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The controller for the Samsung Gear VR just debuted the day before, so I got to try it with a game called âA Night Sky.â The game opens to a campsite setting with stacked boulders, a tent, a flickering campfire and the titular sparkling night sky. You use the controller to point and connect the stars to make a constellation, with the constellation coming to life and flying around the scene. I made an owl, a ship and even a dragon! It was a simple game that gave you a lot of help when connecting the stars so that whatever you were pointing at with the controller was more suggestive than precise. Young children would enjoy this free game as it inspires imagination in a peaceful scene.
I found the Gear VR headset cushy but still bulky. Images were very pixelated. I waited 1-1.5 hours in line for a 10 minute demo as they had 7 working headsets at a time.
Virtual Virtual Reality on Google Daydream
For this one they gave out appointment cards so I didnât have to wait in line and simply came back at my appointed time. I chose the game âVirtual Virtual Reality,â which the staff member described as Inception with VR. When the game starts, you meet a robot named Activitude, who explains that you can keep stepping into virtual realities inside virtual realities by putting on VR headsets. You flick the controller with your wrist to let out a line that looks like a fishing rod with a suction cup at the end to grab a virtual headset, and then run your thumb along the touch pad to reel in the headset onto your face.
The controller wasnât working for me, something the staff member attributed to a low battery, so my experience with it was worse than the Gear VRâs controller. The robot gave me a demo on how to grab a virtual headset but after some time flailing around and failing at using the controller, I felt that it got a bit impatient with me and just made the headset fly onto my face, transporting me into another virtual reality. I also failed at grabbing all the flying pieces of toast, but it was still highly entertaining going into all the different virtual worlds. Would definitely recommend for $9 in the Play Store.
I liked the Daydream headset better than the Gear VR as it was made of fabric and was lighter and more comfortable. Instead of a foam cushion, the thinner padding between the headset seemed to be made of breathable mesh. In contrast, the foam cushion on the Gear VR made it look even bulkier. Although the Daydream seemed thicker than the Gear VR, its design was more sleek and aesthetically pleasing overall. Image quality was better.
Hado by Meleap
I saw this 2 vs 2 player game and definitely had to try it! Basically you get to shoot energy balls that look like fireballs from your fist like the famous hadouken move from Dragon Ball Z. Hado is not VR but AR. When you put the headset on, you can see that the players are wearing 4Â âwings.â The goal is to use the armband sensor on your wrist to aim at the wings of the player on the opposing team. You can also put up shields, which I never figured out how to do. My team won, probably because I stopped caring about shields and kept continually shooting at both the opposing players (yeah, Iâm highly competitive).Â
The wait was shorter since 4 people at a time can play but was still about 40 minutes. I believe this was an 80 second game. Hado was produced by Meleap, a Japanese company all the way from Tokyo. There was a surprising number of Japanese people, both exhibitors and attendees.
Things I wished I got to try
There was so much more! I wanted to try the Vive, the Google Tilt Brush and something that looks like putting on a headset and getting inside a bubble ball. Not sure what was going on with the latter, but I saw a guy put on a headset, get inside the bubble ball, and then freak out and get back out. Wish I was able to attend the 360 film making session with Unity.
Ah, I forgot to mention that I also tried out Facebook 360. They had a 360 camera the slightly larger than the size of a Square Reader that you plug into your phoneâs charge port called the Giroptic iO 360 camera. Wasnât too impressed by the image quality. But I saw cameras of all sizes, from the small handheld Ricoh Theta to giant motion sensor cages to this other thing that looked like a Mars rover.
A wide variety of industries which applied VR for practical use was represented too, from VR marketing to live streaming games and events to real estate. I passed by GâAudio, which did 3D audio, and canât even imagine what thatâs like.
I didnât have time for everything as most of the demos and experiences had a long wait time. It never got crowded and there might be only 8 people in front of you, but if each person took about 10 minutes and there was only one headset then you could be waiting for a very long time. Almost a Disneyland-like feel. The AR Easter Egg Hunt with Microsoftâs HoloLens was 1.5-2 hours wait for an 8 minute demo. Worse still was the Oculus Rift with up to a 3 hour wait for a 45 minute game. They said they decided on a longer demo as that particular game just won an award for best VR content.
