Author: Aaron Nelsen

  • Hijinks Inc. Minecraft Alpha Multiplayer Server

    As you might have heard, Minecraft has caught our collective eyes here at Hijinks Inc. so much so, that not only have myself, Fred and Jared bought the game, but we’ve also decided to launch a multiplayer server available to a select few.

    Want in? Just send us an email aaron@hijinksinc.com

    Like the software, our server is in alpha. Basically that means it’s an old MacBook sitting behind my TV in my living room, which also means it doesn’t have a static IP, we’re currently getting around that by using an easy to remember subdomain name, and if the IP address of the server changes we’ll just update where the domain is being pointed. In short, we don’t expect to have much downtime, but you’ve been warned.

  • Five Things Android Could Learn from iOS

    These aren’t ordered in any particular manor, just a random list of five things that iOS does better than Android 2.2.

    1. Style. Android is nice looking, but a little utilitarian in places. Whereas iOS is sleek and stylish to the very end.

    2. App badges. Androids task bar notifications are great, but badges are handy for those lower priority apps, not to mention inbox counts.

    3. Centralized settings.  I really like the fact that iOS lets app developers include a settings page inside of Settings.app.

    4. Parental controls. Android seems to be lacking even basic options for parental controls.

    5. Remote wipe. Yes,  they have APIs to enable applications to do this, but let’s see a native app ship with the OS.

  • iPad 3G Data Usage for September

    Despite my iPad crashing and needing to be restored, I managed to use 18.3GBs of data for the month of September. Bringing my total data usage for the year to 84.3GBs, I’m feeling pretty positive about breaking 100GBs total by the end of the year.

    It will be interesting to see if my data usage decreases now that I’m also using the Droid X, which depending on data speeds I will most likely be using to tether to my laptop instead of the iPad.

  • Twitter is Down – Employees less productive than normal

    Twitter is fail whaling left and right, but I doubt that’s causing workers to become more productive. In fact, I would argue that those Twitter obsessed members of your staff are spending more time refreshing their browser/client/mobile app to get back to their social media life line than they would normally lose by Tweeting.

    Just a thought.



    Update: 16 minute outage or so, not terrible. Unless you’re a social media website with millions of users.

  • Mobile Browser Shootout

    Everyone is entitled to their own favorite smartphone, but I think we all can agree that some phones just do certain things better. Today, let’s take a quick look at how various mobile browsers fair in the Acid3 test.

    Default browsers for the platforms:

    Android 2.2

    93/100
    No screenshot, because I haven’t rooted my Droid X yet. I know, I know, I fail at life…

    webOS 1.4.2

    92/100

    webOS_1.4.2_acid3.png

    webOS 2.0 (developer beta)

    91/100
    Wait… the performance of the browser actually went down with a new build of the OS?

    webOS_2.0_acid3.png

    iOS (tested 3.1.3 through 4.2)

    100/100

    Third-party browsers:

    Skyfire 2.3 Beta (Android)

    93/100

    Opera Mini 5.1.21126 (Android)

    97/100

    Opera Mini 5.0.019802 (iOS)

    97/100