The weekend that a lot of people were waiting happened from September 2nd to the 5th. PAX 2016 was my second PAX and now this time I decided not to miss any day. All the pictures are uploaded to the Facebook page with a separate album for Friday, Saturday and Sunday/Monday.
I am still working on integrating this blog with IFTT. The goal is that every time I post something here both my Twitter and Facebook page will be updated.
So far the IFTTT<->Facebook integration is working fine but the integration with Twitter did not work. This post is also another test to see if it is working. My assuption is that the Twitter interation did not work because I accidentaly turned off the IFTTT recipe rather than trigerring it. As a result the post would not be considered “new” anymore.
If the Twitter recipe works, the next step will be to fix how I am handling images. Currently I am adding <div> and tags around all the images. Instead I will move to use markdown syntax for all images and then the style will be applied with CSS.
This post is a test for testing the new IFTTT recipes for posting to Twitter and Facebook.
On Saturday July 23rd was the 2016 Seattle Retro Gaming Expo in the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. I have been to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo a couple times and I know that SRGE was a smaller and more local event. Despite of the much smaller size and limited number of vendors, the prices I found were really good and the collection was diverse. As always, the people were very friendly and I got to talk to a few guys about technical stuff. I could not stay very long because I had to leave at around 3:00PM but this is what I ended leaving the expo with:
I wanted to get another DreamCast game and Alone In The Dark is a game I have heard a lot about. I got it from the great guys at Game Over Videogames.
This game was one I really liked as a kid but I had completely forgotten its name. It happened to show up for very cheap so of course I had to get it.
Gex 3 featuring Marliece Andrada, I think that is all the description that this game needs.
I already happen to have this game but this game is complete with all manuals and a gase in great condition.
The sequel for the awesome Metroid Prime for GameCube.
When I first got my GameCube as a kid, I had the option to get either this game or Star Wars The Clone Wars. Since I wanted to play something with my brother we descided to get Star Wars, but now I will finally experience what I could have had.
In between buying stuff I also got the chance to meet a few people. The first one was Joe from 8Bit Heroes , he described the project and the documentary that he and his team were working on. He also showed the tool they developed to work with NES hardware and limitations.
Then I had the chance to speak was Dan and Terry Diebold, the current owners of the Nintendo-PlayStation.
I chatted with both of them and they told me about about how they ended up with the console and what their plans are. It was great been able to see what could have been had the partnership between Nintendo and Sony worked out.
Overall, even though I didn’t spend much time in this convention I had a great time. I will totally be attending next year.
Few would have thought that Pokemon Go would be the hit that it has been. It has only been a few weeks and Pokemon is all the craze again, with people catching pokemons everywhere you go. As a pokemon fan of course I had to try Pokemon Go and I have spend several hours walking and catching pokemons while going and coming from work. The first few hours were really fun, looking for pokemons around me and trying find which ones live around my usual route, but as I keep catching them I started to feel that maybe my nostalgia and love for the Pokemon franchise was the reason I kept playing.
Pokemon Go is basically a simplified version of Ingress but with a pokemon theme. The first time I tried Ingress I was overwhelmed by the amount of content, data, text and quests I had to do, to the point that I stopped playing because I felt I could not commit to this parallel world. But now when I see Pokemon Go I feel that is such a bare bones game, no in-game chat, no trading, no PvP, lame battle system and such a horrible grind to evolve your pokemons. I understand that for this game to be successful it had to be adapted for a more casual crowd, but may(just maybe) they went a bit too far.
I feel that Pokemon Go has all the characteristics for it to be just a fad. It’s initial appeal came from the use of the Pokemon trademark and It’s popularity exploded thanks to social media and the mouth-to-mouth. Pokemon Go has achieved a very large player-base, but we still need to see what the retention rates will be, specially given some aspects like the amount of grinding required. The problem of when something becomes such a big hit so quickly is that there is the risk of burning out your players. The timers in mobile F2P games are used to prevent players from over- dosing in the game, Pokemon Go does not have this mechanic and instead it always has activities you can do. Even though this may sound like a positive point, on a game with no clear end-game, it can easily lead to players exhausting themselves and leaving the game.
I really hope Pokemon Go will be a success and not just another Periscope or Peach. If Niantic can improve the social features, fix the bugs and add more content, it can really become a new juggernaut in the gaming world. Only time will tell.
This is the project that has been sucking my time lately, a lightweight hub for data that is collected in my home. The project started as a service to keep track of the energy consumption from two WeMos in my apartment. But When I was done I noticed that there is no reason why this wouldn’t work for other kinds of data.
