Blog

I've lived in three countries in my life, and I travel on a regular basis. I wouldn't go as far as to say that we should have global open borders, but there are ways that the life of the new breed of global entrepreneurs could be easier. One of those is registering a business. Registering a business outside of your country of residence has historically been reserved for those who have big businesses or those up to no good (or both). I would guess that many of you reading this live in one count...

Versioning large files can be problematic with distributed version control systems like Git. Git Large File Storage (or LFS) is a new, open-source extension to Git that aims to improve handling of large files.

You've had and developed an idea, got it started and hit the ground running with people involved, projects happening and hopefully some outcomes. _Now what happens?_ After the initial adrenalin and enthusiasm wears off, just keeping going, growing and knowing what to do next can be one of the most difficult stages in any not-for-profits lifecycle. ## Reviewing where you're at At regular intervals you should take time to evaluate and review your organisation and those working within it. This do...

When a project is created in Android Studio it contains several auto-generated files containing skeleton code for our project. In this video we look at what function these files perform and when and why we would edit them.

Android Studio is now the official IDE for Android development. In this video we look at how to download and install it, tour the interface and look at some of the tools and features it offers.

We have had requests from many of you about the potential of running Crate on Azure cloud hosting and/or Windows. Whilst this was always possible with some exploration, we now have official documentation.

The main reason for a lack of small posts on the progress of Chip Shop is that behind the scenes we have been working on some large stumbling blocks to push the game towards play testing. We wanted to focus on getting those completed over all else. ## New and Improved Cards We have added a lot of [new cards](https://chipshopgame.com/cards/) but also spent time fleshing out the existing ones with flavour text, images, legal information and removing as much extraneous text as possible. I have always wanted the game to be as un-r...

In this video we'll look at understanding the differences between Android devices, system versions and the components that comprise the Android Operating System.

Powerpoint and Keynote are powerful, but also a dead-end for your data. I shows-off the growing power and flexibility of open source presentation tools.

A well functioning Crate cluster relies on its nodes being able to utilize service discovery to become aware of each other. Until now the options available have been multicast, and when this is unavailable, specifying unicast hosts. To help with Unicast host discovery we are pleased to announce support for discovery via DNS and the AWS EC2 API. [Read more](ttps://crate.io/blog/crate-unicast-host-discovery-dns-aws/)

Sorry for the lack of updates in a while. There have been two main reasons for this, other commitments kept me busy and I've been reworking a lot of the technology stack that powers Chip Shop. I'd like to tell you more about updates to the later. I have been a [Drupal](https://drupal.org) developer for many years. I have contributed to core, to documentation, run meetups and code sprints and developed almost exclusively in Drupal for over seven years. Therefore when it came to developing web applications for my own...

In June Crate.IO was chosen by the Austrian Federal Chamber of Commerce (WKO) to compete in the Born Global Champion challenge and received the reward. The Chamber of Commerce thereby officially recognizes Crate.IO for its "Outstanding merits in the internationalization of the Austrian economy". [Read more](https://crate.io/blog/born-global-champion/)

One of the best things about being an open source community is the unexpected contributions that appear. One of our development team was following an issue for our PHP PDO driver when he noticed that a participant in the issue mentioned they had created a driver for Laravel, a popular PHP framework. [Read more] ([https://crate.io/blog/crate-driver-available-for-laravel/](https://crate.io/blog/crate-driver-available-for-laravel/))

[Read more](/)

Sorry for the lack of updates, I have been traveling with work the past few weeks. However, I have managed to find the time to start adding accessories to the [product cards](/cards). Accessories are smaller products that can be attached to other products, even other players' products. They represent things like mice, keyboards and a plethora of others. Generally they are small cost and small return, but let you take advantage of other products for cheap wins. There are more to come, I am currently res...

I have been wanting to read this as part of my research into dystopian fiction for my One day the World Ended project and I have mixed opinions on this book. I loved the concept and it's scarily close. Whilst reading some of the book I was in NYC and it seemed even closer to reality. However, the pacing of the book was odd, it had a lot of padding and then the 'dramatic conclusion' is about twenty pages. Some of the writing is a bit trashy to, comparisons to Brave New World are not deserved....

Apache Mesos is a fantastic tool for abstracting CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual). This lets you program against your datacenter like it's a single pool of resources. Crate's integration with Mesos enables simple management across any number of Crate instances you may require without needing explicit knowledge on the quantity and their specifications.

Over the weekend thanks to [Berlin Games Week](https://www.gamesweekberlin.com/) I attended the <a href="https://www.computerspielemuseum.de/" target="_blank">Berlin Computer Spiele Museum</a> for free. It was a small exhibition but great research for Chip Shop and the visit combined with several other events during the week inspired me to work on some of the product cards on Sunday. Interestingly this included working on cards for several products that were either failures or were never released commercially. I wondered how the...

