Science Tony

By McDonald. T |  July 14th 2018   The 80s was a great time for gaming. For a while, gamers had been able to alleviate the boredom with dedicated gaming devices such as Asteroid and Donkey Kong. However, things really got going when gaming consoles like Atari 2600 hit the market. Even so, nothing compared to the new home computers like Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k. These computers not only had tons of games, but also you could program your own software including games.  Sign up to my blog for more fun stuff! The gaming consoles had the advantage of instant loading from a cartridge while the home computers needed to load games from a tape in a tape recorder, which was not always successful. This could take 5 minutes or more and the sound level had to be just right or the game would fail to load. Despite the loading issues, the home computer won out and steadily advanced into the powerful machines we have today. Now that we have our wonder r...

 By McDonald. T | Updated November 28th 2018 Building a website may seem daunting if you are new to web design. The truth is, however, that building your own test website is so easy it will embarrass you! You just need the correct tools to do the job. Brackets and xampp can be used on Mac, Windows or Linux, but in this blog I will focus on Mac. What is a test website? A test site is a site that you can create without the need for a server or a web host. You can create the test site all on your own computer and play around with it until you are happy with it. This is a really good way to learn HTML5 and PHP in a safe environment. 1)  Install Brackets  Brackets is an editor that will allow you to code and test files. Brackets is simple to use and has a nifty little feature, called live view, that allows you to view the code in a web browser as it would look as a webpage. In other words, it translates the code into a webpage. Brackets is free and open...

By McDonald, T . | Date 13th of December 2017 When a human wakes up in the morning, the next thing to happen depends on the needs of that human.  For instance, if hungry, putting on a dressing gown and heading to the fridge is the most likely thing to happen. If the bladder is full, a trip to the toilet will occur before raiding the fridge. Furthermore, most people can perform these tasks independently, but what if the subject is a robot? Writers have written about autonomous robots and androids with super intelligence for decades. With that in mind, how would an autonomous robot achieve true autonomy? Before understanding an autonomous robot's needs, developers must first consider humans needs and second understand the meaning of an autonomous robot then apply human needs to the autonomous robot. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs First, before understanding the needs of autonomous robots, developers must first consider human needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a g...

By McDonald, T . | Date: 6th of December 2017 Almost everybody likes to use the internet for a varied number of reasons. With the increase in disability awareness and the mobile market, every developer needs to think carefully about accessibility from the beginning of the design process. It is a top priority it to consider the needs of accessibility for legal reasons, and because of the mobile market. Accessibility and the law Accessibility needs is a top priority for a developer for legal reasons. Some users will be using assistive technologies to access the internet, for example, screen readers used by people with sight impairments. Subsequently, HTML has attributes in image anchors such as alt and longdesc, which will allow the reeding aloud of a text description of an image or graphic by a screen reader. This is, however, only one example, so it is good practice to involve people with disabilities throughout the design process to get a better understanding of individu...

By McDonald, T. | Date 1st of December 2017 You may have wondered what goes into building a webpage or thought about becoming a web developer yourself. If so, you may have noticed that web developers and technology businesses encourage workers to volunteering in the community because it can be a valuable experience. Can volunteering in a charity shop improve web development understanding if a shop is thought of like a webpage even though volunteering in one will not make anyone a web developer? Is thinking of a webpage like a shop useful? Shops have services going on in the background such as sorting products much as a website will sort data. The back room is unseen by the shopper, yet remains a crucial part of the service much as a server is critical to a webpage. In addition, shops have a window, which displays the services much as a landing page does for a website. Service users must be able to see what the shop has for sale just as a landing page needs to clearly di...

By McDonald, T.   |  Date 21 of November 2017 Sometimes life can leave us with time on our hands and nothing to fill the void. In other cases, a person may just need a chance to get started or restarted in working life, or maybe, like me, you spend all your time in front of a screen coding and studying and simply need a break. In any case, some suitable activity can provide the experiences all people need in order to achieve a feeling of fulfilment. Volunteering is one such activity that can provide much more than people realise. With this in mind, what can someone expect from volunteering? A volunteer can expect a variety of duties and benefits. Duties in the shop A volunteer can expect a variety of activities. The standard model of a charity shop is to have clothing, housewares and book sections with the intension of providing quality second hand goods in order to support a charity financially. Standard duties in a charity shop can vary but mainly involve sor...

By McDonald, T. | Date: 19th of November 2017 In the previous blog, usability was briefly covered. Usability is about ensuring a site is easy and pleasant to use. This blog, briefly covers accessibility. Considering accessibility will increase audience and avoid prosecution, so it is worth adhering too.  Make a site accessible to maximise the audience . You may be excused for thinking that accessibility is the same as usability since the two ideas do overlap. However, while usability is more about using the site, accessibility is more about accessing the site using assistive technologies. Assistive technologies are things such as screen readers, which read everything on the screen and even read allowed a description of an image or graphic. In order to do this the image or graphic must have a description in the html code within the tag for the image. Before I go any further, it would be good to examine disability. If you go to a shop and it has a door ten meters...