Year: 2021

Protected: Most insightful chicken on social media. Who is behind Doomberg?

With a bit of luck and a couple of hours of Internet search I've found who's hiding behind the green chicken logo and Doomberg's name on FinTwit.
The whole "investigation" was fun and quite easy to accomplish thanks to small mistake made by Doomberg.
Staying anonymous on the Internet is harder than one might think.
Anyway, I will keep this post password protected for now and see how it goes...

RESULTS: Doomberg, not again!
If you are dumb, then try the password below, if smart, then click the link above.

This is Scootterre!

Back in 2016/2017, I’ve spent 5 months traveling around Asia: China, Japan, but mostly South Asia, like Thailand, Indonesia, and a bunch of other countries.
The two longest stops were the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand, where I’ve stayed for about a month, and Bali, Indonesia, where I’ve spent almost 2 months. (and did a visa run to Australia… a bad idea! 😀 )
Both islands are full of spectacular views and fun things to do, and the most popular mean of transportation on both islands is a scooter.
Continue reading “This is Scootterre!”

Admob OpenFL extension v2

In 2015 I’ve made my first version of Admob OpenFL extension.
At that time it only supported Android, so I was happy to abandon it as soon as “official” extension with Android and iOS support became available: https://lib.haxe.org/p/extension-admob/.
Fast forward to 2021 and it was abandoned as well as no one really updated it for 4+ years…
It was working ok until recently when Apple introduced iOS14 and their App Tracking Transparency: https://developers.google.com/admob/ios/ios14?hl=en.

Well, as old saying goes: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”.
So, here is my new version of Admob OpenFL extension, that supports both Android and iOS and has lots of cool features:
https://github.com/pozirk/extension-admob

It took me around a week to make it work. While Android part was quite easy and straightforward, with iOS part I wanted to climb the walls.
Biggest issue was the speed, or rather lack of it, as I was working on iOS part in virtual machine, and it was slooooow. Any small change required me to rebuild the extension and then rebuild my project to test the change.
On virtual machine this procedure could easily take 20-25 minutes and then if I need another small change, I have to repeat everything all over again.
Anyway, extension is out there and I hope to keep it up to date!

Real price of a smartphone

My old BLU Vivo Air test phone became too old, both physically and “mentally”.
The battery is playing tricks showing 40% in one moment and then dropping to 0% another and Android version is 5.0.2, which is soon will become unsupported even by my own games.
At the moment I still set minSdkVersion to 19 (Android 4.4 KitKat), but targetSdkVersion is already forced by Google to be 30.
Btw, in OpenFL it is done in project.xml file:

<config:android minimum-sdk-version="19" target-sdk-version="30"></config:android>

A neat list of all the Android/API versions can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history.

Continue reading “Real price of a smartphone”

Take me somewhere expensive

By accident, I’ve got involved in lumber, more precisely in lumber stocks, to be exact, one stock.
I can’t already remember why I wanted to buy lumber stock, but I’ve found this nice company Conifex Timber Inc. (TSX:CFF) and what I liked about them was their power plant.
Continue reading “Take me somewhere expensive”

Gambling on interest rates… no more!

Real estate is kind of a national obsession in Canada (like everywhere else). Those, who have already bought the house, feel like they won a lottery, those who haven’t, still dreaming to win.
Both are checking prices and trends regularly.
Interest rates are as low as they can get, but prices went up a lot.
Checking from time to time what’s on sale around me, I can’t stop wondering how prices can be so high.
Anyway, I’m not writing about gambling on real estate today. 🙂
Continue reading “Gambling on interest rates… no more!”

Lady Jane Solitaire and Alhambra Solitaire, weird lags and high CPU usage

I have added 2 new games to All-in-One Solitaire (HTML5 version only for now) and the very next day started receiving complaints about the game being slow…
I have tested the game on all the computers I have, one of them is 6 years old, and the game was working as smoothly as before.
I have a feeling that the problem is because of the latest OpenFL/Lime, as it still has lots of bugs and every update is kind of a gamble, while some bugs are being fixed, others appear. 😥
Thanks to one really nice and skillful player, I came to the conclusion that the game is working slow only on computers with AMD CPU and, maybe, in Chrome browser.
None of my computers have AMD CPU, so I’m not able to 100% confirm this weird bug.
Luckily, I was able to rollback to the older version of OpenFL/Lime.
It will be challenging to release new updates though…

New games are Lady Jane Solitaire and Alhambra Solitaire.
Alhambra is a tricky one, I had to cheat a little to make a winning gameplay video. 😉
Lady Jane Solitaire Alhambra Solitaire

Cromwell Solitaire and Demons & Thieves Solitaire, plus Mahjong updates

Finally I have released updated versions of Solitaire and Mahjong games on all the platforms including iOS.
As I mentioned before, I added more layouts to Mahjong for the total of 200 layouts and added 2 more games to Solitaire: Cromwell Solitaire and Demons & Thieves Solitaire.
I must say Demons & Thieves Solitaire is a tricky one, it is not hard to win, but fairly hard to win fast.
I’m giving 11 minutes to get bonus score, but there aren’t many players who were able to get more than 728 base points so far.

Cromwell Solitaire and Demons & Thieves Solitaire

Cromwell Solitaire Demons and Thieves Solitaire
I have added 2 more games to All-in-One Solitaire: Cromwell Solitaire and Demons & Thieves Solitaire.
While working on the game I have made some modifications to other games and it caused major problem for website users.
The problem with HTML5 version is when browser caches .js files, but doesn’t cache resources like .jpg and .xml.
Whenever I update the game users’ browsers keeps loading old code, but new graphics which completely breaks the game.
Never had this problem with Flash, but they say HTML5 is better anyway…
I need to figure out some simple way to fix that, so if I update something users always load new version.
Telling everyone to clear the cache is not really helpful. 🙁

What was wrong with Flash?

I have never had any problems with Flash Player myself.
But I’ve heard lots of complaints about 0-day vulnerabilities, etc. Of course, no support for mobile browser. Flash Player is not open source.
Maybe, maybe…

Anyway, I’m keeping Flash version of my games on the website as they are still working for me and some diehard players don’t want to switch to HTML5 version.
Moreover I still play some of the games from time to time, like Space Age, Resistance Is Useless and Mad Tanks.

Google License verification extension

I have completely forgot that I have developed and released a little extension for Haxe/OpenFL.
While in the end I’m not using this extension myself, it was working fine at the time of release and should work in the future, unless Google changes something dramatically, as usual.

Extension can be found at Github and installed through haxelib:
https://github.com/HaxeExtension/extension-lvl

DISCLAIMER: The content in this blog represents the opinion of the author. No information here should be used for any purpose except for entertainment.