Category: Nerd Fun

  • Quick Thoughts Apple Watch Sport, AppleTV, Magic Trackpad 2, iPad Pro

    This year I had a lot of Apple product to buy. Other than buying a new iPhone every couple of years the rest of my Apple gear didn’t need updating. iMac, MacBooks, and iPads got a little faster, a little thinner, and a little more expensive but not so much that I really needed break…

  • Four Tips for Xcode Storyboard Users

    Apple’s Xcode Storyboard is both your best friend and your worst enemy when it comes to developing state-of-the-art iOS, Mac OS X, tvOS, and watchOS apps. Sometimes, what would be really hard, like associating a function with a gesture is quick and easy. Sometimes, what should be easy, like toggling a property,  requires hunting down…

  • Fun with Core Graphics and Swift Part 2

    Hey, you have 10 minuets, don’t you? Then you can add pinch and rotate gestures to our fake-genigraphics app. I didn’t realize it would be this easy. But sometimes Apple’s developer tools engineering team does something amazing–and gesture recognizers are super amazing. A good way to start is to read the UIGestureRecognizer Tutorial on Ray…

  • Fun with Core Graphics and Swift

    A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… I was a computer graphics artist. Specifically I was a Genigraphics console operator. I worked the night shift creating illustrations and slides with vector graphics for big corporations. This was the early 1980s and fast, cheap personal computers with color graphics had not quite been…

  • The Secret to Swift is Enums

    I’ve found the CS193P (Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift) iTuneU class really helpful in wrapping my old Objective-C head around Apple’s new Swift programming language. Yes, I know we’re at iOS9 but the fundamentals of the class are still relevant and coaxing the code to compile in iOS 9/Swift 2.0 is a fun little…

  • Lisp Cons Cell and List Cheat Sheet

      A diagram of a nested linked-list and how it is structured in Lisp with Con Cells, Symbols, Pointers, and our old friends CAR and CDR. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  • Upcoming Important Holidays (Now that Nerds Rule)

    Mark your calendars so that you can send an eCard to your favorite hacker, startup co-founder, or sys admin! March 14 – Pi Day – Celebration of everyone’s fav irrational number! March 25 – Tolkien Reading Day – Commemoration of the fall of Sauron (where did I put that ring?) April 25 – DNA day…

  • H@PPY N3W Y3@2 2015!

    My Resolutions for 2015 Contribute to an open source project Write a mobile app every month Master VIM, GIT, and Make Read all of Focus’ suggested computer science papers at least once 🙂 Write ALL the tests first! Roar! Buy and read books printed on paper! I’ll post weekly updates!

  • Surface Pro 3: Quick Status Update

    I’ve been using the Surface Pro 3 all  week and I continue to find ways to integrate it into my daily routine and overcome minor obstacles. Apple Magic Mouse and Wireless Keyboard. I have some unused Apple bluetooth peripherals lying around the house and I wanted to see how they paired with the Surface Pro…

  • This Page Intentionally Left Blank

                                            (Yeah, I’ve been meaning to post an intentionally left blank page for some time now. Whenever I see one my mind spins in a little mental loop: The page is blank. But the page is…