleopment work. I have found however that my own interests have shifted more and more towards working with mobile devices, and this has become a real passion of mine. As a result, I have now accepted a contract to work in the logistics industry working with mobile devices to make truckies lives easier.

So the speculation was wrong. Its not terribly surprising. Requiring people to buy a new device to sync their media would have been an impost, and Apple have a brand new shiny data center which will do the job nicely. Its a shame however, I was hoping for something a bit more personal. Wishful thinking! Opinions seem to be that whilst its a welcome addition and will integrate seamlessly, its hardly anything revolutionary: Just well executed.

Rumours are circulating before WWDC about how Apple will be supplying its iCloud service using a new version of its Time Capsule router come backup device. The idea is that the new version will contain a processor similar to that found in the iPhone and iPad and that it will run iOS and apps. The ability to sync my apps and music using iCloud sounds great, but I’m beginning to get excited about the other opportunities that a device like this would bring.

I have been playing around with the ideas of mobile processing agents lately, and to do this I need to execute code that has been uploaded to my processing environment, rather than the traditional “deployed” code. Java has this ability built in, via ClassLoaders. At any point, a java application can create classes from byte arrays. I wanted to do this on Google App Engine, but GAE does not support the traditional methods of loading classes would work.

Sitepoint.com has just launched a mini-site dedicated to the builidng of mobile applications in all their forms, named BuildMobile. Inexplicably, they have chosen to feature my little application NodeDroid as their first featured app, and even more explicably they have asked me to contribte some stories as well. The featured app is up now, and my article will be posted in a few days. There’s nothing like having a wider audience (not to mention a deadline) to inspire you to write, so hopefully I’ll be a bit more regular with my postings there than I have been here :)

When I started writing NodeDroid, I did it to learn about writing mobile applications, and all of its associated technologies. One of those technologies was advertising. I added Admob advertising to the bottom of the application, and wated for the megabucks to roll in :). In the little over 3 months that its been available, it has netted a grand total of $13.88US. Thats enough to cover hosting costs, but thats about it.

I’ve been playing with jekyll to create my website over the past few days. Primarily, I’m doing it to play with Ruby, but its also nice to have a new website :) Jekyll produces a static site, but does this using templates and markup. Its remarkably easy to set up a site, and to give it the look and feel that you want. Any dynamic capability can be provided by external services (e.

Earlier this month, I posted a new website for my hobby company 8bitcloud.com. As part of this change, I have now decided to host my personal blog here as well. My Blog will henceforth redirect to http://8bitcloud.com/blog.html. All URLs will continue to retrieve the correct posts, but with the new layout. There shouldn’t be any disruption to service, but who knows. RSS feeds should automatically switch over as well. I apologise if it re-posts everything I’ve ever done…

I have just posted a new version of NodeDroid, which incorporates only one small change: Bugfix for issue caused by interrupting a running fetch. Future fetches may not have worked correctly. I’m currently working on a widget, which I hope to release before the new year. In the mean time, I wish you a merry christmas!

This site is primarily intended to allow me to play around with new stuff. As part of this, I’m playing with Jekyll, which is a simple, ruby based web generator which creates static sites programatically. Some advantages: Simpler hosting requirements. All you need is a web server like Apache If you want dynamic capabiilties, they can be added in via javascript. Will be able to survive a slashdotting (not that that is ever likely to happen to me) Not hackable through attacks on the CMS product, because there isn’t one Uses Markdown, which makes writing the content much easier.

I'm the author of a usage tracking utility on Android called NodeDroid. Originally it only supported Internode, but I am now expanding it to support other ISPs and telcos. The first one I want to try out is Optus. I've just uploaded the new version of the application, and I'm hoping some of you guys would like to try it out.The application works by screen-scraping the optus web site, and presenting it in a better format, along with usage graphs and the normal sort of thing you would expect from a usage meter.

This weekend, I thought I'd extend my little Android usage tracking application to work on more ISPs than the one (Internode) that it already does. As my phone is (sadly) on Optus, I thought I'd write one for that. Internode was easy to add, as they have a documented API for accessing usage counters which are ideal for computer consumption. Optus on the other hand only provide a web application interface to check usage, necessitating the use of a web scraper.