Three till Seven

While reading on Hacker News about Spidermonkey performance, I saw commenters talking about switching from Chrome to Firefox and Opera. One commenter described Opera as Chrome without Google, which sounded interesting to me. I hadn’t tried Opera in a few years and I like to cycle through browsers occasionally to see what I’m missing. So I downloaded Opera 25 on my MacBook and gave it a try.

I upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite on my MacBook tonight and thought I’d share some of the fixes I had to apply to get my development environment set up again. I’ll continue to update this post as I discover new things that aren’t quite working the same as before.

I made another thing! This time, I made my first game. Well, the first game I’ve ever finished (I’ll get back to you someday Mahjong). It’s a JavaScript web implementation of the game Blicblock that your Sims play in The Sims 4. I built it using AngularJS, my new loves Yeoman and Bower, and Bootstrap. You can try it out in your web browser and view or contribute to the source code on Github.

I always lag behind Jon when it comes to trying out build tools or frameworks that are supposed to make my programming life easier. He tells me about cool new things he’s using, and I say “yeah, that looks cool, but I just want to be productive, so I’ll do things they way I’ve been doing them.” Then eventually I get a chance and I try out the cool thing and Jon was right, it’s totally great. That happened for me recently with Yeoman and Bower.

Recently, I had need to change the value of a select menu in an iframe from the outer page containing the iframe. There was a change event listener that had been added in the iframe’s JavaScript:

I recently ordered a Fitbit Zip because I missed the Moves app but didn’t want to return to them now that they’ve been acquired by Facebook. I also wanted something I could carry around more easily on my person than my phone. Sure, I take my phone almost everywhere I go, but I have to remember to grab it if I’m going to go downstairs or otherwise take a quick walk. With a Fitbit, my hope was to always wear it without even having to think about it.

Recently, I became interested in Google Music All Access and decided to try it. I had already used my free month back when the service first became available, so this time around I had to shell out $10/month. I’m used to that price, though, having paid the same for Rdio and Spotify before it. I went ahead and cancelled my Rdio subscription because I only need one streaming service at a time.