2017 was an exciting year for virtual reality. The Oculus and SteamVR ecosystems grew immensely, and for many people, 2017 was the year virtual reality was more than a fleeting dream. From the December 2017 Steam Hardware & Software survey, here are some fun stats about VR adoption in 2017: 0.34% of all Steam users own a VR headset. 47.26% of that 0.34% are Vive owners; 46.…
The Windows 10 Tablet Experience in 2017
I've owned an HP Stream 7 tablet for a while. It was released on September 29th, 2014 and even back then, it was scraping the bottom of the performance charts. It was released running Windows 8.1 with Bing which was Microsoft's first real (polished) and substantial push into the tablet world, to mixed success. But somehow it's still worth talking about over 3 years later, and that's pretty remarkable.…
The importance of net neutrality
You might have heard about "net neutrality" on the news recently. In case you are not sure what net neutrality is, in a nutshell, it's the idea that from the perspective of your Internet provider (Comcast, CenturyLink, Cox or Verizon, for example), all of your data is the same. They are just arbitrary series of zeroes and ones, and it doesn't matter what the content of the data…
HardWar: The Future Is Greedy
HardWar: The Future Is Greedy is a 1998 PC game created by The Software Refinery and published by Gremlin Interactive. It's still one of my favorite games to date, and I'd like to share it with the world.…
JWT Authentication with micro
These past few days, I've been working on two NPM modules. They are micro-http-router and micro-http-router-jwt. The former, is a router library for micro that lets you more clearly define your microservice's routes. The latter is a middleware library for the router that allows you to protect your endpoints with JWT authentication. Today, I'll be showing you how to wire it all together to make a simple microservice that generates…
Introducing micro-http-router
Hot damn! For the first time, I've uploaded some code that I thought was worth sharing with the world. But first, some background on micro. micro micro is a tiny Node.js HTTP API library designed for microservices. In English, that means it's a really small, basic HTTP API that focuses on speed, size, and simplicity. For another project that I can't yet talk about, the team and I have…
IBM's LoopBack is a massive headache
I spent a few days trying to write up an example tutorial for using LoopBack with MySQL. I scrapped it. Everything was going fine until I realized the project that the example tutorial set out to help create had wildly inaccurate query results. It worked great if you were just grabbing a single set of data from a single table, but if you needed any related data it was just…
12" MacBook: A year in review
I received an email from Best Buy this morning. It said that last year, on 8/24, I bought my 12" MacBook. I thought, well, now that I've had a good amount of time with a computer that was introduced with a less than enthusiastic response, I'd write up my thoughts on the machine.…