Last week I presented [Chip Shop](https://chipshopgame.com) at an event here in Berlin. I was woefully unprepared and just had my laptop, showing a few screens and telling people about the idea. Despite that, I got some really good feedback on the game idea, the mechanics and story behind the game. It motivated me to get more done quickly and get some physical prototypes as soon as possible. People also suggested events and places I could test and promote the game at when I am ready, good to know that there is a healthy...

This week I have added rules to the '[Playing the Game](/manual/playing-game)' section of the manual to cover the following: - How and when products pass from being private in a player's factory to being public in the general playing area. - What happens when players run out of certain resources. I added a [game concept to cover accessories](/content/accessory) (keyboards, mice etc). Finally, I am speaking at the Berlin Game Scene's <a href="https://www.meetup.com/BerlinGameScene/events/220863773/" target="_blank">Talk & Play event next...

One of the main perils of the modern world is there is far too much to distract us. So many interesting blog posts to read, events to attend, crap-we-don't-need to buy and other assorted diamonds from the internet. I'm sure several days into the working week we look at our browser and find 20+ tabs open, all eating up memory and so cluttered you can't even remember what is what anymore. So we dutifully bookmark them and close them all, resolute in the knowledge that one day we will revisit and...

I spent today drawing together the disparate parts of the game manual and concepts into something more cohesive and readable, it can be found [here](/manual). I used the Drupal module <a href="https://drupal.org/project/menu_block" target="_blank">Menu Block</a> so that the manual can be organised as pages and sub pages (with associated menu links) and the structure then shows correctly. This will enable me to add and edit more in the future and everything will fit together nicely.

The VoIPstudio Telecom system is a unique cloud system running on a large amount of servers in a wide variety of locations. Each data center has two basic roles: storing data in real-time and backup for other locations in the system. This results in a lot of data that has to be processed around the globe. Retrieving data in this environment is complex and fetching results can be time consuming. [Read more](https://crate.io/blog/how-voipstudio-searches-multiple-cloud-systems-with-crate/)

Docker is currently one of the most spoken about tech projects right now and it's hard to believe that it's only two years old. As part of the celebrations, the Docker team decided to host more than a dozen open-source-a-thon parties around the World. Not only to help people learn how to contribute to the project, but also donating $50 for every contribution to the Oceanic Society. In our first blog post as part of the celebrations, we attended the party in Berlin. The event was held at Soundc...

One Day the World Ended is designed to be an open source and collaborative work of fiction. Most of this will come later when I have more material ready, but <a href="https://github.com/ChrisChinchilla/One-Day-the-World-Ended-Jekyll" target="_blank">the code of the website is on GitHub</a> and you're more than free to issue pull requests if you want to. At the moment there's one part of the work where you can contribute and I welcome your ideas, this is for the "<a href="https://onedaytheworld...

Bill Kunkell helped create "Electronic Games Magazine" in 1981, the first magazine dedicated to video games. It seemed a great research resource for Chip Shop to get some anecdotes and atmosphere for the era. Being born in 1981, I remember the 80s, but not in any great detail, my first real memory being the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Hence I am aware of the hedonism of the era, but sometimes reading about it is still a surprise. It would be hard to imagine computer journalists of the p...

In my continued efforts to read as mazy works of dystopian fiction as possible, next on my list was Battle Royale. On a side note, are there many works of purely utopian fiction? Or would that not sell? Back to the east Asian republic. Set in the non-too-distant future, a large Asian empire now rules over an undefined area, full of social control, aggression and suppression. Once a term a class of school children are chosen to compete in a battle to the death on an abandoned island with no hope...

A few small updates in this blog post, however, they have a large impact on the game. ## Regional Focus As much as it pains me (being a Sega fan boy), this initial edition of the game is US only and thus, there will be no Nintendo, Sega or other Japanese products and personalities represented. They will of course be added at a later date, but I need to focus for now. ## Game concepts In an effort to make the game as accessible as possible for non-English speakers and allow for easier translat...

The mobile monolith that is Mobile World Congress is over for another year. I was lucky enough to get hold of a press pass and decided to spend the week in Barcelona. Soaking up the warmer weather, joining the 90,000 other attendees and preparing for the bombardment of marketing mumbo jumbo to unearth some gems for developers.

I picked this book up as part of a book bundle somewhere, but escapes me with one right now. It's timing was perfect as research for the development of Chip Shop as it covers the history of video games from 1970 up to the year 2000. The writing quality is average, which is typical of this style of book written by an (obvious) enthusiast. Each year gets its own chapter and occasionally reads like a collection of essays as topics are sometimes repeated in different chapters. In terms of content...