Blog

Firedancer Software DNS issues

So I've ended up with some major DNS issues on Firedancer Software that means the site has been down for 2+ days, and is instead showing a parked domain message from my hosting (or SSL/QUIC errors for some). I'm kind of wondering if this is a sign that I should just shut it down this billing cycle anyway and not try to extend for another year. I will think further on it as I diagnose the issues…

What's going on in July to September

The Brave FAQ is gone now. As I mentioned in my post a few months ago about future plans and downsizing I couldn't afford to keep it running due to long term unemployment. I have had some bits of work recently, but some is only temporary while the guy I'm replacing is on holidays, and some is likely to be ongoing work but there is no guarantee of regular hours so I can't fully rely on it. As men…

More game development tools

Related to my last post, I've recently added a standalone crew evaluation tool for Legendary Encounters: Alien which allows you to compare the relative strength of various combinations of barracks characters. It is also linked from the Barracks section of the Legendary Encounters: Alien setup manager, which will auto-fill the generated characters and game options for you. There will be more deve…

A handful of recent projects

Board gaming has been a hobby of mine for many years, and with my recent downtime due to unemployment plus some renewed interest and access to some of my older games while I'm in Australia I've added 3 new projects which are all board game related. The first includes a randomized setup manager and crew evaluator for Legendary Encounters: Alien. The others are randomized setup managers for both L…

Future plans and downsizing

Due to long term unemployment I have to figure out some ways to reduce my ongoing bills. I was already planning on retiring Firedancer Software this year, but I'm also going to retire the Brave FAQ unless I can find a decent remote job before the yearly renewal is up (two, maybe three months from now). So I'll be moving a few extra things here that only currently exist on those sites in the nex…

Software migration is underway

The Software page is all up and running just fine and I've released all current versions of my software from Firedancer Software. Next steps will be to reimplement the updater DB on this site, then minor updates to each app to point to this site for updates and homepage!

A few small additions to the site

I've just pushed a few small extras for the site. The blog now has an RSS feed for all posts, and each app has a seperate RSS feed for releases. Also included are a few small tweaks and fixes for dark mode.

Quick outage today

The site will be down for a few minutes today for an update. To consolidate my online developer presence I am planning to remove my old site (Firedancer Software) in the future, and move all of my software here. The first part of this move will be started with an update to the site today which will add a Software page, and I will try to migrate the individual apps sometime in the next few days. …

Temporary downtime today

The site is going down for an upgrade soon. This will add some improvements to the career history page and set me up to introduce a skills page in the near future. The upgrade should be reasonably quick and everything back up and running soon. I'll update here when the maintenance is over and everything is tested and working! Update: The upgrade is complete and everything looks to be runni…

The Brave FAQ Released

I've just released a site I've been working on recently - a FAQ and user guide for Brave browser and Basic Attention Token. I will be adding more content as well as screenshots to certain entries as I find the time. You can check it out at bravefaq.com

Brave Ad Stats project added

I've just added a new project/tool to the site which is retrieves the current Brave ad catalog for your region and gives an overview of the numbers of campaigns and ads available, as well as the values of the ads in the catalog. the project can be found here, or the repository is available on GitLab.

Contact details updated

I've just updated my contact details to include Reddit (where I am a moderator for both r/brave_browser and r/BATProject), as well my new Twitter account. Please follow me on Twitter if you would like to get the latest release announcements for my software.

BAT Ticker 1.1.1 released

A quick bugfix for BAT Ticker was pushed out today to fix an issue which could cause the API calls to stop triggering. If you are affected please restart your browser to get the update as soon as possible.

