Last Post

This last be my last post on blogger!

As I have written about before my website was taken down due to lack of activity so i thought i would try something a little different and create a WordPress site.

Now thinking this over, I decided to move my blog to WordPress in corporate into my new site.

So Thank you supporting my blog here and please come and check it out with  new look at 99redbooleans.wordpress.com

thank you

Updates

Currently beavering through several bits and bobs.

Trying to help my boss sort a draft out for the website which is quite kool.

Been doing quite a bit on Codepen, check this pen for some kool drop down boxes.

Been playing with button and bits to create some good looking stuff!

My First App!

Over the last few days I have been playing around with App Inventor 2.

With a Google account you can create android app using a scratch type block code system.

Instead of writing the code out you place blocks together to gain the action your require. 

I have just finished building my version of the first tutorial video. My app is now available on Google Play here.

Called Talk to Me, its a text to speech application. Type in a word or phrase and it returns it out loud. Very basic and simple but fitting for my first ever app. I made a few tweaks with a pitch bar to change the pitch of her voice.

I'm proper proud of myself. I know some people with be thinking well anyone could make that and yes they could be that to point it so easy I highly recommend people to try it out and download my app of course.

Download my app..... oh and give your phone a shake lol.

makegameswith.us

I have just completed the course on cloning flappy bird, which is a the free course.

The site revolves around there summer and on-line academies. The latter is a $99 course running from the 23rd June till 10th August. 

No word of future course as this course has already started. I haven't tried to enrol to see what happens, it might give you other option at that point but doesn't look like it.

The summer academy is an 8 week course running in Palo Alto, California or New York City. Price is *cough* $5000 *cough*

Bit out of my range me thinks!

They offer a free* iOS Game Development course. I put "free*" for two reasons. The first is the obvious one, you need a mac that runs OS X Mavericks. Secondly the games you develop can be sold on the app store, ported to Android and they help you with artwork but take 30% of your iOS sales and 50% of Android. Free cost wise but you paying in the end. If you don't have a Mac your paying alot, you'll need to buy one!

Course is delivered well, worth checking out as a brief introduction to objective c but no content rich unless you have a mac but I don't.

Just a word about Code.org

I posted the other day about how I had finished the intro to computer science course of code.org.

Some thing that I didn't realise was the amount of courses available but they are links to external sites. Some paid some free but code.org is a vast array of computer science related content and we'll worth a look for anyone not just kids. Each course has an age who its recommended for.

Currently I'm looking at an iOS game development game course with makegameswith.us.

Well worth looking at!

Completed Code.org's "Intro to Computer Science"

Today i managed to complete the course. Through a lack of time and the nature of the site this hasn't been top of my priority.

Couple of things struck me about code.org on how useful a tool it is for children. 

It is without a doubt aimed at children but the course itself has the necessary component for coding.

I'm going to try and get my girls on it and see if they can work it out.

My Website update

For anyone trying to get onto my site current its is down, i hadn't noticed part of the terms of service with 5gbfree.com is that you had to keep its active and i had not made any additions to it for a bit so they cancelled my account. i'm hoping ti get a domain sorted soon so we'll be back up asap.

Thanks

Udacity update

I haven't to well over the last couple of days. I've had a chest infection and have a couple of days off work trying to recover. During these days I have have mostly been sleeping but there is only so much I can do before my back start to hurt and I feel worse than when i went to bed.

For the rest of the time i have been sitting at my laptop on Udacity.

I wrote a review on Udacity, when I did my reviews of the coding tutorial sites not long after I started this blog. I was impressed with how the content was delivered, the fact I could do most of it on my iPad but the price for a paid course was huge compared to the other site I had reviewed.

Anyway I received an email to tell me I could now do my courses on my phone through the new android app. I thought "cool" so I checked it out and it does offer a great on the move option for learning. It's presented very well through a Samsung Note 3 that I have. A Few months back I sat down and finished lesson one and some problem sets of the intro course. So when I went on the app I thought i'd look at what else was available. I found a couple of interesting courses and one was about app building in Salesforce. So I sat down and worked through the courseware and I enjoyed it. It wasn't quite what I expected but still well delivered course and very informative.

