25 Feb 2015

Double or Nothing

Double or Nothing

I often run out of space on my MacBook. It’s one of the second generation Airs, from 2010, the entry-level model. It came with a 120GB drive, which seemed a bit small at the time, and has looked increasingly tiny as I’ve added Eclipse and Xcode and other development stuff over the years. I’ve recently moved […]

8 Feb 2015

Musings on the Functional High Ground

Musings on the Functional High Ground

Both my Macs are quite elderly right now. While they’re still powerful enough for most tasks I put them to, I’m starting to bump into issues just because of their age. For example, Intel don’t seem to be too bothered about supporting Core 2 Duo chips in HAXM any more, which is stopping my Android […]

19 Dec 2014

Review Corner: Lumsing Portable Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker

Review Corner: Lumsing Portable Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker

What’s bright green and surprisingly loud? No, this *is* still a tech blog, not a Kermit the Frog fan site. So the answer is the Lumsing Portable Waterproof Bluetooth Speaker. As you’ll remember, I recently invested in an Altec Lansing Life Jacket speaker, having seen its virtues extolled on The Wirecutter. It’s a great gadget, but […]

10 Dec 2014

A Quick Hack to Quote Swift Strings in a Playground

A Quick Hack to Quote Swift Strings in a Playground

Tonight, André Daniel asked a good question on Stack Overflow: does Swift have a “heredoc”-like syntax for saying, “no, really, these characters are exactly what I want in my string literal.” Unfortunately, the answer is “no”. The same is true of Objective C. Previously I’ve worked around this limitation by putting my strings into string […]

6 Nov 2014

PSA: The UE Mini Boom Bluetooth Speaker

PSA: The UE Mini Boom Bluetooth Speaker

This is not a review, but more of a public service announcement. If you want a review of Logitech’s “Ultimate Ears” Mini Boom portable bluetooth speaker, you should go read The Wirecutter’s excellent review, which is what convinced me to try it. I just wanted to acknowledge here that their review is spot on — this thing is […]