AWS

April 15th, 2017 / 1 Comment » / by Ryan

Hello World!

A few updates to begin with. You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything in a VERY. LONG. TIME. There are a few reasons for that. One is just that I just haven’t been in much of a sharing mood, and the other is that the place where I had this website hosted had pretty much abandoned the platform I was on and so keeping the software on this site updated had turned into a manual process. So any time I felt like sharing I was reminded when I logged in that my software was out of date and then I had to remember the steps to do it manually and by the end I had lost interest in whatever I was going to say.

To be fair, my host did have a new platform that I could migrate to, but I figured that if I had to do a site migration anyway, might as well look at all my options. So that’s what I did.

This site is now running on AWS! I’m pretty new to AWS but I’ve been playing with it a bit for the last 4-5 months. I hope I don’t run into any unpleasant surprises. So far it’s been pretty smooth, but if anything comes up I’ll be sure to write about it.

Also take note that the Twitter feed is back! It had stopped updating about 6 months ago (or maybe more). It seems the plugin I had been using previously hadn’t been updated in 3 years and I’m guessing it was just using outdated APIs or something. I had the old plugin configured to only show *my* tweets, but this new one shows everything I post. I retweet A LOT of things, so now you’ll see all those here too.

I recently retweeted some of Trump’s tweets from before he was elected that haven’t held up so well now that he’s president. So the downside of seeing the retweets is that my site currently has a whole bunch of Trump faces running down the Twitter column. 😉

2012 Music Wrap Up

December 31st, 2012 / 1 Comment » / by Ryan

The music for 2012 was a disappointment for me compared to the previous year, but still there were a few songs that stood out. So here’s my list of the best songs of 2012 (in no particular order):

Garbage – “Blood for Poppies
Imagine Dragons – “It’s Time
Fun – “We Are Young
Florence + The Machine – “Shake It Out
Gotye – “Somebody That I Used To Know” (I know I’ll get crap for this one. I think it was a good song that quickly became one of the most overplayed/remixed/parodied songs of the year)
Linkin Park – “BURN IT DOWN“, “LOST IN THE ECHO“, “CASTLE OF GLASS” (“LIVING THINGS” is easily my pick for best album of the year.)

Now, in standard tradition, here’s one I missed from 2011 that deserves notice:
Chevelle – “Hats Off to the Bull“, “Face to the Floor

2011 had a lot of great releases where I enjoyed the entire album, whereas this year was limited to just a few songs here and there (with the exception of the Linkin Park album). So I’m sad I missed Chevelle’s ‘Hats Off to the Bull’ last year, but glad I found it this year to fill the void of whole albums that are completely awesome.

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2011 Wrap Up

December 31st, 2011 / No Comments » / by Ryan

Well here it is, the last day of 2011 and I haven’t posted all year. Lots of big changes happened this year, which I may or may not write about later. What I wanted to write about now was that, contrary to some previous years, 2011 produced some great music. So here’s my list of the best songs of the year (in no particular order):

Bush – “The Sound of Winter
Blink-182 – “Up All Night“, “After Midnight
Jane’s Addiction – “Irresistible Force
Foster the People – “Helena Beat“, “Don’t Stop (Color On the Walls)
Cage the Elephant – “Aberdeen
The Joy Formidable – “Whirring
AWOLNATION – “Sail“, “Not Your Fault
Foo Fighters – “Rope“, “Walk
Grouplove – “Colours

There were also a few songs that were technically released in 2010, but I didn’t hear them until 2011 so I’ll include them here as well:

Young the Giant – “Cough Syrup
The Naked and Famous – “Punching In a Dream
Middle Class Rut – “New Low

Here’s hoping to more great music in 2012!

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Twitter Apologies

September 10th, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Ryan

Twitter recently changed the way they authenticate users and it caused my Twitter feed on this site to stop updating. All is well now and my most recent tweets are showing so you can catch up on what you missed. Apologies for any inconvenience 😉

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iOS4 on a 3G

July 14th, 2010 / 1 Comment » / by Ryan

I had a semi-long post written up about about running iOS4 on an iPhone 3G, talking about the new features that are both present and missing from the 3G model and other performance related issues. However, after spending a few weeks running it I think it’s safe to save myself all the effort and you all the reading and just say that it sucks.

If Apple removes certain features for performance related reasons, I totally believe and support them in doing so because everyone knows they are all about the user experience. If adding a wallpaper to the home screen placed so much of a strain on the hardware that the feature was removed (which is was) then my opinion is that the OS itself is probably too much for the hardware to handle. I have to say that my personal experience confirms this. I’ve loved my 3G from the beginning, but the last few weeks since the upgrade have been nothing but frustration. Everything has a delay, sometimes a LONG delay like 30 seconds or more. Sometimes it just seems to freeze up completely. You thought Notes was bad before? Trying to tweet when you get interrupted by a text message pop-up? Good luck with that. As I said earlier, Apple is all about user experience, and I’m honestly surprised that they approved iOS4 for the 3G because it’s just terrible. I imagine they did it just to avoid the backlash from the angry masses if they hadn’t.

My official conclusion is that I cannot recommend iOS4 in it’s current state (v4.0) for 3G hardware. I think the OS looks great and has tons of welcome new features, but 3G just doesn’t have the guts to run it. I know that the 3G is hardly the target device for iOS4, but hopefully one of the next iterations will include some performance enhancements that will help improve the experience on the 3G.

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