My friend and I were at VRLA since 10am for the keynote and presentations (which we should have skipped), got into the exhibits when they opened at noon and were pretty pooped by 4pm. We didnât even get to go to any of the workshops. We were expecting food trucks or at least some food vendors but all they had was the venue cafeteria. Some companies were handing out VR headset hygiene masks but most werenât. If you ever go to VRLA, Iâd recommend bringing comfy shoes, water, a packed lunch (or eating before) and your own VR hygiene mask.
I manage company social media accounts and always have to fight the Instagram algorithm every time it changes. There was a sharp decrease in likes and engagement at the beginning of April. Iâm in a few private Instagram marketing groups on Facebook (more useful than Reddit in this case) and many users there noticed it too, so I can surmise that itâs another push to force businesses to pay to promote posts.
From these private Facebook groups, I also learned that some Instagram accounts use automated services to increase their following. I heard about bots that can like, comment, follow and unfollow other accounts on a userâs behalf but didnât know that you can pay for one. The purpose is reach as many accounts as possible in the hope that these accounts will look at your account and perhaps follow or like you back. The most popular of these services is Instagress.
How do you know if an Instagram user is using automated services?
1. An account follows you and then unfollows you the next day. This is usually an account that doesnât share any of the same subject matter in the niche you post and/or is in a completely different country.Â
2. Generic comments on your posts. Can be emojis or something like âLove it!â that can apply to any post.
3. And for the most surefire evidence of all, look at the activity feed of the people you follow. Instagram shows 8 max posts that people like at a time. If they are liking 8 posts every few seconds when you refresh, then they are using automated services. It is impossible for a human to manually tap âlikeâ on that many posts in such short time spans.
Not going to out anyone, but quite a number of social media influencers who are well-known locally that my accounts follow seem to use automated services. Like hell will I pay for Instagress though, so the first thing I did was google âhow to build an Instagram bot.â If you canât beat them, join them, right?
Using an Instagram bot
Found a few ready-made bots in the search results. Instagram also recently changed their API to restrict access to many of their features, so many older Instagram-related apps no longer work. From a hacker board, I settled on InstaBot, which was last updated at least a week ago. Completely free and the dude even wrote instructions on how to install and run it. Nice.
Iâve never written in Python before so I had to download it, making sure it was a version that was tested. Added variables and paths to run commands. Downloaded the code. Located the file and right clicked to edit with IDLE. InstaBot requires your username and password to login and act on your behalf, so just input it in. Some of what InstaBot can do:
1. Set number of posts to like per day.
2. Follow and unfollow a number of users per day.
3. Wait a set number of seconds before unfollowing a followed user.
4. Like posts with certain tags.Â
Itâs a pretty simple bot. Change the numbers to your liking and save. I added a few tags that I used in my last post and ran the bot on my personal account. Hit F5 to run. And voilĂ ! The code worked!
The results
After a few hours, however, I learned of a really big pitfall: I WAS ATTRACTING OTHER BOTS.
I saw a slow increase of likes on that one post, as well as more likes on older posts, possibly netting 15-20% more likes. I also gained about 10-15 followers and a few comments per post. But look: most of these people unfollowed me the next day or few days. Majority of them had nothing to do with food even though that was what I mostly post and I used food-related hashtags for the bot. The comments were also generic and added no value to my posts. The extra likes felt shallow.
You can google more articles discussing if you should use bots or not but I donât think it works for me. My company also decided against automated services because of the risk of getting banned. Bots violate Instagramâs TOS and you can lose your entire account. Went from feeling smart to feeling like I wasted half a day.
Since I was trying to hit up at least one tech meetup a week, I went to a professional workshop for engineers that helps bootcamp coding grads transition to full-time software engineers. I was a little surprised to find that it was hosted in the offices of a sports data company in Little Tokyo. Like literally just a few doors down from my current favorite noodle shop with miso carbonara so mind-blowingly good it makes me want to cry every time I scrape the last of the sauce from the bottom of the bowl.