Think i expected it the be building mobile applications but i would of realized it wasn't if i had have read the course data properly. 

Udacity

Udacity again takes a different approach to teach coding. A different but similar approach. (confused?)

First I want to get something off my chest about Udacity. 

They offer a variety of courses in various coding related topics, I personally am working my way though the "intro to computer science". Udacity employs free course-ware and paid enrolment. the difference illustrated in the below picture.

So you get in class projects, tutor support etc etc. Udacity charges per course per month, course have a length but as the next picture shows:

Wow, yes that $150 per month. now I understand that the guy teaching is a professor of computer science at Stanford university but I don't want to pay Stanford tuition fees.

I can't fault how the lesson are delivered though. This is what I was talking about earlier that there approach it different but similar. 

The tutor( I forget his name ) (on the "intro to computer science"  course) present his lessons though an interactive white board. Writes with his pen and this translates to the screen your viewing through. Very clever way to do it in fairness, I really like the way he writes a quiz on the board and it allows user interaction. 

Another cool feature is they have an iPad app which allows full access to the site content. Hooray! This is a god send, for this reason alone I will complete as much of the free content as possible on my iPad.

New laptop update

I went ahead and purchased a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad from eBay courtesy of 3000rpm computers.

I have to say I’m very impressed with it, the laptop itself is a nice size and weight, the keyboard feels nice, not to mechanical or unresponsive to touch its just right and the performance is awesome. Boots from its 120gb SSD in about 10secs. Applications load instantly, no waiting for your web browser.

Very impressed, as with refurbished laptops it only has a 30mins guarantee on battery life and its like it know it, as it won't last any more than 30mins!

But I used it plugged in most of the time anyway plus I may look into getting a new battery for in the future.

I've not got round to putting Ubuntu on it yet, not sure if I will but we'll see.

I have however been playing StarCraft 2 on it quite a lot and it works flawlessly.

All in all a good purchase.

Another good purchase was a mouse i purchased from eBay.

For £1.98 bargin and great bit of kit.

laptop new life

Just a quick post to say I have resurrected my girlfriend old laptop by installing Ubuntu over windows.

 I'm writing this on LibreOffice because my spelling and grammar are appalling. Cant spell appalling so thank goodness for spell check. 

I really like the set-up and lay out of Ubuntu, its super easy to install and set-up. Boot rally fast and on this laptop that saying something but this thing is ancient I mean there were Romans on the earth when this thing was made.

Its a really breath of fresh air over the mundane style that is Microsoft windows. it never really changed has it, same old blues and task-bar. 

I wrote my last post on this laptop too, and I'm really impressed so far, I've installed wine as I cant install notepad++ which works great. I'm going to test as much as possible over the next coming weeks and get back to you about it performance.

Real Racing 3

Something a little different, at the back end of last year I started writing a blog about how I want to improve my kill/death ratio on call of duty. That then turned into a gaming blog as I discovered the world of professional gaming. I stopped writing it because I have a terrible memory and most of all I get forced on something and it tends to consume me. I started with call of duty then I found star-craft 2, then I'll get frustrated and put it down and find something else.

Anyway strictly speaking this blog will be about me and my journey coding but I’ll put the odd post in about something else and at the moment I’m really enjoying Real racing 3 at the moment.

Its a mobile racing game with game play and graphics to rival gran turismo or forsa. It really is that good and a mobile game!

I'm playing it while I write this, do a race write a bit more, do race and write a bit more.

I was talking to some guys at work about it the other day and getting them to take a look, its free also did I mention that. A mobile game that rivals gran turismo and its free!

While I’ve writing this I’ve been playing(until this bit, my battery died!) and looking online and I found a review by eurogamer that rated it 3/10!

WHAT!!! are you mad! This game is fantastic! As you read through the review he talk about how good the game is but he main issue is the in app purchases. And yes the game doesn’t have in app purchases but you don’t need them. He talks about the amount to upgrade and service you vehicles. Well durr! This is a necessary part of owning a car and it cost money.

I don’t know what some people except when they download a FREE app, it will have two things, Ad's and/or in app purchases. How do they except the company that has spend I don't know how money developing this game to make a profit if its free!

Some people need to wake up! Rant over!

