In the process of simplifying my tools and respecting my users privacy I came back the the old way of doing website analytics. The access.log from our webserver has most of the data you need and no need to execute any Javascript client side.

I'm using the following command to analyze all the log files with GoAccess (even gzipped) and following the changes of the current access.log in order to have realtime updates.

tail -n 10000 -f access.log | zcat access.log.*.gz | goaccess access.log.1

Idea from: https://benhoyt.com/writings/replacing-google-analytics/

With tools like Ionic or Cordova we have the possibility to create performant multi-platform apps for Android/iOS and the web. But there is a problem.

Building and testing the iOS version of their app without a Mac is nearly impossible, you could use some cloud build services but the debugging options are very limited to nonexistence.

Fortunately there is a solution that doesn't contain buying a new Mac. Just run osx under a virtual machine on your normal computer.

Install osx on a VirtualBox

There are hundrets of tutorials on youtube how to install osx under VirtualBox for linux. I used this one. (keep in mind that you can't necessarily trust the download sources)

The main points todo are :

• Download the osx image
• Install VirtualBox
• Execute the vboxmanage script to make VirtualBox compatible for osx
• Install osx

Now we have a working version of mac osx running. We can install XCode and enjoy the iOS simulator. But if we want to connect a real iPhone device we have to make more changes for the virtual machine to be able to recognize our ios device.

There seems to be a lot of dark magic involved to make the iPhone connection work under a virtual machine but the following 3 steps should help you succeed

Virtualbox extensions

To have usb support for VirtualBox we have to install the VirtualBox extensions. Most people probably use the open source version of VirtualBox via the ubuntu package manager. To install the extensions for this version execute this command (source)

VBOXVERSION=`VBoxManage --version | sed -r 's/([0-9])\.([0-9])\.([0-9]{1,2}).*/\1.\2.\3/'`
wget -q -N "http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/$VBOXVERSION/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-$VBOXVERSION.vbox-extpack"
VBoxManage extpack install --replace Oracle*.vbox-extpack

On Ubuntu 17.04+:

sudo apt install virtualbox-ext-pack

No usb at all?

The first problem you could have is that vbox doesn't have access to your usb devices at all. In this cas just execute this command to add your user to the vboxusers group.

sudo adduser YOURUSER vboxusers

After this modification you might need a restart.

Setting up the USB

In your VirtualBox settings you have to enable a USB controller and then choose the "USB 2.0 (EHCI) Controller". With the other controllers your XCode won't be able to make a connection to the iPhone.

Once you have done all this steps you should be able to connect your iPhone and see it under usb devices in VirtualBox. If not check first if you iPhone appears under your Linux system. I can add from own experience that sometimes just changeing the usb ports seems to help.

I hope this mini tutorial helped you getting started developing iOS apps under Ubuntu/Linux.

Links :

• Install vbox extension under ubuntu
• Resolve usb problems in vbox
• Iphone usb is not connecting to virtualbox

Upgrade to High Sierra 10.3.6

I followed some great articles/forum posts but ran into the following error:

validate_root_image: validating root dmg /macOS Install Data/BaseSyste.dmg

I had some wrong settings in my virtual machine. Verify that your virtual machine has 2 processors active and (probably) USB3 activated. I hope this will not interfere with the iPhone real device debugging but we'll see

• https://raimue.blog/2017/06/09/upgrading-a-vm-from-macos-10-12-sierra-to-macos-10-13-high-sierra-in-virtualbox/comment-page-1/
• https://tobiwashere.de/2017/10/virtualbox-how-to-create-a-macos-high-sierra-vm-to-run-on-a-mac-host-system/
• https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=85631

Last month I bought the HTML5 Engine ImpactJS. It was amazing to see how fast one could develop a small game and without further a due I hereby present you Cold Trails : Click to play

(unfortunately runs way better in chrome)   It was developed with a friend and we spend more or less two weekends  without ever having build a game before. It started basically as a game  where a guy in the woods could cut down trees and the story and gameplay elements were introduced later on. Anyway I'm glad we did it and  finished something (well it’s not finished but we’ll just put it out  there and see what happens. I hope however plays it has fund for some  minutes.

Some credits to the creators of some free game content that we used: sprite sheet based on: http://opengameart.org/content/16x16-town-remix music: http://opengameart.org/content/creepy-forest-f sounds: http://soundbible.com/1507-Chopping-Wood.htmlhttp://soundbible.com/2039-Tree-Fall-Small.htm