Running Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds on Linux

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on · · 5 comments · 450 words · read ~2,857 times.

OMG! Good Old Games has the amazing Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds available for a mere £3.99. That was the game which introduced me & my wife to collaborative gameplay, so I was incredibly excited to see it available again. This is a brief guide to getting the game working on Linux - including multiplayer and […]

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Working With Twitter's Embedded Videos

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on · · 500 words · read ~817 times.

Twitter has just launched embedded videos in Tweets. How can we, as app designers, present them to our users? You can now shoot, edit and share video on Twitter. Capture life's most moving moments from your perspective. pic.twitter.com/31JoMS50ha — Twitter (@Twitter) January 27, 2015 So, what options do we have? First of all, let's take […]

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BlackBerry's "App Neutrality" isn't as crazy as it sounds

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on · · 3 comments · 650 words · read ~600 times.

BlackBerry have drawn scorn from the technology world with their calls for Network Neutrality to apply to app developers. The CEO thinks that NetFlix - and others - should be forced to provide apps for BlackBerry's minority platform. Is he serious? It sounds like an insane and bureaucratic solution to BlackBerry's woes - but I'm […]

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How To Stop Twitter Auto Linking URLs

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on · · 1 comment · 250 words · read ~4,097 times.

Whenever you send a Tweet with a URL, Twitter automatically replaces the URL with a "t.co" link. This means that long links only count for 23 characters against Twitter's 140 character limit. Mostly, that's great - but sometimes it's not. Inspired by this StackOverflow question, I decided to see if it was possible to write […]

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Star Wars in Navajo

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on · · 700 words · read ~228 times.

There's something poetic about watching a film you know intimately being performed in another language. Like many children of my generation, I don't remember a time before Star Wars. My birthday cakes were sloppy green Jabba The Hutts, my brother always got the "baddie" toys and I got the "goodies", every cardboard tube became a […]

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Writing A "Choose Your Own Adventure" Story On Twitter

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on · · 13 comments · 1,300 words · read ~14,767 times.

I've spent the last few days writing a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) game on Twitter. This blog post briefly discusses how I did it - and what pitfalls I discovered when creating it. But, first, if you want to play.... You should probably be asleep. I've created a "Choose You Own Adventure" on Twitter. […]

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New Year - New Dabr

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on · · 11 comments · 450 words · read ~1,004 times.

Way back in 2008, David Carrington created Dabr - a really simple mobile website for accessing Twitter. Fact of the month: @dabr is now 5 years old! Born in August 2008 when @davidcarrington was inspired by @whatleydude. — Dabr (@dabr) September 16, 2013 In those days, Twitter had a kick-arse API and were happy for […]

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Why Does Twitter Think Facebook is Swedish?

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on · · 1 comment · 450 words · read ~1,186 times.

I've nothing against the Swedes. Lovely people. Sweden is the third-largest country in the European Union by area. But I'm not from there. Neither, as far as I am aware, is Facebook. But Twitter seems to think so. When I share a link to Twitter on Facebook, this (sometimes) happens. And sometimes, I get this […]

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