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.
It is curious how the economy is described bad all over the place, yet the tech sector is growing and growing. The mobile phone app business is exploding, and Google today announced a 33% jump in revenue to $9.72 billion. This disconnect has been going on for a while, and doesn't seem to have much of an end. Tech just isn't stopping to watch governments that overspend struggle or bankers who made arrogant bets sweat.
To quote Jan Eggum: "Kor e alle heltane" (where are all our heroes, for you non-norwegians). Dennis Ritchie passed away today. That is Richie as in &R in K&R C, or The Book. Without Dennis, I'd probably not known my good friend Dag-Erling. I'd probably be writing Pascal. I'd probably given up on computing after having led the DemOS project in assembler and Pascal. Dag-Erling would not have been a FreeBSD committer. I would not have written my thesis about the FreeBSD project. There would be no Mac OS X, or iPhone. At least not the way we know it. There would be no /dev.
Looking through the page source for iCloud.com I couldn't but help how much SC was all over the place. That rang a bell. Apple has been helping out the SproutCore project before, so could it be that iCloud is based on Sprout Core? I bet it is 
Time to put in that work to learn SproutCore that I had planned on doing a few months ago.
Dear Steve,
you have shown us that we don't understand what we think we understand, and must redo what we think is done, in order to go forward. You've tought us not to accept mediocracy, not from ourselves and not from the world around us. Strive for passionate perfection, every day, with love. Love for what we do and those that surround us.
Finally, after having sent mails to people high up at Apple, signing petitions, joining groups and blogging about it for many years, iTunes movie rental and purchase is coming to Scandinavia, possibly the world. That is great, we have been missing it for ages. Thank you, Apple, for allowing us to send you money 
Like many other people, I'm looking forward to trying out this service, especially the rental service.
I've used many version control systems, but this week has been the first time I've used Mercurial for anything more than a bit of testing. It looks good to me, so I read a bit around to see how people are using it in their projects, and I came accross Lajos Kamocsay's post about how he includes Mercurials branch and revision information in his Xcode projects that I think deserves a shout-out.
When updating an Address Book record in Cocoa, I read that I had modify the record using ABRecordSetValue(). But it wouldn't change. Even if I called ABAddressBookSave() afterwards, it just wouldn't change. It turns out I had to call ABAddressBookAddRecord() also. There is no ABAddressBookUpdateRecord(), but it turns out that the ABAddressBookAddRecord function does the same. I expected that it would give me a duplicate record, but it does not, it updates the existing record. Glad to have that sorted out, I hope this helps you as well.
I'm sorry if this is all over the net today, but I really find this a great info graphic, by Noodlor. I link directly to his graphic:
So Google's admitted that Android is not open source. Some parts are, some parts are not. That's the same with iOS. Many parts of iOS are from open source projects (I'll mention cups, the printer stack on many Linux systems, that is very much supported by Apple, even though it's GPL). Heck, even Microsoft Windows has components from open source projects (the ftp client being my favourite example). To me, it's not so much about these projects being open source, as what do they give back to the open source projects.
I hate instant messaging. Not because I don't like talking to people, but because there are so many networks I have to be part of, and once I'm signed up I have to use this program or that program, which means I have to have a ton of programs running, or I can wait a while and get a program that does a half decent job at implementing many different networks and then have a few more programs running to open what that program doesn't support. So I log off, and never log back in again. I would really like to use IM, I would really like to be more available that way, but it's such a hassle.