If you like racing game I strong recommend Real Racing 3. I have never spend anything on this game I have got to level 47, have over 4 million worth of cars in my in game garage and completed 5 race series without spending anything on it! Not a penny! Its more than possible, if you don’t want to spend then don’t but give it a go its a great game.

update

After my frustrations with JavaScript, I have turned a corner. Watching the Tutorial I linked to in my last post, I have been able to understand a little bit more. I have now progressed on through my JavaScript course on codecademy. Not finished it yet but I’m getting on a lot better with it.

I edited my website a couple of times since uploading, changing so layout and adding bits of content. I have a couple of other thing in my head to put on there and will do when I get round to it.

I had a bit of look at treehouse the other day after seeing an advent. I wasn’t overly impressed I searched for reviews and the content looks limited and interface not overly friendly but one way to find out is take the free trial. Which I will do when I have the opportunity to take advantage of it. 

Bucky's Javascript Tutorials

I was on YouTube looking for JavaScript tutorials to help support my codecademy course. I written about issues I've had with grasping JavaScript.
On the two occasions where i have been stuck, these tutorials have really helped me out. 40 videos in total cover JavaScript topics. 

Check it out at buckysroom.org

My Website

Check out www.jwatkins.5gbfree.com

Its my website showing currently what i have learnt in HTML/CSS so far.

Notepad++

The first code editor I'm going to review for pc/windows is Notepad++.

This editor I downloaded on to my girlfriend laptop along with sublime to see how thing go and I really like how this work.

If I'm honest I used sublime exclusively until its started to tell me I needed to register. Sublime is nice but the registration is not happening at 70 quid!

I moved to notepad++ and I'm glad I did, Notepad++ is bright, user friendly, feature rich and generally nice to use.

As I said in my last post, I can’t offer anything of use to anyone who code regularly but as a beginner I think notepad++ is one of the nicest to use.

Extremely easy install and its Free! Can’t get much better than that. Download it here.

Although notepad++ doesn’t have a preview window you can easy save (ctrl+s) and run in browser (ctrl+alt+shift+r for chrome). Great for checking you changes. I have only used it for HTML so I’m unsure on it uses for python for example although it is compatible. 

Its worth a shot lol 

My new review series.

Welcome,

Updated my last post to make it look a lot better, posted via Blogger for android and haven't worked out if you can edit font etc.

Anyway the first post of the new series. I'll first outline was I'm going to review and then a new addition a mobile editors.
(I'm currently sat in lazer-force Leicester at a kids party, wife says I'm not allowed to play. Needed something to past the time.)

So which editors I'll review,

1.Notepad++

I was going to review more than just this one, but I was thinking about what I could write about than I decided I'm completely under qualified to write about anything of any use to any body who uses code editors proficiently. So I'm going to write about Notepad++ and why I like it. 

Which mobile editor? Although I think I have more to offer here, I only have an Android phone and can't provide a decent insight so I'll talk about the one I use.

1.Webmaster pro (only reviewing the pro version as I bought this prior to writing this series.)

New laptop

I'm have been looking at code editors for my new laptop. Buying a new laptop very exciting!

I was looking at either a Samsung series 7 ultra book or and macbook air. Both very nice laptop full of tech, good speed and plenty of power but both about a grand!

Looked at a couple of other options but still felt drawn to the macbook air. If I want to develop apple apps then mac is a must but at this stage I'm learning so spend so much on a bit of kit I am unlikely to use is pointless.

I found a great alternative on ebay however, a two year old lenovo thinkpad t410.  Now thinking two year old laptop is out of date already but this is an  ex business lease laptop so has 128gb ssd, 8GB ram and around 5ghz from its processor.

This lead me on to my next series of posts, I'm going to review some code editors.

Stay tuned!

Update

Just a quick unedited post of text to let you all know I'm back in the game.

After a few weeks of different issues, arising I'm know back putting more effort into my coding and my raspberry pi.

First project is to sort this print server out!

Bootstrap

 I completed another challenge on codecademy.com to create a professional looking website.

This used a new element called Bootstrap. For those of you who don’t know it’s a CSS framework that allow functions to be created faster.

Interesting element I’m going to use it in a codebit I have on codecademy at the moment.

Come check out my profile if you want.