So, I’ve started dabbling in games development with a few game ideas I’ve got bouncing around in my head. And whilst I wanted to make wonderful, amazing, visual feasts of games - I also wanted to start a bit slower and ease myself into what is essentially the most difficult discipline of software engineering around.

Cue, LÖVE - an engine dedicated to 2D games (there are 3D libraries available for it). It uses LUA, and pretty much encourages diving straight into the code and learning how to make a game, as opposed to learning the tools and figuring out how to use a suite of (albeit amazingly powerful) tools.

I worked on some basic tutorials last night, and I’m enjoying learning both LUA and the engine right away. It’s quite logical from what I can tell so far and I found a few tutorials especially helpful in understanding what’s going on:

• this tutorial about Tilemaps by Kikito helped...

Remote Desktop more than covers my use of productivity on JT-NXS, my laptop system that’s based at the office. So far, I’ve been fortunate in the last 10 days or so since moving towards ‘Cloud Citizen’ status, that I’ve been at my desktop, JT-DXS and not needed to use JT-NXS as much for productivity.

The experiment so far has been a wonderful success, especially when it comes to Media Consumption - it’s been awesome being able to access a personal collection of media that some close friends and family are also able to access.

Gaming has been great, for anything that’s not on a pressured level (ie. competitive play like Overwatch, or CS:GO - even then, they’re fine, but I just feel more comfortable not leaning on the internet connection so much to remain competitive with other human players). Co-op games are a revelation with it, Parsec.tv have really outdone themselves in their...

So, primarily to get away from my desktop (see my previous post below) - the solution appears to be resorting to Cloud computing in some shape or form.

Gaming Entertainment

The biggest issue currently, that will dissuade me the most from becoming a citizen of the cloud is that I won’t be able to play games with my low-spec terminal (in this case, in my room, it’ll be a 2012 Mac Mini).

Luckily for me; I actually stumbled across a wonderful solution! Parsec.tv - an amazing, free, 1080p 60fps cloud gaming application. Steam In-Home Streaming has never worked well for me, but this evening I gave it a go with a brand new release Sea of Thieves!

The experiment worked spectacularly - the quality of the game is more than adequate. My Laptop (off-site) reached on average about 40fps; and the input lag was more than acceptable for adventuring, fighting the undead and firing cannons to deal...

Since the start of the year, I’ve been working towards making the technology and capabilities of the tech I use in my every day life, a whole lot more comfortable and less cluttered.

I’ve been looking into a minimalist lifestyle after realizing whilst trying to plan on moving out - that I have way too much crap in my life to accommodate such a move.

There’s a pretty simple rule/goal I keep in mind now with each of the gadgets, tech or ideas I have:

It should, as seamlessly as possible, integrate into my everyday life and tasks. I shouldn’t have to worry about how I’m doing something, or if I can do something.

And the best way I can think of that, is to no longer be tied to a desk in order to do all the programming, design, development, gaming and media consumption.

It would enable me to have a much more enriched quality of life, being able to go out, and adventure around, and when...

Well, I’ve got my website slowly being redeveloped into something a little more presentable. I’ve integrated it (very loosely through RSS feed) with my actual blog on svbtle.com

It’s not as prolific a website as Medium.com or Wordpress, and in fact is little more than a blank page and some text input areas, but it serves its purpose as an ongoing always-on blogging service.

You’ll see me doing a lot more updates to this blog now that it’s running, and they’ll be slightly briefer posts, I suppose. For now, I think I’ve found a happy balance between creating my own CMS, and using my existing subscription to svbtle, where content and data are promised to be kept online

See and Download my Current Layout Here

Back at the start of the year, I picked up an Ergodox EZ keyboard; in an effort to save my wrists from the terrors of RSI. The keyboard, is actually quite alien compared to most standard keyboards, with something of a split QWERTY layout, it still bugs a lot of people when they see the keyboard.

Needless to say, it’s taken me quite some time, in fact, I still am adapting to using this keyboard. It doesn’t help even more that I’m using a regular shaped keyboard at work everyday, either.

I still make a lot of typo errors, and I’ll stumble every now and then based on games asking me to press certain non-alphanumeric keys (Ctrl, Shift, etc.) and I sorely miss the arrow keys being in that familiar up/down/left/right shape on a regular keyboard. Instead, it’s an almost Vi-esque left/right/up/down setup. Still, I’ve persisted, and my typing speed...

My last update was quite a while ago…! Coincidentally it’s also about a topic that I think I should write about again, just to see what’s changed since then!

In my time away, I’ve since started stabilising things regarding my personal career as a coder/developer/designer, and really, have started looking for a place online to write and journal my story. Enter this blog!

So, hopefully, you’ll see me updating this thing a bit more regularly, with a few more personal musings than before.

So, as you read in my last post - I recently got a new Gigabyte Laptop to start using as my all-in-one gaming and development device. This has recently meant that I’ve returned to the Windows ecosystem after developing and coding in Unix/OS X for the last 2.5 years professionally.

It’s a helluva change…!

My previous working arrangement was:

• Sublime Text 3 as my primary text editor for coding
• The built-in Terminal application to handle my SSH shenanigans
• Filezilla FTP for any GUI based file transactions needed

Admittedly, the above covered about 99% of everything I needed to do. Over the last few days or so, I made do with an almost similar compromise in Windows:

• Sublime Text 3 works just as well in Windows for coding and development!
• Git Bash – which comes with Git for Windows is pretty darn great too! It’s a very nice alternative to the Windows Command Prompt, and works much...

So, it’s been quite a while! Today I’d like to make a fairly quick post about my most recent toy, and the impact it’s actually had (within 24 hours - that’s pretty impressive!) on the way I’m working and doing eLeague.gg stuff!

Behold, my newest gadget (toy) - the Gigabyte P57X-1070-603S:

It’s a pretty big 17" Laptop, with the new GeForce 10 series graphics cards built into it (a Geforce GTX 1070 to be exact). It’s a device of many firsts for me:

• My first gaming dedicated laptop
• My first $2500+ laptop
• My first 17" laptop
• My first attempt at rolling everything I do into a single machine, realistically

It’s the fourth point that I’m going to be rambling on about today. Prior to owning this laptop, I was always a fan of the MacBook Air - using it in excess of 8 hours a day, I was essentially surgically grafted to it. It let me move around and still keep up coding.

The way I worked...