FeedCity

We just had AGM for Tasmanian Game Makers, Inc. (TasGM), and for the third year in a row I was pleasantly surprised to be elected President. I’m really looking forward to working with the new committee to continue pushing the video game industry in Tasmania along, get the Tasmanian Games Incubator going as part of TasGM, and helping Screen Tasmania run Level Up.

With thanks to our outgoing board member, and our fantastic community and financial members.

Your high school English teachers probably warned you that passive voice is dangerous and forbidden. Then, when you were an adult, some guy in a leather jacket told you that passive voice is cool and should be used whenever it’s desired.

Well, the tide has turned again. If you’re a software developer, stop using the passive voice.

Wait, what’s passive voice?

In English, sentences can have one of two structures: passive voice or active voice.

John Gruber has a post about how Google’s search results now require JavaScript[1]. Why? Here’s Google: the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam Lol, the irony. Let’s turn to JavaScript for protection, as if...

Let me tell you about one of the best feelings. You have a problem. You bang your head on it for a while. Through the banging, you formulate a string of keywords describing the problem. You put those words into a search engine. You land on a forum or a blog post and read som...

This is a note to my future self, as I’ve setup HTML minification on a few different projects and each time I ask myself, “How did I do that again?” So here’s your guide, future Jim (and anyone else on the internet who finds this). I use html-minifier to minifiy HTML files c...

An outline of my philosophy and direction for the platform

TL;DR We’re making a new Pebble-style smartwatch. Want one? Sign up here - rePebble.com I started working on Pebble in 2008 to create…

While getting things ready for the relaunch , I asked some Pebblers to share videos or things that they love about PebbleOS. It’s time to…

This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction. I’ve been playing around with MAME a lot lately. […]

tl;dr: Microsoft and other email security scanners will visit the links in email you transmit, and run the JavaScript in those links, including calls that lead to POSTs going out. This used to be unacceptable, since POSTs have side effects. Yet here we are. This breaks even somewhat sophisticated single-use sign-on / email confirmation messages. Read on for how to deal with this, and some thoughts on how we should treat gatekeepers like Microsoft that can randomly break things & get away with it.

Only some kinds are bad

A note before we start: I don’t know how much of this I believe. I’m sketching out some feelings in this post and thinking through whether it actually makes any sense. I’d be curious where other folks land on this. I’m not sure I totally understand this impulse we have on ...

Between middle-class stability and creative resistance, there's a teenage part of us keeping watch. Maybe it's right.

You know what’s really helpful in solving my own problems? Writing them down, sending them to someone, and not hearing back. You ever do that? For me, it’s a bulletproof method to solving problems. It’s akin to those moments when you go to someone with a problem, you talk i...

On what to do after work

So how hard could it be. As input we have something like Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07 in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. Trying to figure this out led me to discover many ‘surprise features’ and otherwise unexpected behaviour of POSIX time handling functions as implemented in various C libraries & the languages that build on them.

When you replace a vacuum robot's proprietary brain with open-source firmware, you are not just modifying a device—you are making a statement about ownership and control. Sometimes the smartest choice is to make devices dumber.

“Every drink takes five minutes off your life.” Maybe the thought scares you. Personally, I find comfort in it.

Enterprise sales don't have to be crazy.