The Official Blog of Patcoola

Im just a dude watching over my parents,
and trying to make cartoons and video games from home.

News, Updates and What’s Up [2015-01-12]

, By Patcoola

Some news and updates with mostly reflections of 2014. I will actually talk about myself this time.

First for the news, I’ve posted my Projects year end report that covers what happened in 2014, what was done what was not. I also posted the Projects for 2015 overview, maybe next year all projects will be multimedia related, figures crossed.

I have created a Java Script Class to change how the Select element looks in most web browsers, I call it button type, it’s to help users of my future Web Apps distinguish editable drop down fields and non-editable button style drop down fields. Very cool, but only applies to a limited number of web browsers.

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Now for the updates, I’ve fixed a problem with my blog’s Print View feature, should work with every page now. Blog’s minimum requirements browser detector has been updated to detect Internet Explorer 11, thank you Microsoft for changing your identity. The blog has been updated with four new advertisement presenters since the big redesign launch bringing the total to ten.

Headline photos, I mean graphics have been added to many blog posts, most notable the Java Script and PHP postings.

Now for me, this is the part where I talk about myself, something I really don’t do much of, I have always seen my boring blog more as a work thing or as part of my personal portfolio or resume. Can’t you tell, I’m obviously unemployed.

I got a lot of personal work done in 2014, I even made an animated short called The Indie Game Developer. I completely redesigned this blog and remade every Flash app in HTML5, that was a lot of work. I also started working on two more websites, one for I.T. services which I see more as a portfolio. A backend website is in the works, will provide services like short links and Web App management.

In December I watched Game of Thrones for the first time, watched all 40 episodes. I also started watching a Canadian show called Lost Girl. For Christmas I got the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on Blu-ray (I can only watch the digital copy included), high definition looks awesome.

In mid 2014 I bought a Nexus 7 2nd gen, was worth ever penny, I use it every day for reading Manga and stuff. I also purchased lots of Archie Comics Best of 70 Years of Stories and 1000 pages graphic novels, that’s like 10k pages of Archie Comics.

I play the game Clash of Clans and Second Earth on the tablet, the secret to success is to keep your trophy level low so you won’t be attacked much and people won’t steal much from you so you can save and spend more on upgrades. On another note I really like Clash of Clans’ commercials.

Around September the phone company (keep in mind we only have one) increased the Internet usage limit from 30gbs a month to 40gbs. I now have more peace of mind and Internet freedom now and I’ll have the last of my Steam games downloaded by the month of May. After that I don’t know what I’d do with all that extra data usage.

In the summer, I started using our Nintendo Wii, we never used since we got it. So I installed Homebrew and bought 30 games online and a classic pro controller. I had only one bad deal on eBay in the process, and I didn’t spend much, the average cost per game even with the bad deal came down to about 11 dollars, it should have been 8 thou. Plus half of the games were brand new and other half like new, and all came from Canadian sellers. Now I just need to sell my old xBox to off set the costs.

In the year of 2014 I watched almost every episode of Wizards of Waverly Place, Disney’s Jessie and the Canadian show Continuum. I’d like to note my mother is now a big fan of the show Jessie. Also in 2014 I read a lot of Archie Comics and Manga, literary thousands of pages.

My mother mad a big deal about our electric bill one day (about $300 per month) so I set up a switch to hook up my paper pusher to my work desk. (Paper Pusher: a 12 inch netbook computer) I started thinking energy efficiency since then, but nothing I can do about it thou. My 12 inch netbook is about the speed of an old Pentium 3.4ghz Prescott but runs on only 25 watts where my desktop uses between 100 to 250 watts. I realize now most of my computer usage is just typing related so the first month of using the netbook instead of the desktop dropped our electric bill to about 180 dollars. My netbook is a bit slow and limiting but I did make my animated short The Indie Game Developer on it and Adobe Flash didn’t crash or freeze up once.

Steam now has their games set to Canadian prices, maybe it’s just me because I’m cheap but I think the prices on games have gone up. Ether way I don’t need any more games, I’ve kind of dug my way into a hole of games I haven’t played yet. As a rule I try to finish my games.

Money wise I had a good year, I made about 700 from local services, over 200 in donates, I finally made a 100 from Google ads (only took three years). Blog traffic is way down now that I have like zero spammers, in December I made about 6.5 from ads and on the first week of January 2015 I made four dollars, I wish every month did so well.

This winter has been great, not like last year which was hard with heavy snow fall and a broken snow blower, last winter I once spent six hours shoveling the drive way. This year’s winter has been pretty good with very little snow, I can still see some tall grass poking out the snow in some spots, call it global worming I guess.

I hope to get all this Web development stuff finished so I can do what I really want, make an online comic and animated shorts, maybe a game on the side.

 

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