Hacker Yet Another Rambling WWDC Predications Post Tomorrow is the opening keynote of Apple's WWDC[1] conference. Two years ago I predicted that Apple would open source Swift, and I was right[2]. Last year my predication was XCode [https://developer.apple.com/xcode/] for iPad. That didn't happen, but Swift Playgrounds [https://www.apple.com/uk/
Hacker When Apple (or Anyone Else) Really Gets a Product Right Being British, I have a story about tea. It goes like this: For my entire life, it had tasted wrong. Not bad, exactly, but not quite right. I tried all different kinds, and just about every brand I could find. I drank it without milk which made it taste a
Hacker The Lady Who Lives in the Tube on Top of The Fridge In our kitchen is a short white cylinder. Inside is an array of microphones, always listening passively. Whenever someone says the magic word it starts actively listening for instructions. This might be to start a timer, it might be to add something to our shopping list, or perhaps to turn
Gym Rat My Gymnastic Bodies Review Previously I talked about getting back on the exercise horse [http://harveynick.com/2017/02/25/getting-back-on-the-exercise-horse/], and how this lead my to following Gymnastic Bodies [https://www.gymnasticbodies.com] as my program. At the end of that post I promised a review of it, and so here it is.
Blogger International Women's Day I'm going to interrupt the regularly scheduled (ish) programming in order to talk about something topical. If you're reading this on the day it's published, today is International Women's Day. In the grander scheme of things, we shouldn't really need to explicitly devote a day to recognising people who make
Gym Rat Getting Back on the Exercise Horse When I resolved to start training again, I had a problem: what sort of program should I follow? After a good eight or nine months of not going to the gym I was pretty damn out of shape. When I wrote my previous [http://harveynick.com/2013/05/10/a-very-rough-guide-to-beginners-barbell-training-programs/
Hacker Building My Shiny New Website Part 3: Tech Stack This will be my last post on building the new implementation of this site. Having previously talked about the choice of platform [http://harveynick.com/2016/10/16/building-my-shiny-new-website-part-1-platform/] and the theme [http://harveynick.com/2017/01/15/building-my-shiny-new-website-part-2-theme/], I’m now going on a quick dive into all of
Blogger Goals for 2017 I don’t really do new years resolutions. They just don’t seem to work for me. I don’t see that there’s anything that special about January 1st. It isn’t even the first day of the year for a reasonable portion of the planet. Expecting to make
Blogger Building my Shiny New Website Part 2: Theme I built the theme of the previous Jekyll based incarnation of this site myself. If I’m entirely honest I made a bit of hash of it. I just hacked the default Jekyll layout around a bit and slotted in some colours I though might look reasonable. They did not,
Hacker My Procedural Landscape Generation Project A while ago I started working on a procedural landscape generation project and then... I stopped. I didn't stop because I was no longer interested in the subject (I assure you I very much am), but because a) my free time got a lot more limited; and b) I'd bitten
Blogger Building my Shiny New Website Part 1: Platform This is a post which has been a long time coming. I’ve been planning it since I started building the new version of this site, which is coming up on over a year ago now. Step one was to choose the platform. Having used Wordpress [https://wordpress.org] before,
Blogger What's Changed? Well, I went quiet again, didn't I? While I've been away it feels like the world changed quite a bit. For starters, from an entirely personal perspective, I moved flats and areas of London. A transaction which completed on the 24th of June, 2016. If this date sounds familiar, that's
Hacker Apple Keynote Live(ish) Blog Since I've never liveblogged anything before, I decided to give it a go with today's Apple WWDC keynote. The follow was written as I watched it. It has been edited for spelling and grammar (and to add a couple of links) but not for content. It might get edited for
Hacker Material Design and iOS Disclaimer: the opinions expressed herein are my own, not those of my employer, and that’s what this post is: opinions. One of the complaints about Google’s iOS apps is that they look like Android Apps. Somewhat obligingly, Jason Snell recently published an article along these lines [http://www.
Blogger Getting Back on the Horse(s) Last year, around August, I fell off two horses, more or less simultaneously. Metaphorical horses, much as I would love to say that failing to straddle two galloping steeds is the reason that I ended up skipping the gym for six months. One of those horses was training, the other
Blogger Why HarveyNick? So. HarveyNick.com is the name of this website. It's also my Twitter handle, and my username or moniker on Hacker News and various other sites. Sometimes it's not available and I end up using something like "TheRealHarveyNick", or I just don't create an account at all (Hello, Reddit). I
Blogger New Blog! Well. This has taken a little while. After trying out just about all of the options I mentioned in a previous post [/2014/04/27/is-it-that-time-again/] I decided that most were still a little on the under baked side. As fun as it can be to be on the bleeding
Blogger Is it Time to Change Blogs Again? So you may have noticed that it's been a little quiet around here as of late. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, I've been stupidly busy with work and the amount of... faff involved with adding a new post using Octopress [http://octopress.org] has been something of
Blogger Some Thoughts on Gamification If you're playing any sort of a game, the question "Am I winning?" is usually quite easy to answer. "Is my score higher than the other guy?" usually covers it (though if you're playing something like chess it might be a little more complicated than that). If you're playing a
Globe Trotter Whilst Not Running in Australia (With Photos!) In throwing up a few pictures of my trip down under in that previous running related post [/2013/04/07/running-the-first-time/], I realised I hadn't really posted much else about that particular trip to the inter webs. I also realised that picking through those photos is a bit of a
Hacker So I made an iPhone App Various things have kept me busy and away from this blog just recently. I've done a bit of traveling (both for business and pleasure), I've discovered Netflix (and Crunchyroll), and, somewhat more productively, I followed through on what started off as my "20% time" project. There is, right now in
That Ad So. There has been a small(ish) ad off to the right hand side of this blog for a couple of months now. It is as small as AdSense [https://www.google.com/adsense] will let me make it, though ideally I'd prefer if it had a size not unlike
Gym Rat Further Watching and Reading This was supposed to go at the end of my last post, but it was running a little long. Basically, here is collection of writings about fitness from around the internet which I've found either useful, thought provoking, or fun. Warning: the blog post features two pictures of women in
Gym Rat Barbell Training Follow Up So: after writing that giant post about the three main beginners programs I read up on while trying to figure out the best way to get myself into some sort of (non round) shape, I thought I'd switch to a topic on which I can confidently talk with some authority:
Geek A (Very) Rough Guide to Beginners' Barbell Training Programs As I promised in my last post [/2013/05/06/do-you-even-lift], I'd now like to talk a bit about the different weight lifting programs I ended up researching. I spent a fairly silly amount of time here, so I'm hoping that you find it useful. I'm going to talk about
