Year: 2013

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The good lady recently bought me a premium subscription to Spotify. Amongst lots of new features is the ability to play music on my mobile streamed from Spotify, which, when I connect it to my 3G Mifi, means I can stream almost any album from wherever I am.

Add into the mix the fact that I currently drive a Mercedes Benz A-class with a very nice music console and a 3.5m jack input for aux. input. If I run a short 3.5m stereo cable from the phone to the socket I can get streamed audio straight into car. However, there would appear to be a slight problem. For the past few weeks the setup has been producing a lot of feedback. The sort of engine noise, electric switch style feedback you used to get on old cars with no suppressor on the antennas or speakers.

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Many blog authors use plugins in WordPress to make their code samples look good. Code is generally written in most IDEs in a mono-spaced font, yet blogs are written in proportional fonts so code pasted in between blog text is usually very unreadable until you add a plugin to wrap the code samples in a mono-spaced font style.

There are a great deal of plugins available for WordPress which will make your code samples look good and the one I’ve started to use is called “Prettify GC Syntax Highlighter” (It had the highest rating!) The style is great but you can’t easily add captions to the code.

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To play just call the number or text the word ‘Play’ to – +44 (0) 118 324 7006 †

51339jW18WL.Image._As a child I loved playing/reading the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. (See Amazon) The very fact that I was able to decide how my story went was probably one of the first role playing games I ever played. I remember going through all of them in my local library, then waiting patiently for the new editions to arrive.

As a challenge, my girlfriend and I set about recreating the same sort of thing using PHP. She chose to go down the browser route and I decided to try out the Twilio platform which would allow the user to play via their phone, initially using the touch-tone signals and eventually moving onto SMS based play. I’d previously played with Twilio at a very low level, creating a messaging platform for the radio show, The Games Cast.
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320_albumAnyone who’s followed me on-line for a while will know that I am a co-host and co-founder of a podcast/radio-show focusing on video games, memorably called The Games Cast. Recently we celebrated our 50th episode which, considering it’s our third attempt at a podcast series with longevity, is quite an achievement.

When I say “Our” what I actually mean is myself and my two close friends, Paul Sunter and Duncan Simpson. Together we were responsible for the thirteen “rare” episodes of the Vagusnet podcast. Things went awry and a few years later we came back with season one of The Games Cast.

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BelfortWorker management board games are something I quite enjoy but sometimes they can be a bit too heavy on the rules. If the first game doesn’t bed in the basic rules then the game has, in my opinion, too many rules. A worker management game has a greater learning curve than most board game styles and it needs an associated level of ease in the ability to understand the rules and run the game through the instruction book. I suspect someone with a maths degree, or a better understanding of algebra, can probably work out a graph of the relationship between the length of time a game should take against the ease at which you should be able to follow the instructions.

The Manhattan Project is a great game but it’s let down by the overly difficult instruction book. With a worker management game you need a book that is going to take you through each step and for the first game it should almost hold your hand as you go through the steps. The Manhattan Project gives you lots of options and tells you how to complete each one but it never gives you the bigger picture – it doesn’t tell you why you should do something or what you, as the player, gain from the move the book is explaining. This brings us round to the new game of the weekend, Belfort.

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