Ignite Blog by Ruxton » Misc

What’s been happening?

Ruxton — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 15:46:20 +0000

I haven’t blogged here for ages, lets be honest; it’s almost been a year. I’ve been quietly managing the blog in the background, because blogs don’t just sit there and do nothing; as much as sometimes you want them to. Over the last year I’ve made some huge moves and decisions in my head and to be frank I just haven’t had time to be here. Does it really matter? with posts like this one right now no, but with posts like these.. yes. I’ve neglected my plugin. It still works fine but I think I’ve left a foul taste in some peoples mouths; so sorry for that – there’s new version incoming real soon.

So what’s happened in just under a year that’s kept me away from ITALM and other things?

Wrote about music

Back in March 2009 I started Rhythm & Poetry, solo; It’s all me. I don’t think I realised how hard a task that was until I started doing it and I’ve been trying to enlist help ever since. It’s fun to write about hip hop music in Australia, it gives me a new respect and appreciation for the art-form and for writing in general. I never proclaim to be any kind of writer, but I try my best to do a thorough and correct job. Writing reviews has always been a sore point, but I’ve created a way to keep it fun an interesting for me without destroying the joy of listening to a new album.

Wrote some music and started something

Myself and a mate Luke setup a small hip hop group called Selekt Few and we’re working on a lot of stuff. We don’t profess to be some kind of amazing, we’re just doing our thing and speaking our minds. Thanks to Luke and Matt-F we’ve setup a small room out the back of my place where I’m writing beats and we’re recording. Things just fall into place sometimes and the setup was one of those moments, I had no DAW computer and Matt just happened to have a spare computer he wanted to get rid of .

Did some Landscaping

The Landscaper never dies, he only gets stronger. For a while for me, it felt like The Landscaper was going to die but thank god it didn’t. Chris is deep into Issue 3 at the moment and i think it may be approaching some kind of epic finale. The Landscaper comic has by far been the most fun online stuff/thing/experiment I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing. Chris just does stuff, talking is great, but he tells me doing is better (i should listen more). We had another comic, we put out at the same time and The Landscaper got a lot of traction so we focused on that. Also the other comic relied a lot on me writing things for Chris to draw, sure it’s easy, but hey.. I haven’t posted here in a year either. There’s other comics on the backburners from other people we know that may very well come to Visual Assault this or next year, so keep your eyes out.

Launched Wantsi

Wantz.it is cool, but writing my own Rails app (Wantsi) was better and proved to be a fun exercise. I’d debated about (and built) a project that never saw it’s real light of day for various reasons and i’d always argued that the best target market was actually something different. It turns out someone else in another country was on my thought train and they built Wantz.it (hi guys, things are looking good over there!), I found wantz.it about half way through building Wantsi but wanted to keep building my own thing.

Got a new Job

Around 2 months ago I left PerthWeb to go work at The Frontier Group and I traded my PHP/Windows toolkit for a Ruby/OSX toolkit. PerthWeb was a great place to work, but an opportunity arose to take on a new language and work in a bigger team, so I jumped at it. Thanks to all the crew at PerthWeb for 4 awesome years. While working at Perth Web I wrote a lot of code into a core system myself and Ben designed and built over the years. In a weird way I wish I didn’t have to leave my code baby behind to be nurtured by someone else, we built a framework/cms system from the ground up and after building with it for a few years had to leave it and it’s idioms behind. Most people will never get that opportunity and I’ll probably never get that kind of opportunity again, but it only happened because we made it happen.

So what did I take away from my year long blog break? Shit only happens or gets done when you stand up and do it. What’s that, what about Tomorrow? I guess I’m gonna clean my room or something like that? It does feel nice to write this though, I guess we’ll talk again soon random internet people, for iTALM 0.6, if not before.

Taking Part In #Lunchdoodle

Ruxton — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:13:01 +0000

Thought i’d take part in LunchDoodle today.

Recycle A Blog Post Day (2009-08-12)

Ruxton — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:07:53 +0000

Mark Pollard threw a tweet to the world that had some interesting weight, Recycle A Blog Post Day (#rabpday). Mark’s idea was that you would dig a post out from earlier in the year and “re-cycle it” which i assume means, create a new post, put the content in from the old and post it again. My suggestion was that the post should be over a year old, obviously this can’t for everyone and in that case, you should pick an older post.

I’m not sure what the intention was here, my thoughts were that it could be a monthly or yearly thing? But i get the impression others maybe thinking weekly? Anyway it seems like a cool idea.

When’s it happening?

TOMORROW!! (12th August 2009)

Who’s recycling?

Mark tagged the following people in and I guess we’ll see if they partake:

Of course, you know you can take part too, post below with a comment if you’re going to join in and let’s see where this goes to.

iPhone 3G & The Case Lineup

Ruxton — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:28:47 +0000

I bit the bullet on Friday and traded to an iPhone, after all the iTunes bullshit (i’m seriously over it!) the phone has been fantastic, no problems so far and it just WORKS. The phone just working is a big thing coming from Windows Mobile where sometimes things just dont work for some stupid reason or another, so it’s really nice to just pick it up, press a button and BAM! the screeen is on straight away and everything responds as soon as you touch it, Windows Mobile device manufacturers have alot to learn from this.

Anyway onto cases, finding a case in Perth seems hard at the moment. Wait that’s not right, finding a GOOD case is hard, it’s all poorly made ill-fitting shit or poorly thought out designs and that’s if you manage to find it. A good case protects the phone while you use it, take it from a guy who drops stuff you rarely drop it from your pocket or belt (it happens sometimes), you’re mostly dropping it when you’re using it, this makes setups that force you to remove the device from the case to use it properly totally out of the question. If all you want is pocket protection and don’t think you’ll drop it, get a sleeve Vaja Cases make a great sleeve for the iPhone 3G as do Incipio from what i can see these both well put together, but hey a sleeves just a sleeve so who cares, i just like the look of these.

