The first game from my own company (Retroburn) is now set to be released to Steam on March 17th. The store page is live and it should soon be available for pre-order:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/374780/

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I'm using SDL2 at the base of my own engine to help with cross platform compatibility at the lowest level. We're also using it at work for Z Steel Soldiers (and other games) and we had numerous reports of strange things happening which all sounded like DPI scaling issues to me.

On some machines our games would launch and appear to be clipped off-screen. So you'd only see the top left portion of the screen and couldn't select any buttons or elements that were off screen. The other issue was that the full screen would render, but the mouse would be trapped in the top left portion.

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A few years ago I was introduced to Visual Assist, a productivity tool for Visual Studio users that adds some cool features and a whole load of nice keyboard shortcuts which help you write code faster and make project navigation a breeze.

One of the most common shortcut keys I use is Shift+Alt+O (Open file in solution), however if the code / text editor doesn't have focus, you'll end up seeing a warning popup (or if you have web developer tools installed, it will try to open a website).

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I recently started having some problems with my Windows 7 installation on my mid-2010 iMac so decided it was time for a refresh and full update.

I backed up my files, booted in to OS X, repartitioned the drive, updated to Yosemite and proceeded to run the Bootcamp Assistant to install Windows 8.1 (with update).

That's when I noticed a problem. I was not given the option to create a bootable USB installer. While my iMac does contain a SuperDrive I don't really have any DVD-Rs lying round these days so wanted to use one of my fast USB sticks to install Windows from.

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See that cool looking banner there on the left showing that awesome Tron inspired light cycle game Positron? Well I've been working on the game in my spare time for the past two years and It's finally nearing release!

I could really use your help in spreading the word about the upcoming PC demo which will be released on February 1st 2014.

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I'm somewhat disappointed in not getting my game Positron released in 2013 having had a fully working prototype build since the start of the year, but a lot has happened and through work I've released a few games which I'm very proud of. I thought it'd be nice to think back over the events of the past year as I thought it was cool to see Shahid Ahmad do the same last year on his personal blog.

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A whole load of people I know received their OUYAs last week and I had my fingers crossed that mine would be arriving soon too. Just had the email from OUYA to say it's now reached their 'distribution center' and I'll be notified when it's picked up for delivery (so could still be a few weeks before I get it).

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It's been a while since I posted a movie review and I recently took my Daughter Willow to see Iron Man 3 so figured I'd write up my thoughts on the film.

Please note there will be spoilers in this review but I'll try not and spoil anything major for those who want to read the review before seeing the movie.

So, first of all, I loved the whole movie. It had the right mix of action, drama, and comedy we've come to expect from the Iron Man and Marvel movies over the past few years.

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I see hundreds of developers these days using the 'Indie' label and personally I feel they're creating confusion by grouping themselves with much more established studios with much higher production values. It's something I've been wanting to comment on for a while and here I'll state my personal opinion and I ask those reading to comment if you agree or disagree with what I have to say.

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This whole process has annoyed me so much that I decided I'd make my first proper blog post of the year about it;

The Kids' PC buggered up about a month or two ago and having had a quick look at it I came to the conclusion that one of the sticks of RAM was bad (Damien kept turning the PC on and off one day as it wouldn't boot).

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This year I'm really pushing my Indie Games Startup (Retroburn Game Studios) and I'm planning on attending all of the networking events and conferences that I can.

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As anyone involved in Email Marketing should know, even the most legitimate mailers can sometimes hit Spam Traps. Many people however don't understand what a spam trap is, and that's because there are two different types of trap which operate differently:

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Yesterday I took part in Pedal For Pounds (North), a 50 mile charity bike ride in support of Yorkshire Cancer Research. Four of my colleagues (Deric, Mark, Paul and Tim) also took part in the ride and it was good fun, but it was also very hard work.

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Now that we've identified the domain parts of all the MX servers we're hitting (from Part One), we can now move on to identify each domain which matches one of these groups of MX servers.

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If you've ever seen DSNs saying 'temporarily deferred' or 'too many recipients' it's likely you're sending too many emails to a particular MX server or ISP. You should make use of PowerMTA's backoff mode if you see these errors to slow down your sending speeds to a point which the ISP is willing to accept.

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I've been meaning for some time now to start sharing some of my PowerMTA work and share some of my experience working within the field of Email Deliverability but it keeps me so busy I have very little time to write anything up!

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I've been using Mozilla Thunderbird for quite some time now as my email client of choice (much preferred over Outlook and Windows Live Mail) and one thing that's slightly annoyed me is there seems to be no way to re-arrange the order of the email accounts shown in the left panel.

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It was last May that I made a post about my Blackmagic Intensity Pro and I thought it was about time I wrote another!

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I've had Moon for some time but knew it probably wasn't the kind of film my wife would enjoy so held off watching it until now.

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I've now had my new Windows Phone for a full week and thought I'd share my thoughts on the new operating system and the phone itself (HTC HD7).

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Yesterday I wrote a review of the original Tron movie and today my Wife and I went to see Tron Legacy. I'll write my review of the movie in two parts since this is my first time ever watching a 3D movie so I'll briefly say what I thought of the 3D and then what I thought of the movie.

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Tomorrow me and my Wife are going to see Tron Legacy at the cinema so I thought it was a good time to watch the original again as I haven't seen it in years.

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My Son loves Ben 10 and we must've bought him about 15 of the little action figures now aswell as the Omnitrix (actually two of them) and other stuff.

He must've seen every episode a few times each but still keeps asking me what certain characters are called. I don't take as much notice of it as he does so I don't know most of them. Trying to find lists of the characters (with easy to recognise images) was pretty hard so I've decided to post my own list. The list below shows every character Ben has transformed into using the Omnitrix or the Ultimatrix.

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Last night my Wife and I went to see Inception. I can pretty safely say it is the best movie we've seen this year!

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We've had this one for a while but hadn't got round to watching it until tonight. My Dad has told me he didn't think much of it and that it wasn't worth watching but I thought considering the range of well known actors that are in the movie, I'd give it a shot.

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Just watched Kick Ass with my Wife and thought I may aswell start posting my movie reviews which I've wanted to do for a very long time. The hope is that over the years I'll keep a record of the great (and not so great) movies that I've seen.

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A few weeks ago we were having internet problems at work, I'd done a fresh install of Windows 7 just a week before and Google Chrome kept timing out while trying to find websites.

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Last night I sat down for two hours with my Wife Laura and together we watched the final episode of Lost after watching the full six seasons together over the past two years.

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Just a little update here as I did manage to get my Intensity Pro working last week after some fiddling.

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I was searching for some information last night on how I would go about connecting an Xbox 360 to a 27" iMac and after hours of searching I found a solution.

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I found myself searching for a way to export .obj files from Maya 2011 this week and found very little information regarding the subject. It turns out the functionality is inbuilt but just hidden away!

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My Brother's band Roadkill played their first gig in a while lastnight and I have to say they were pretty tight!

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For those of you out there who are Twitter users I have three accounts on there which I try to regularly keep updated (ok, not so much yet but I do plan to update them more often).

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Well, here's a quick catch up after my first post regarding the Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro.

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Over the last few weeks I've been looking around at what options are available when wanting to record video from the Xbox 360. I came to the same conclusion as many other Indie developers I know. The two most reasonable options (cost-wise) are the Matrox MXO2 and the Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro.

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This must be about my twentieth attempt at a personal site for blogging and general information, let's hope I can keep up with the updates this time and make it useful for more than a handful of people.

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