The application is divided on three parts, the server, the API and the modules. Let me explain what each part does.
This is a python script that uses the scheduler to trigger events to poll devices. The server will import all the modules in the ‘modules’ folder and then it will instantiate an object for each module enabled in the senson_station.cfg file. Each module imported has the logic to check if a device is online and
I say tentative title because it is a bad idea to call something ‘module’ since it is such a common word.
To handle multiple types of sensors, each module is a self contained python class that provides information to the server about how often should the polling happen as well as the logic to do the polling itself. Other pieces of information in each module also include a database version and also the format of the data to be retrieved.
And in order to get the information out of the database there are two endpoints, a JSON endpoint and a simple HTML page. The JSON endpoint allows other application to get the summarized data in JSON format. While the HTML page is just a front-end that formats the JSON data into some ugly HTML tables.
For some more information you can look into the README file from the repo at sensor_station.
This is a reminder for myself that I should stop ‘investing’ into increasing my productivity. I am at a point in which if I were to actually work on something I would get it done much sooner than if I were to work on achieving 120% productivity.
A few weeks I uploaded a new repo which I am calling Sensor Station. Basically the idea is to have a low powered device gathering data from other low powered devices and providing a way to access that data. The current implementation is two python daemons running on a raspberry pi, although it can run on anything really. One of the daemons is constantly listening and checking the status of WeMos in the network and saving the information locally to a SQLite databse. The second daemon is exposing the information in the database via a JSON endpoint or a HTML page. The data is gathered every minute and then you can see a breakdown of usage per WeMo.
There are still a few bugs to fix before I can post it somewhere, specially dealing with network errors but the project was short and fun.
After a long time debating with myself I finally made the decision to move this blog from Github Pages to an AWS EC instance. The reason I decided to do this is because Github Pages was a bit limiting in the capabilities I had and it also didn’t provide an easy way to upload and manage blobs. But the main limitation was the inability to deliver E2E TLS support, there were some solutions using CDNs, but this does not ensure encryption from Github’s servers to the user.
After I migrated everything to a dedicated instance I remembered how much I enjoy managing and tinkering with Linux. It is just so much fun for me to host it myself rather than using GitHub.
Thank you Github for this year of free hosting, it is time to part ways. :)
Despite of my inactivity with bringing features and fixes, Auraxis Control Center has kept growing and it is reaching now 1500 active users. Most of the new user are PS4 users that want a away to access their stats, friends and outfit mates from their phones.
I am very pleasantly surprised with the interest of the users to get new features and fixes. I have received several emails of users saying how they like the app and what features they would like to see in the future. Most of this features are not feasible(specially with regards of PS2<->PSN integration) but there is still room for improvement in the app.
This release contains mostly bug fixes and small UI changes that should not affect be very noticeable for most people. One important change was the new ACRA endpoint and it backend. For the last few months ACC has been using ACRA to report crashes but the endpoint use to upload the reports was broken. Thankfully on the client side the only change was a new URL but this change will allow me to fix crashes as soon as they are reported.
To receive and manage crash reports I decided to build my own sollution. By using Google App Engine and Java I developed Bug Maniac. Currently I have an API to upload, browse and delete reports. I also have a simple HTML page that I am working to to access the reports much easier.
I deployed the project over this last weekend and I already fixed a few crashes that some people were experiencing. I am planning on working on this project on the side until it is fully working and nice to use.
This post is two weeks too late but Auraxis Control Center just hit version 3 this last month. I decided to bump up the version number since this release included some major work such as namespaces, localization, new panels and better crash reporting.
The upgrade was very smooth despite of the radical changes. I decided to spend two weeks for testing and it seemed that I caught all major cases(except for one crash that affected few people). The number of users went up again even without me advertising the new features, which means that there is still a healthy amount of people looking for PS2 apps.
After the initial release I got couple crash reports, but the information I got from the Play Store was very limited and so I decided to reintroduce ACRA into the app. This time I took a different approach, instead of doing the lazy way of using email intents, I deployed a simple Google AppEngine app that stores logs. I used the ACRA functionality to POST crash logs in JSON format so I can simply post it to my own url. This ended up been much easier and better for the user since they do not need to do anything. The only thing that I lost is the ability for them to send messages, but I think that the fact that I can get crash logs in almost real-time makes up for that fact.
Apart from that I added Spanish as a language and now I am also adding German. Those will have to be the two languages I support unless I can get better translations for the strings I have.
Overall I think this was a very successful update, and at a good time too since the PS4 launch of Planetside is getting near.