When it comes to real protection, always have a good screen protector, funnilly enough my jasjasm didn’t have a scratch on it’s screen until my screen protector got all messed up and removed, then came the scratches, so always use a screen protector.

I found a few cases i’ve deemed worth, i’m really liking all the cases made by Vaja Cases but i just cant wait that long to protect my new device, so they’re out of the question. Once again, Incipio have a nice well formed protective case that once combined with a screen protector, should be able to keep the entire device protected in a number of bad situation, the Hard Molded Framed Case for iPhone 3G. I’m either getting the case from Incipio or this case from DLO, the DLO SlimCase for iPhone, however the DLO website doesnt show that it’s compatible with the iPhone 3G, so i may have to give that a miss.

Last Comic Standing

Ruxton — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:23:25 +0000

I’m not to sure how many of you know this but most of my friends and people that are forced to be around me often, know i love Stand up comedy, theres something about it’s honesty that makes it enjoyable for me, the no holds barred approach. Consequently, i love to watch Last Comic Standing and so far this year has been awesome.

We started this season with some real crap getting into the finals and inching out some real good performers. Some how acts like God’s Pottery got through while excellent stand-up artists were pushed aside, thank god Iliza sent them home! Esther Ku actually edged out some favourites of mine in the finalists, so i’m kinda glad she was outed so quickly, again THANK GOD for Iliza!

Iliza Shlesinger once again this week got put to the test and shat on the competition.. i have a suggestion for the comics, don’t challenge Iliza, only 2 or 3 of you can best her on stage and that’s if you’re at the top of your game. She may not have the experience, but she has the crowd gripped when she’s on stage and that’s half the battle.

I thought when i saw her initial judging that she was pretty awesome and well.. she continues to prove it, i really think much like John Reep, Iliza has the chance here to be the underdog winner and as long as she keeps up this awesome material and style, she’ll always get my vote!

The Worlds Largest Arcade Machine

Ruxton — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 05:24:54 +0000

The arcade machine stands at a huge 13 feet tall and has a 70 inchish screen. By the looks of it, its a custom built PC using emulation software to run an old copy of the game Rampage. Primitive, but a classic. Its part of an American TV show called Attack of the Show which is currently being broadcast on G4TV in America.

source: Engadget

Halloween and some free icons

Ruxton — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:19:34 +0000

I’m not so much a fan of halloween as i am a fan of random holidays, thankfully no one has knocked on my door trick or treating yet, halloween is a weird holiday it’s fun, strange and unknown.

Did someone say free icons? One of the designers at glyFX was working on a dark halloweenish free set and it just happened to coincide with halloween, so he finished 5 icons up, and put them online for everyone to see and use.

Check it out at glyfx.com

Plantronics & Sony Warranties

Ruxton — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 23:57:48 +0000

First let me lay down the back story on my plantronics headsets for you. Back in June 2007 i purchased a plantronics audio 550 dsp headset, for half price ($75AUD), 2 months later the headphones died. After realising i couldn’t find the the receipt, i purchased another set at full price ($150AUD) and made sure to keep the receipt, 2 months later (last week), the left headphone cup stops working.

I rang up plantronics and explained the entire situation, that i had 2 headsets that were both dead and that i only had the receipt for one. They told me to fillout the quick web service return form and 2 new headsets would be sent out to me, once they’re sent out, i just need to send my broken ones back. I was a little wary, as i only had one receipt and i figured i’d probably end up having to pay for one, but was assured by the guy on the telephone both would be covered.

Talk about a great warranty, i’m still waiting for the 2 new headsets to turn up and i also had to clean up my bedroom the other day and guess what i found? the other receipt! So there really shouldn’t be any problems now. Now onto Sony..

In september last year i purchased a Sony W100 8MP Cybershot digital camera, just over a year on, the shoot button seemed broken and unreliable, now i have to apply serious pressure to take the photo. It’s 1 month out of warranty and guess what? Sony are replacing the part with a new version, covered under warranty.

Two great companies with what most would say are ‘expensive products’, yet look at their service, on face value so far it’s impeccable, so as long as they follow through with what they say they would do, they both should be commended on great customer service and support.

Another company that totally deserves to be tared with the excellent service values brush is Blue Ant, they have consistenlty provided me with excellent support on my Blue Ant X5 Stereo headphones, to the extent of actually finding my problem on a forum, and then contacting me via MSN to try and rectify the situation, WOW!

update: the plantronics headsets turned up today, wooop, +1 point for plantronics!

Clicks-of-Death

Ruxton — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 03:46:58 +0000

Came home tonight to a nasty sound, my biggest and newest hard drive has “The click” but its still giving me data (be it slowly), thank god! I was down at PLE this morning waiting for them to open so i could get a new one and now i patiently sit back and copy off the 120 or so Gigabytes of data that i didnt have room for on my other drives last night.

I pray to the hardware gods that i get through this without losing some data, but i probably need to take some of my own advice and BACKUP more often. So i got an external hdd to keep copies everything critical on.

glyFX Sorcerer Set

Ruxton — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:47:09 +0000

A couple of the guys at work cooked up a beauty mini-free-set and we FINALLY got it out today.

Here’s a bit of something to tease your taste buds, now go get all 8, for free.. from glyfx.

You can find them in the free icons section and they’re packed as ICO files for windows or ICNS files and Folders for Mac OSX. Unfortunately we haven’t really thought about how to package these things up for the linux crew as yet, but i’m thinking about it, i promise.