NSConference 5 Video Pack

Yesterday, I purchased the NSConference 5 Video Pack which are the 31 sessions of the NSConf held in Leichester last month.
At $150 this is not just a great way to support this conference but comes in at about $5 a session – quite a bargain.

On the first day I’ve already gone through the following seven sessions:

1. Scotty’s Whisky Opening Keynote (25 min) to set the tone
2. Alan Cannistraro’s Art of Shipping inspired by the Lessons of Steve (33 min)
3. Emily Toop’s Rise and Fall of a Mobile Start-up (22 min)
4. Maxim Zaks’ Don’t Do Agile, Be Agile (15 min Blitz Talk)
5. iOS Tools at Flipboard with none other than Evan Doll (48 mins)
6. Handling the Press with Chris Phin of the UK’s MacFormat and Tap! Magazines (27 mins)
7. Thriving in the App Store with Jury (1 hour and 6 mins)

These are a mix of technical, business, and philosophical.
With 24 more sessions I’ll need to pace myself and have this hold me over until WWDC.

Netflix on Ubuntu

Besides my Mac Mini, 11″ MacBook Air, and 15″ Retina MacBook Pro my dark secret is that my ASUS X401A workhorse laptop and Dell Inspiron 620 i5 desktop run Lubuntu and Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit respectively.  Up until now I could do it all but one: Netflix.  Sure I have VirtualBox running a Win7 Ultimate instance but this always felt dirty.  Well, no more.  Finally, today, I was able to get Netflix HD running on both and with only three terminal commands (easy) and no emulator to speak of (well, technically its a package that runs on Wine with a Windows build of FireFox but you hardly notice it – they made it look like a native app).

Read on to find out how. Continue reading

Customer Service: 90’s Style

After a solid week of coding with a prototype phase and integrate phase cycle [prototype the feature in a new app and then integrate it into the larger app knocking off items of my to-do list] I thought a good break would be to get and build a new work table.  There was no other choice for me than the $99 Ikea Bjorkudden table.

First, I should say that this was a pleasure to build.  Second, it is a perfect size and is completely solid.  I would highly recommend the product.  Now it had been some time since I have been to an Ikea.  This was my first time at the Brooklyn Ikea as I previously used to go to the Long Island one.  But the Brooklyn location shaved probably an hour off the commute.  My rosy recollection of Ikea was one of awesomeness – and maybe in the 90’s this was the epitome of customer service.  But in the 10’s now with a decade of Apple Store and even Best Buy store experiences the bar has been raised exponentially and my nostalgic trip to Ikea quickly turned frustrating. Continue reading