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Welcome to Nicky Thomas Media

Welcome, my name is Nicky Thomas and I am a Computing undergraduate studying BSc(hons) Computing and Information Systems. This site (www.NickyThomas.net) acts as a personal portfolio where I am able to demonstrate my knowledge and skills to a range of prospectus employers.

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2013 Summer Project

Nicky Thomas

Date: 06 May 2013

Well last summer I set my own Blog & Content Management System as a summer project while learning PHP/MySQL. It is that time of year again, the last week of University is finally here, 2 programming assignments (Data-Centric Windows Programming & Application Design and Development) both due in on Friday (I should really make a start on them today..) and I want to try something non-web based this year, I have decided to become an Android Developer for the summer and create my old game CSR (Crazy Swansea Roads) in to an Android App and become a multi-millionaire by September (One can be hopeful right?)


Project planning will begin on Monday 13th of May and it should be finished by the end of the month. I then will be jetting off to Spain for two weeks to enjoy a bit, well a lot of sunshine before returning and getting stuck in to the designs and programming side of things.

(P.S. Wish me luck for this weeks assignments!)

My New Passport

Nicky Thomas

Date: 29 Apr 2013

Not exactly my actual passport, but on Friday I had a few issues with my Mac, the internal hard drive got corrupt on a disk repair utility and long story short, I done terrible practice of not making regular back-ups of my work, I normally do manual back-ups every week or so to my Dropbox folder or Memory Stick, luckily with the help of my friend Kash who let be borrow is SATA to USB lead and of course his time, we managed to recovery the data and back it up to my brand new WD 1TB My Passport for Mac External Hard Drive - I have never been a fan of them before, but 1TB is future proof for the next few years for myself, I cannot see myself actually ever needing to buy another one in the next 10 years (Although people have spoken too soon in the past and were proven wrong) but for the price, £70.00 I thought it was a steal and it is pretty compact



iPhone 4S, WD My Passport, Samsung Galaxy Note 2



It is not as bulky as it looks in the picture, the rubber feet on the bottom gives some distance from the Note 2

It measures at 111mm in Length, 82mm Wide and 15mm thick weighing 0.14kg, so it is pretty lightweight!

DaisyDisk

Nicky Thomas

Date: 24 Apr 2013

 

I came across DaisyDisk a few months ago when I was sorting out my files and I was curious to where 100GB of disk space had disappeared to,  on first use of DaisyDisk I was amazed at the fact it mapped out my entire hard drive in to a nice visual graph allowing me to navigate through different segments to view file sizes and contents.

I recently used DaisyDisk again today, more disk space seemed to be disappearing, I know I have a lot of photos, music and videos but I could not understand how I could only have 59GB left of my 250GB Hard-drive, I would expect at least 100GB as I don’t really story anything else. I was amazed how much my hard-drive was filled with useless installation files, duplicates of music, videos and photos, un-used applications and drivers so I started to clear them up and I managed to retrieve a whopping 73GB of storage space which was taken up by useless files and applications. DaisyDisk is free to use but you can buy a license for currently $11.94 (I think it was about £8.04 in todays PayPal rate) and the licence allows you to easily drag and drop segments of the hard-drive you do not use and delete them without the fuss of going in to the folder and manually deleting it, it is a lazy way of doing it but it is a lot easier so it is worth the few pounds to make my life easier and to free up some space on my forever aging Mid-2010 Macbook (I am starting to think I should of opted for the 1TB Hard-drive instead).

I have never actually used so much hard-drive space in the last 14 years, I think the most I have ever used is around 100GB (minus any games installed which could take it to around 200GB) so I really was in a state of shock when I saw the space left on the hard-drive.

Facebook Home: A response Zuckerberg & Co was probably not expecting

nicky thomas

Date: 13 Apr 2013


Facebook Home has been with us for a little under 24 hours now and already the Internet is filled with critical reviews of Facebooks new product Home. In the official announcement at the start of the month they seemingly had everything perfect and created a lot of hype with this beautiful new cover screen but in reality it is absolutely ugly unless your friends-list is full of professional photographers.

 

Not only do posts from friends show up but annoyingly, page spam also clutter what is supposed to be one of the most social interfaces to date.

 


 

It is not surprising that the Home App has an average market rating of 2.5 stars with over 900 one-star ratings

 


 

 

The seemingly fluid responsive app which was demonstrated to us at the press launch has a lot of realistic issues, one of the most annoying things about this is, the Facebook Home Wrapper makes using your own applications a lot harder and uglier.

 


 

The once beautiful Android UI has been replaced with a dark iOS style menu and another alternate menu, which cramps all of the devices apps in to one list.

 

Some user comments from the Play Store

 “No widgets, kinda clunky, and petty much just Facebook with access to your apps drawer. Meh, an unimpressive launcher compared to most others.” - Jeremy Noah

 

“This app adds nothing that I can't get from the regular Facebook app AND it takes away everything I already love about my Android phone and the care I've taken to set it up. Uninstalled.” - Rickie Friedberg

 

Not everyone is negative about this new app from Facebook

I'm surprised at how well developed this launcher is! I really don't understand how it's got such a low rating! Great job Fb team! The only option I would like to see is the ability to disable double tap to like. - Bryan Edens

 

Conclusion is, try it, you’ve got nothing to lose and only you will be able to decide whether you personally like it or not but personally for me, looking at my phone and seeing a random friend grinning at me is not for me.

Amazing what is stored on the internet

Nicky Thomas

Date: 31 Mar 2013

I honestly completely forgot about this, I created it back in 2007 as a fan-site for the Swans, was just doing some general 'research' on Google and I spotted the link, got my curious.. What other sites of mine have been archived online?




My first website dates back to 2002< - At the time I used to play on RuneScape quite a bit and formed a Clan with my step-brother Nathan Loosemore and we created the Master Assassins Clan Page, previously a site did exist before Master Assassins but it seems there is no evidence of it.

7th Feb 2002



28th March 2002


Web Design and Development has always been an enjoyable passion for myself, possibly have hundreds of site concepts stored while I was doing my Lost-Pixels design stuff a few years back.

The Web has come a long way since the early days, proud to say that I was there.

© Nicky Thomas 2013

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