Computers

My wife and I read a lot of books. Now that our son has gotten a little older and needs less attention, I go through more than a book a week on average, Bobbie doesn’t go through as many books in number, but she is reading much larger non-fiction books and taking copious amounts of notes. Many years ago I bought Delicious Library 2 (DL2) as a part of a bundle deal. Bobbie and I used it to catalog all of our fiction and collectable books. It worked well enough and with some simple PHP and YUI coding I built a simple web page we could use on our phones to check our library while out and about. ...

Maintainable JavaScript by Nicholas C. ZakasI read this book using Safari Books Online using various laptops and an iPad. This is an amazing book. Following a style guide while programming is common in many languages, but for me it is a new idea in JavaScript. Reading Douglas Crockford’s Style Guide http://javascript.crockford.com/code.html can teach you a lot, but Maintainable JavaScript teaches you not only the how, but also the why. ...

CodecademyI first learned about Codecademy last year and I immediately jumped into it and completed a few of the JavaScript courses and promptly forgot about it. Lately I have been writing more and more JavaScript and jQuery to make interactive prototypes for work. I rate my JavaScript skills somewhere around intermediate and I am challenging myself to work my way up to expert by the end of the year. As a part of that personal challenge I have been reading a lot of JavaScript, jQuery, and Git books and websites, this is how I ended up back on the Codecademy website. ...

I read this book on O’Reilley’s Safari Books Online using personal and work laptops along with the Safari Books app on an iPad. I really like the Adobe Classroom in a Book series and have read many of them. They are great because they are based on real-world use and come with all of the files needed to build the projects used in them. ...

I read this book on [Safari Books Online](http://www.safaribooksonline.com" title=“http://www.safaribooksonline.com) using Firefox. I am doing more and more with jQuery and went looking for a book that could show me the ins-and-outs of it and “Pro jQuery” is definitely that book. I do not agree that this is a “Pro” book as it does not cover professional techniques for programming in JavaScript using the current best practices that you would find in a production environment, but this book is a great reference for jQuery and I could find none that were better. ...

Last weekend I attended the Vintage Computer Festival and Apple Pop-Up Museum at the empty CompUSA store off of Holcomb Bridge Road. It was nice to see someone doing something with one of these abandoned storefronts. It was great fun seeing all of the old Apple, Commodore, Atari, and other computers and gaming consoles. It all made me very nostalgic, but not so much as I would trade in any of my current computers for any of them. It was really amazing what we were able to produce using those old machines. ...

I really enjoyed the first Portal video game, it was a much needed break from the first person shooters I had been playing that were focused on violence. Portal did not disappoint, the levels grew progressively harder as the game went on and the payoff at the end was spectacular. The GLaDOS song at the end of the game is fantastic. Now we have Portal 2, I played it using Steam from Valve on a MacBook Pro. There were no slowdowns, frame-drops, or stutters during the game, and the audio was great. ...

I read this book as a PDF bought from O’Reily Media’s Safari Books Online mostly using an iPad and iBooks but also using the Preview app on a MacBook Pro. I really dislike showing any photographs without the minimum of rotate, crop, exposure correct, color correct, and export at the needed sizes and Lightroom allows me to do that very quickly. ...

I played this game on a MacBook Pro using OnLive and had no technical difficulties. This first person shooter has a lot of problems, it starts out slow, takes a long time to get going, and then at the very end throws some odd control issues at you. It is definitely “on a rail” and appears to only offer one pretty flat story to tell. Maybe its biggest problem is that it is trying to tell a story. It may have been a better game if there was more than one way to get to the end and something in all the dialog that let me know that the end was coming. ...

I bought this game on Steam and played it in Windows 7 in Bootcamp on a MacBook Pro. There were a lot of crashing with the game initially; apparently the default install is a horrible experience full of crashes and blue screens for many, many players. It took a lot of searching and a lot of fiddling around to get the game to play for more than 10 minutes without crashing but eventually I found the right combination of settings and the game played great. ...