While reading on Hacker News about Spidermonkey performance, I saw commenters talking about switching from Chrome to Firefox and Opera. One commenter described Opera as Chrome without Google, which sounded interesting to me. I hadn’t tried Opera in a few years and I like to cycle through browsers occasionally to see what I’m missing. So I downloaded Opera 25 on my MacBook and gave it a try.

I upgraded from Mavericks to Yosemite on my MacBook tonight and thought I’d share some of the fixes I had to apply to get my development environment set up again. I’ll continue to update this post as I discover new things that aren’t quite working the same as before.

I made another thing! This time, I made my first game. Well, the first game I’ve ever finished (I’ll get back to you someday Mahjong). It’s a JavaScript web implementation of the game Blicblock that your Sims play in The Sims 4. I built it using AngularJS, my new loves Yeoman and Bower, and Bootstrap. You can try it out in your web browser and view or contribute to the source code on Github.

I always lag behind Jon when it comes to trying out build tools or frameworks that are supposed to make my programming life easier. He tells me about cool new things he’s using, and I say “yeah, that looks cool, but I just want to be productive, so I’ll do things they way I’ve been doing them.” Then eventually I get a chance and I try out the cool thing and Jon was right, it’s totally great. That happened for me recently with Yeoman and Bower.

Recently, I had need to change the value of a select menu in an iframe from the outer page containing the iframe. There was a change event listener that had been added in the iframe’s JavaScript:

I recently ordered a Fitbit Zip because I missed the Moves app but didn’t want to return to them now that they’ve been acquired by Facebook. I also wanted something I could carry around more easily on my person than my phone. Sure, I take my phone almost everywhere I go, but I have to remember to grab it if I’m going to go downstairs or otherwise take a quick walk. With a Fitbit, my hope was to always wear it without even having to think about it.

Recently, I became interested in Google Music All Access and decided to try it. I had already used my free month back when the service first became available, so this time around I had to shell out $10/month. I’m used to that price, though, having paid the same for Rdio and Spotify before it. I went ahead and cancelled my Rdio subscription because I only need one streaming service at a time.

I found SimCity Plus on sale on Origin for $20 last week. I checked on Reddit if it was worth it and was told that with the inclusion of the Cities of Tomorrow expansion, which came with the Plus version, it was. I bought it and was super excited to try it because I’ve been really enjoying Tropico 4 and wanted to experience the new SimCity.

I was excited to see the Jekyll turns 2.0.0 blog post announcing built-in support for CoffeeScript and SASS. I updated 3till7 and my portfolio to use the latest Jekyll. This in turn meant I did away with my custom plugins for compiling CoffeeScript and LESS, and moved from LESS to SASS. Here on 3till7, I stopped using the Jekyll Asset Pipeline to compile my assets and produce a combined, minified file. Using imports in my .scss files was sufficient for me CSS-wise, and my one CoffeeScript file is small enough that I don’t care it isn’t minified. I actually haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Jekyll 2 supports JavaScript minification like you can do with your SASS.

It was the middle of the night. I was surrounded by four shirtless men bearing torches and deadpan expressions. One of them threw raw chicken breasts at me and told me to eat them, or they’d kill me. Maybe they’re being nice I thought. Maybe they can see I’m hungry and they’re trying to save me. So I ate a chicken breast and immediately began vomiting–I had been poisoned!

The VCR gem is really handy for testing calls to external web services, such as AWS commands made through Fog. You make your call for real once and VCR records a new “cassette” of the request and response. Subsequent calls use the cassette, so VCR plays back the response it recorded instead of actually reaching out and touching the external service. It’s good for testing how your own program makes requests and how it handles the responses it gets back. I recently had a need for similar functionality but with command line tools. Namely, the ec2-cmd script for importing an instance into Amazon.

Over the course of a little less than a week, I migrated this blog from WordPress 3.8 to Jekyll. I used WordPress for years, probably since 2005 or 2006 when I switched away from Movable Type. I finally decided I wanted something more lightweight than WordPress, and in particular I wanted a blog that would load faster. Jekyll gives me both of those. The part that took the longest to migrate was customizing the new layout, based on Dbyll, and formatting the code examples in my posts.

Last week, T-Mobile announced they’d pay your Early Termination Fee to switch from another carrier to T-Mobile. I had been thinking about trying out an Android phone for a while, and the Nexus was my top pick. I couldn’t have a Nexus on Verizon because of GSM/CDMA crap, and I wasn’t about to go back to AT&T since I left them in disgust for Verizon a year back. The T-Mobile deal was my ticket off of Verizon, which was a decent carrier if expensive, and into the Android world. The next day, I went out and swapped my iPhone 4S for a Nexus 5. I’ve been keeping notes in Evernote on my new phone about how the experiences differ.