BAT Ticker 1.1.0 released

BAT Ticker, my Chromium extension to always have the current value of Basic Attention Token handy in your browsers has just been updated! The new version adds support for showing the current value of BAT in 45 different fiat currencies (previously it was only in USD). You can get the extension here on the Chrome Web Store, or you can check the project page for more details and a link to the…

Witch's Brew 0.3 released

Inventory is here! This release changes the way scoring and ingredient pick up is performed. Now you have 4 slots to pick things up, and have to drop them back to a barrel by your sister witch to score. This is in preparation for a future major element of the game - recipes that you will have to gather ingredients to make. Go check it out! Again there is a write-up over on PublishOx, …

BAT Ticker extension for Chromium browsers released

I've just published my first extension for Chromium browsers, BAT Ticker, to the Chrome Web Store. It shows the current USD price of the cryptocurrency BAT along with the 24h change (direction is shown on the icon by the red/green badge colour, or click the icon to get the percentage value). You can get the extension here on the Chrome Web Store, or I also have a project page here with more…

Witch's Brew 0.2 released

Finally some more progress on Witch's Brew! This release introduces a health mechanic (instead of insta-death) plus some behaviour related to being hit by monsters, and includes the basis for positive and negative timed effects. The only one noticeable in-game so far is a slow effect if it is a ghost that hits you. Go check it out! I've also posted a little more in-depth write up about t…

Static route updater project added

Just released a new project. It is a Python script to automatically manage static routes on MacOS for domain names which change IP address. Originally developed because I use a VPN but Brave browser's ad catalog would not load while my VPN was on, and their ad server would occasionally change IP. Project can be found here, or the repository is available on GitLab.

Dark mode added

I just added in a quick dark mode setting. The switch can be found up in the menu, and will persist across refreshes since the setting is stored locally. Took about 2 hours, including playing around with colours to get a decent level of contrast for readability. I kind of think I like dark mode better than normal!

Witch's Brew 0.1 released

The last couple of weeks I've been working on a game written in JavaScript using the Phaser 3 framework. And here it is! It is still very basic, and only represents a small part of my eventual plans for this game, but it is functional and playable. The current point of the game is just to gather good stuff (for points), while avoiding bad stuff (which kill you), in an attempt to get a hi…

Quick maintenance window

The site will be down or only partially functional for a brief maintenance window later today. I will be performing some quick manual upgrades that will swap out the id value used in URLs for blog posts and projects, and instead use a text-based link, so instead of eg. blog/1 for my first post you would instead see something like blog/welcome-new-website. I expect the maintenance will not take …

New projects this week

Two new projects are up - both of which are web projects hosted right here on my portfolio. One is a lightweight QR code creator which generates downloadable QR codes with customizable colours. The other is a browser notification tester to check if notifications are supported and working in your browser. At some point I will add an option for error correction level to the QR code generator. The…

Always research the company when you are applying or approached for a job

I was recently approached with a job offer that sounded great on paper - an established German business named Payever who have some big companies backing them, and the job was reasonably attractive. But thankfully before I responded I did my usual thing before any major steps - I did my research. I found a treasure trove of bad reviews for Payever, most from remote workers, and most of which di…

The crazy things you see when hunting for a job....

I've been out of work for a while (partially by choice), and while I was casually looking before to see if anything interesting came up, recently I've started looking seriously again since the world is running in a sort of slow motion which blocks most of my own business plans. And the thing that always amazes me is how many job listings I see that don't make sense! I keep seeing job listin…

My love/hate relationship with Google

For a long time I was one of those people who just said "screw it, Google know almost everything anyway, so why should I try to hide anything from them". But that was a different me. These days my thinking is a bit different, and I have slowly (ever so slowly) been prying myself away from Google in an attempt to have some level of privacy on the internet and beyond. Some Google servic…

Images are down

So I'm having some trouble getting the images for the project screenshots to show. They were working when I first uploaded the site, so not sure what changed, potentially it is something on my hosting. For now I will just remove them so the site doesn't look too broken, and get them fixed when I can! July update: this is fixed now - the issue was a misconfiguration I'd made in my hosting.

Basic commands for working with Django

Recently I've started working a lot with Django (this website plus a few other projects I have in the works), but I am always forgetting a couple of the commands and have to look them up. So I thought I would gather the commands I forget together (plus the other basic commands for completion) so I have a place to look them up quickly, and thought they might be useful to others as well. Virt…

Welcome to the new website!

This is my developer portfolio, and will also include some other stuff as I get to it, including some of my activities on the game development front. Eventually I plan to move all of my open source software here too, but that is still a while away. Most importantly, this site will see a bit of activity. Maybe not regular app updates, but at least an occasional post about what I am up to in the…