Hacker Smart Watches, Pilots’ Associates, and Travelling Salesmen I can probably be described as a wearable tech true believer. I bought in fairly early and have more or less stuck with it. As a device class it's still in the early stages, I think, but has a lot of potential. After all, humans have been putting
Hacker WWDC Predications Score Card Having made a point of making some WWDC predictions in my last post [http://harveynick.com/2017/06/04/yet-another-rambling-wwdc-predications-post/], it seems only right that I should look back at them after the fact and see how I did. I'd also like to talk about a couple of
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:
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
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 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
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&
Geek Do You Even Lift, Bro? After I arrived in London I decided to take a second stab at Couch to 5k, having abandoned it the first time around [/2013/04/07/running-the-first-time]. The problem now was finding a time and place. At first I tried running in the evenings around Wandsworth Common, conveniently close to
Geek Running, The First Time When I decided to drag myself back on to the fitness wagon, it seemed to me that running was the answer. Getting myself to an actual gym clearly wasn't working, but I lived a short walk from a large and beautiful park (oh The Meadows, how I miss
Geek A Fitness Story During most of university I was in pretty crap shape, but in the second year of my PhD my physical condition got particularly lousy. I caught a bus every morning which left from directly outside my flat and took me directly to the university. I did pretty much no exercise
Blogger New (ish) Year, New (ish) Blog 2011 was an interesting year for me. A lot changed. I turned 30. After 10 years of residency I moved away from Edinburgh, a city I love dearly, and took a job in London. With Google [/blog/tags/google]. As a result, I no longer work with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
Cinephile Who Likes Short Shorts? I think I love almost everything about this short film. That being the case, I'll quit my chin wagging and just get on with showing it: {% include youtube.html video="4drucg1A6Xk" %} Mucho kudos to Dan Trachtenburg, Danielle Rayne, and everyone else envolved. No get back to
Hacker Full Nerd II: Nerd Harder It seems that people really enjoyed my post about the computer history museum [/2011/06/03/in-which-i-go-full-nerd-2]. At the time I wrote it, I was worried that it might constitute just a little bit too much nerd, so I held back on my initial impulse to put in more pictures
Hacker A Different Kind of Tourism If a person were to walk from downtown Mountain View (in so far as Mountain View has a town to be down of) to the Computer History Museum, and then kept going, they might find themselves wandering into Shoreline Business Park. This is where you would find the silicon in
Hacker ...In Which I Go Full Nerd Jet lag is a funny thing. Right now it actually seems to be working in my favour; it's managed to knock a couple of bad habits out of me. Specifically, these happen to be the not entirely unrelated habits of going to bed too late (then making it
Procedural Landscape Generation There Can be Only... Several... As I've previously mentioned, my project (Clockwork Aphid) has been bubbling away in the bearded cauldron that is my head for quite some time. As a result, I have quite a bit I want to say about it. I want to blog about the process of building it
Geek WoW oh WoW Sooner or later, most people go looking for a bit of escapism every once in a while. There's definitely a spectrum of how far people like to escape. Some can't stand anything which steps outside the bounds of the possible, others practically require spaceships and dragons
Geek Location Location Location One of the few things I've missed since abandoning the good ship Windows PC for the Mac... er... Zeppelin (why not?) is magazines. I used to really enjoy reading the PC gaming and hardware mags. Oftentimes they were pitched at about the right level for me. I felt
Geek ...And Another Couple Of Things Something I forgot to mention in my last post was my trying to look at the iPad from a developer's perspective. I talked before about a programming side project that I've had bouncing around in my head for a while. Previously, I mentioned that I wasn&
Geek That iPad thing Originally, right after I got around the watching the keynote presentation which launched the iPad, I was going to write a blog post about how disappointed I was. I thought they'd screwed the pooch and I, for one, was seriously underwhelmed. Needless to say, I didn't
Geek The Goldilocks Dilema Daddy Bear's porridge is too expensive. Baby Bear's porridge is underpowered. Mummy Bear's porridge is just right... but has a monitor in it. Hhhmmm... perhaps I should explain... It's reached that time. My computer is starting to show it's age.
Geek Spending to make... While it's a fairly common and reasonably accurate maxim that you have to spend money to make money, I find myself wondering if the same is true of energy. To reword and disentangle the metaphor: Can you save energy by using energy? Here's a my train
Geek Street Fighter Tutu So I like computer games. This isn't news, really. Not in a hardcore live-to-game type way, more in a general fondness type way. That said, I did, as a youngster in an age before mobile phones, catch a bus to the next town so I could play a
Geek Objects of Desire I haven't blogged in some, so it seemed only natural that I should do the churlish thing and write about items I would like, but do not have, post Christmas. First of all is a pod based coffee maker. When walking through House of Fraiser pre Christmas my
