Software development. Tech punditry. Retro gaming.
At some point in high school students are taught about factorials. A fairly simple concept, the factorial of a non-negative whole number is written as n! and defined as the product (that means you multiply the numbers) of all the positive whole numbers less than or equal to that number. So 5! = 5 ⨉ 4 ⨉ 3 ⨉…
Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s most households did not have a computer. Computers were very expensive by today’s standards. There was, of course, no internet. Software you’d associate with office work today didn’t exist – Word, Excel and Photoshop had yet to be created.
At the time the three most popular personal computers were the Apple II…
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regulates advertising on social media, including Facebook – their guidelines require businesses to make true and accurate claims, and to be able to prove them. Facebook claim to have advertising standards and to follow them. In fact, here is what they say on Fraud, Scams and Deceptive Practices:
If you regularly use Facebook …
Chocolate means a lot to me. I always have chocolate in the cupboard, I make chocolate cakes, I eat chocolate ice cream, I drink chocolate, I have been paid in chocolate for some projects. Chocolate is life. So it may not surprise you to learn I sometimes have ideas about chocolate.
I talked about one of these ideas in a …
Those who know me know that I am a big fan of chocolate. There is always chocolate in the cupboard at home, I drink hot chocolates at cafes, my friends give me chocolates as gifts, and I’ve even been paid in chocolate for certain projects in the past. I think about chocolate a lot.
So perhaps it isn’t a huge …
The Game & Watch are handheld electronic video game units created by Nintendo in the 1980s, consisting of a video game on an LCD display, and a clock (the “watch” part in the name). The first game, Ball, was introduced in 1980, and the last original Game & Watch was Mario the Juggler in 1991. These handheld games were …
Thinking back to high school you may remember being taught about pi and using it in maths classes to calculate perimeters and areas of circles. You may remember being told a good approximation of pi is 3.14, or 22/7. But you may also recall that pi is irrational (meaning, in maths, that it cannot be expressed exactly as …
News of the day is that a new Atari 2600 prototype game has been found. It is being referred to as Fish (that was the filename) and little is known about its origins apart from the fact it was created in 1983 and never released. You can read all about the discovery at AtariProtos.com.
Here’s a video of the …
The Mega Drive Mini (Genesis Mini in the US) has been out now for some time. It’s a great little device with 42 built-in games, and has the advantage that it connect to modern televisions giving easier access to those without original hardware or old CRT televisions.
However, it is also fairly easy to add more games to the device …
Many of you would be aware that a game titled “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” was released for the Atari 2600 in 1982. It is often (unfairly) claimed that it caused the great video game crash of 1983.
While not a great game, there are far worse games in existence. It was rushed in development and the result …
There are a number of different health identifiers in use throughout Australia, some for patients, some for doctors, some for organisations. Each identifier has its own particular use and rules around its format, with some more complex than others.
Good software will generally check the validity of field inputs where possible. For example, a field for an email address would …
It has been 15 years since my last blog post. I eventually turned the blog off because it had no updates, and everyone tells me no one blogs anymore. Well, I decided it is time to bring back the blog!
So, I’ve deleted most of the old blog items as the quality was lacking (it has been 15 years). But …