The workshop went over several different topics. I already heard most of the information about what type of jobs in tech are available and where in LA right now, as well as tools and technologies, so it was really only the interpersonal insights about the company that I found valuable from those sessions. They did mention finding a mentor to guide your development or something like that but at this point it seems like a total stretch goal for me to find tech friends, never mind a tech Yoda. Filed away for later.
I wasnât too interested in the company since they do basketball analytics for the NBA and I usually try to disassociate myself from sports and bro stuff that has to do with sports and ex-boyfriends who are into all manly bro things. But I noticed that they also do AR and VR technology. During the lunch break I asked two of the employees about it since I thought they only did data reports, which have nothing to do with AR and VR.Â
The software engineer explained that they knew the playersâ positions from the data and can thus garner data for AR/VR. Itâs not something the company focuses on and they stumbled upon it accidentally, but I thought that was hella cool. Made a mental note to myself to never underestimate data, no matter how boring it sounds.
The two employees also mentioned a VR expo in LA happening this month. So I guess Iâm going to VRLA! Also Justin Roiland, the co-creator of Rick and Morty, is supposed to be there so Iâm pretty hyped up to go.
Overall Second Spectrum seemed like a cool company to work for with super nice people and it was a good way to meet their employees. I picked up some tidbits of info as well as a lead into AR and VR.Â
// Other notes: I also learned that APIs can be created for internal company use. I thought that you only create APIs for other people to consume.
Responsive design for navbar in Materialize with Angular
Iâm working on improving an old project called eggplantify by adding responsive design to fit different-sized screens. The navigation bar particularly flummoxed me since whenever I resized the browser window the brand logo, website title and navigation buttons seemed to moved around randomly, overlap other elements or otherwise look very ugly.
I struggled on my own for a few days since I thought, hey, CSS is pretty danged easy and I can probably figure it out on my own or google Stack Overflow questions. How hard can it be? But after a few late nights and lots of crying, I looked at the docs on the Materialize framework that makes the navbar responsive by minimizing the navigation buttons into a menu button called a hamburger icon that consists of three short horizontal lines.Â
Iâve seen it before but never knew it had a name. The hamburger icon then allows you to pop out a sliding sidebar navigation from the left side of the screen. For certain smaller screen sizes, the hamburger icon also moves to the upper-left hand corner of the screen and the website title and brand logo becomes center-aligned instead of left-aligned. Pretty neat!
My old navigation buttons in index.ejs looked something like this:
<ul class="right">
<li ng-show="navCtrl.isLoggedIn()"><a id="new-photo" ui-sref="newPhoto"><image src="/images/new-photo.png"></a></li>
 <li ng-show="navCtrl.isLoggedIn()"><a id="gallery" ui-sref="photos"><image src="/images/gallery.png"></a></li>
 <li ng-hide="navCtrl.isLoggedIn()"><a class="dropdown-button" data-activates="logged-out-dropdown"><image src="/images/logged-out.png"></a></li>
 <li ng-show="navCtrl.isLoggedIn()"><a class="dropdown-button" data-activates="logged-in-dropdown"><image src="/images/logged-in.png"></a></li>
</ul>
I added one line of code above that for the hamburger icon:
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I recently went to a Meetup hosted by JavaScript LA on the future of JavaScript by speaker Ben Junya. ES6 has many new features but Junya talked about the ones that were the most practical that he actually uses at his job as an Android Developer.
ES6 is the newest version of JavaScript. These are my notes on a few of the features from Junyaâs presentation that I have used or have seen around. You can see examples in the full presentation linked below.
1. âletâ and âconstâ
âVarâ variables can be redefined or updated. If declared in a function is available only inside the function is is function scoped. If not, globally scoped. Problem: might accidentally be used twice
âLetâ and âconstâ variables are block scoped, or scoped to the nearest set of curly brackets to only be used inside that block
Compared to âletâ, âconstâ variables are declared once and cannot be updated
2. Arrow functions
One-line mini functions that makes code more concise and simplifies function scoping and the this keyword
Bypass having to type the function keyword, return keyword (itâs implicit in arrow functions), and curly brackets
3. Spread operators
Create a new array with the existing one being part of it using three dots (...)
