Niklas Saers
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$362 and nothing to show for it: inside the SeeAir Kickstarter scam

In March 2023, I backed the SeeAir Tankless Dive System on Kickstarter. Compact, battery-powered underwater breathing gadget. Polished renders, a slick video, spec sheets that looked legit. $362 for the dive unit and a couple accessories. Seemed fair.

Recent Writing

March 23, 2008 • Technology

Google Data for Cocoa/iPhone

According to iPhone Atlas, Google has pushed out a new release of its GData Objective-C Client Library that can be used with the iPhone SDK. Yay for Google! :-) Check it out! For my last job I used Google Spreadsheets and Google Documents quite a bit, and it's great being able to integrate it. Making a little word processor with synchronization to GDocs should be fairly trivial now. :-)

March 23, 2008 • Technology

Getting info on private Cocoa frameworks

[class-dump][1] is a great tool for getting information about how private frameworks work that you may want to use. For example, iPhotoAccess.framework gave among other classes the following:
`
@interface Base64 : NSObject
{
}

March 14, 2008 • Technology

SQLite for iPhone SDK

After asking on the MacRumors forums I was pointed back to FMDB that I had looked at a couple of days ago. FMDB is a Cocoa wrapper for SQLite3. I had a look at it, and after my initial difficulties, I found that I was trying a way to complicated way to use it for my iPhone applications. To add FMDB, simply do the following:

March 11, 2008 • Technology

Mono on iPhone

Way cool, a composer/musician/LDAP-developer has made Mono run on iPhone. Jailbreaked, by the look of it, looking forward to seeing it compile with the official iPhone SDK as well and a Mono Touch library. :-)

March 9, 2008 • Technology

iPhone SDK questions and comments

So, two days of implementing ideas, trying stuff out, reading discussions, documentation and watching videos have passed since the iPhone SDK was launched. My dayjob has become developing for the platform, which is great. It's a fun platform to work with and developing for it is quick. I'm really looking forward to Apple delivering those certificates soon so I can try it out on the iPod Touch (no iPhone in Denmark yet).

March 7, 2008 • Technology

iPod Touch development

After yesterdays iPhone SDK release, my boss agreed that we should spend some time making a client for our apps with it and got me an iPod touch to work with. Good stuff. :-) The SDK and tutorials seem very good. Strange thing that many of the samples don't run in the Aspen Simulator. Especially since I need a certificate to be able to deploy them on the iPod, and that certificate is right now not available outside the US. I didn't expect to need a certificate to develop, I thought that was just for publishing on iTunes. So not being able to deploy those samples on a device and not being able to run them on the simluator, I'm stuck with guessing. I hope that is soon resolved as developing for it is good fun. :-)

February 28, 2008 • Technology

Webkit and Webkit/Safari on Windows

I have been using Webkit nightly for the past few weeks. I was not planning on using it much, just trying it out, but it's so fast that without really intending to, I've stopped using Firefox. I never used Safari much because I like Firefox both speed- and feature-wise, but now I'm probably Webkit only. Until something better comes along, of course. Naturally, I've been wanting to use it at work, on the Windows Server 2003 R2 servers that I'm developing on. To start of with something safe, I tried out Safari while installing a Sharepoint server. It crashed when only it and the OS was installed. Jikes. On close inspection, Safari only claims to be XP and Vista compatible, but installed without a problem on WS2003R2. Replacing it with webkit was no hit either, both crashed when entering wikipedia.org in the address bar. Having fully installed the server, none of them run without crashing. So I guess it really is XP or Vista only on the Windows platform.

February 27, 2008 • Work

Setup visual studio for sharepoint development

A food obsessed IT developer writes about setting up visual studio to develop for sharepoint without having sharepoint installed on the development computer. Nice instructions and saved me quite a bit of time. :-)

February 15, 2008 • Technology

PSF -> JPG converting

FixPicture is a nice little site that helped me with converting a PSF file (ArcSoft PhotoStudio format) to JPG. I had received this file as an attachment by a user who couldn't know this was a nonstandard format, and since I didn't have any software that could read it (as far as I know), this site was very useful. :-)

February 13, 2008 • Technology

Airtunes is back

Macrumors reports that AppleTV Take Two includes airtunes support! Yay! Finally some light in this dark tunnel. And here I was thinking that Apple had abandoned the technology after leaving it out of new Airports. I'm looking forward to hearing just what it will do. :-) Stream? Play back? Both ways? Bridge?