I really hate the process of publishing and managing apps on Google Play.
If you are able to fill in dozens of forms and agreements when starting a new app, go through many rounds of updating the forms to meet the guidelines and updating stupid little things in the app to meet the criteria, and feel really good when you finally push the app into production, it does not mean you have won.
Funny is also the "support" and the process of solving the problems with terms and forms. Especially the "appeal process" is a lot of fun.
If you fill in something wrong in one of hundreds of entries on dozens of forms, you get a notice, usually within a week, with some paragraph number and letter that you missed. It does not tell you what is wrong, just that you have not met the requirements. If you have absolutely no idea what is wrong, because it is a generic notice, you try to appeal, asking kindly for help and advice on what should be changed. You will usually hear back within a week or two. It looks like someone "alive" has replied to you, but in fact you get almost ...
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As the project is growing more and more, it is more and more necessary to have semi-public testing environment. Especially with the multiplayer games it is not possible to test them in local environment.
I have a free VPS with enough hardware to do something like this, but it is currently unused.
It is hosted in the ORACLE data centre in Frankfurt. I remember the difficulties, because I have set up my personal website on this kind of VPS. There are a lot of firewall layers and I am not really into networking.
However, I had some time so I decided to do some research and try to run the test environment to be able to offer better, tested services.
I spent five hours getting the web server, mariadb and PHP up and running, setting up symlinked deployment so that I could later create an automated deployment system, and getting the web up and running. After those 5 hours I had a working website with working database connections.
However, the next step is still in progress. It is getting the game server up and running, which is also the most difficult part.
I have managed to set up all the certificates to set up the secure ...
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I tried to turn on my little gem - the N900 - and I was a bit scared. It did not turn on.
So I immediately put the charger in. The indicator light flashed yellow a couple of times and then nothing. So I left the charger plugged in and waited a while. As I look after the batteries in my collection of phones, I was confused as to how this could have happened. I did not find a reason, but the phone was charged in the end, but the battery is weak. Luckily it still works. It does not last as long, but the phone works and is fine.
The phone is still really good, and i am still waiting for some modern phone following this concept, but still nothing came. It is running modified debian, and it is called maemo. Lot of debian packages has been added to repositories for this phone also. So i am able to run htop, aircack-ng (which i have been using really much) or wireshark. The repositories are of course dead, so i am not able to install anything new, but fortunately i have lot of installed apps, games and tools. ...
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As I am going back through the Star Wars games from Jedi Academy, I watched the last three episodes of Mysteries of the Sith and it is really terrible. The "BAN" of weapons in these episodes, combined with extremely unintuitive lightsaber combat and unintuitive and useless Force abilities, is really painful.
So after getting to the end of episode 12 and defeating Dark Mara, I got to the beginning of episode 13 and then cheated my way straight to ep. 14 and then closed it and I would never play it again. It is absolutely unplayable.
So, having already played the standard Dark Forces 2, the only "series" game left on my list was Dark Forces 1. However, Republic Commando came back to me. I saw some reviews and videos, but I did not really like the look of this game. However, I was persuaded to give it a try. So I decided to get the original version and install it on one of my old notebooks, but it is almost impossible to find the unremastered version. Luckily, one of the players in the Retro Gaming Community offered me an .iso so I can run it as it was meant to be. ...
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I made last Sunday a photo day. I visited a LEGO exhibition and a safari park and took some photos. The weather was not the best, but offered some nice moments, so I still managed to get some excellent pictures.
But for better shots it would be better to wait for spring.
Here are some of the better ones
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I finally finished the feature I had been planning for a long time. The images on this blog are now clickable, meaning you can enlarge the thumbnails in the articles.
It was such a simple task as I was so bored to do it. However, I forced myself to do it and now it works, so you can enjoy the pictures.
The next step is to make a section where all the latest comments will be displayed, but I guess I have enough time to do it, as there are still no comments :(
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As part of my annual battery care process for my mobile phones, I took my Nokia 5230 out of the drawer. This model, in a white case with a blue back, was my first touch phone.
While the battery was discharging/charging, I decided to install a few more games, as I found an archive on archive.org that seemed to contain many games of various genres that would fit on the screen and fully support touch controls. The only thing I really hated was that these Symbian 5th generation phones supported playing older games for classic keyboard-based phones by displaying a sort of virtual keyboard across half the screen. Nice feature, but completely unintuitive controls. I can understand that there might not be a better solution for this, but honestly, playing these games with touch arrows is absolutely terrible. In these games, you usually make quick moves, clicks and combos using the keyboard, and this is simply not possible on a resistive (one-touch) screen.
So I was expecting a really good portion of fun with this, but unfortunately... it is really boring. There were only a few good games for this platform, including all five or six of Polarbit's ...
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I bought this retro game console two years ago in a sale for 500 CZK. It came in parts, and the plastic had to be separated into actual parts, but it was quite easy and took about half an hour.
However, the machine is absolutely fantastic. It can run emulators for dozens of devices. Personally, I mainly run Nintendo 64, NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega MegaDrive, PS1 and PSP.
So what made me take it out of the drawer and play? I read the article about my favourite game, The Neverhood, and there was a mention of the second part of the story of that game. It is called Skullmonkey and it is only for PS1. So I remembered my retrogaming gem, grabbed it and set up the ROM. It is a platform game and I will definitely give it a try.
Anyway, back to the device I will be writing about. It runs OpenElec, which I found to be the best.
It should be able to run at least PSP games, but with some tinkering it could even run PS2 games. Unfortunately, I still have not managed to get a single PS2 game to run smoothly on it, as it ...
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I got a new glass last week. And it is a really nice Tamron 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3. The aperture is not really great, but the lenses are really universal, so it is a compromise.
I've been wanting a lens like this for a while, to carry with me when I don't need anything more important, to be able to take just the camera and not the whole bag of lenses.
It is used but in really good condition. The lenses are clean, just some kind of scratch on the plastic around the lens, which is not really important. Now I have to give it a few tries to get used to it, but I think it would be really good for general photography.
I took it for a walk, so here is a sample photo of a freight locomotive I took.
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As I wrote in a previous article about this notebook, the cover for the hard drive was missing, leaving a hole in the bottom of the case, but that was not the biggest problem. With the cover missing, the HDD was held only by the SATA connector, and when there was plenty of space underneath it, it would swing and possibly slowly destroy the port.
So I decided to make a temporary solution until I could find a replacement cover or 3D print a new one that would fit perfectly. And yes, I am a bit afraid that this temporary solution might be the permanent solution. We know...
However, I have been going through my storage of model railway material, and I still have some plastic sheets in 1mm and 3mm thickness that I got and stored many years ago when I was working in an advertising/printing company during school.
So I used a knife to cut the approximate shape of a 1mm board and tried to fit it over the hole. As it was not just smooth, but a bit rounded, I took a lighter, heated the corners a bit and gently formed the rounded shape.
The end result is not very nice, ...
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