Can be used on anything that is iterable
Shorter and more succinct
4. Array.from()
Convert array-like objects to a true array
Even nicer than spread operators
5. Array.includes()
Checks if an array includes a certain element, returning true or false
6. Importing and exporting modules
No built-in support for Javascript modules
Import drops âvarâ and ârequireâ syntax
Export drops âmodule.exportsâ syntax
7. Callbacks and promises
Avoid callback hell
Before, used callbacks which are blocks of code that run in response to events in asynchronous functions. Lots of nested functions in nested functions
Now, store information whether those events have happened yet in objects called promises
Much less code  and reads line by line like a normal function
Ref and more resources for further reading:
Ben Junya: Practical ES6
Wes Bos: How let and const are scoped in JavaScript
Sitepont: ES6 Arrow Functions: The New Fat & Concise Syntax in JavaScript
Rainsoft: How three dots changed JavaScript
MDN: Spread syntax
David Walsh: Array.From
MDN: Array.prototype.includes()
James K Nelson: Introduction to ES6 Promises â The Four Functions You Need To Avoid Callback Hell
Revisited an old project of mine called The Pinterest Project, a close replica of the popular image-sharing website using Ruby on Rails. I havenât used Rails in a while and didnât add favicons until later projects so Iâm going back to add finishing touches for a more polished and professional look. Adding favicons in Rails is little different compared to how Iâve been adding them to my MEAN Stack apps.
1. Generate favicon. I use Favic-o-Matic but any favicon generator will do.
2. Add this to the <head></head> section of your layouts. This was in my application.html.erb file.
<%= favicon_link_tag 'favicon.ico' %>
3. Place the favicon.ico image in /app/assets/images/ if you are using the asset pipeline, and in /public/images/ if you are not. If you are using the asset pipeline and deploying on Heroku like I am, donât forget to run this command:
rake assets:precompile
4. Lastly, add the following code into your application_controller.rb file:
config.relative_url_root = ""
Ref: Stack Overflow. Iâm using Rails 4 with no problems. Commit and push! If you still donât see the favicon, you may need to refresh your cache.
Developer Hacks Apple Watch with to Play Pokemon Game Boy
(đˇ Gabriel O'Flaherty-Chan)
Like most 20-somethings who first saw Pikachuâs cute, smiling mug on TV during their childhood in the â90s and 2000s, Iâm obsessed with anything Pokemon. I also love technology and new gadgets, but not the absurd point of owning supersized smartphones like the iPhone 6s Plus or an iPad (another supersized smartphone). Which is why when I saw that someone adapted a Game Boy emulator to run on the Apple Watch specifically to play Pokemon Yellow, I hooted âThatâs ridiculous!â while simultaneously forking the open source code on GitHub to look at later.
An emulator is a software program that enables a computer system (called the host) to behave like another computer system (called the guest). It translates code for the host system to run like the guest system. âGiovanniâ applies this concept to enable games made for the Nintendo Game Boy Color to be played on a compact device on your wrist made by a completely different company and in a different programming language. Â Â
The battery drain and too small screen for quality game play are obvious issues. Gabriel O'Flaherty-Chan, the developer, also cites problems in his README such as âcrashes or graphical glitchesâ. Despite this, the reception has been mostly positive on discussion websites such as Reddit given Pokemonâs popularity. O'Flaherty-Chan developed Giovanni because he was âdisappointed by the lack of contentâ (from his blog) for the Apple Watch. He highlights a need for content to keep users engaged on new devices, something that the recently released Nintendo Switch may face soon.
I now have a blog to keep track of things Holly knows. All the things I learned from classes, code camp, tutorials or on the job are like random bits of knowledge randomly floating around in my head. I like to wave at them as they pass by.
But seriously, itâs time to get organized. This will just be a personal blog covering my professional interests including: code, tech and design in hopes of starting a career in web development. Stretch goals would be discussing my current job with topics in marketing and social media.
</HELLO>
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