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