Niklas Saers
Featured Post

$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

August 11, 2011 • iOS

Tapptics

I thought I'd give Tapptics a little plug. I love writing nice applications for the iPhone, but taking on a graphics artist for pet projects is sometimes a bit hard to justify. But a while ago I read about Tapptics and saw their site and bookmarked the article so I could come back to it when I had a project where I needed some graphics. That time has come, so I signed up and it's just a bucket full of resources, both nice tutorials and guides, and a lot of excellent graphics to use in my app. There were, however, two glyphs that I wanted that weren't there, but no sooner had I enquired about them, had Jen whipped them up: two gorgeous glyphs that will have a prominent position in my app. The price is well worth it, so go check Jen's site out today. If you're an app developer and need nice graphics, you'll love it! :-)

July 31, 2011 • iOS

Converting OCUnit output to something Jenkins can understand

I'm working on setting up my continuous integration system to work with Xcode. I'm using Jenkins on a separate Mac Mini, and I found this great article by Christian Hedin where he introduces his ocunit2junit.rb utility that converts the output of OCUnit to something looking like JUnit, thus making it easier for Jenkins to pick integrate with the build.

July 30, 2011 • Technology

The Sims 3 in Lion

I don't play that many games, but one that I've enjoyed for a number of years has been The Sims. Now that Lion is out and we can talk about it, I found the answer about what to do when it fails with an Unknown Error: Go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete the com.transgaming.* files and the "The Sims 3 Preferences" directory. This will make the game run again.

June 27, 2011 • Technology

Minus points for the 2011 iMac

Some of you might have thought that I'm perhaps a bit too happy about the iMac, and of course too cheap to get a Mac Pro. (Yes, I'm just as excited as anyone to see what the new Pro will be like now that Thunderbolt is a great bus-alternative, but that's for another topic) Let me dedicate this post to the minus points for the iMac.

June 26, 2011 • Technology

Replacing iMac 2011 memory

Back when the new iMacs were released in may 2011 I ordered one with 4GB RAM, expecting to replace them with 32GB. However, getting four 8GB blocks turned out to be incredibly hard, and very expensive, so I settled for 4x4GB blocks for a total of 16GB RAM 1333Mhz SO-DIMM RAM. Two sets of 2x4GB from Crucial was very inexpensive (about 800 DKK plus tax), and they arrived a couple of days before the iMac.

May 7, 2011 • Technology

Relocating your svn repository in-flight

Once upon a time I used a beanstalk repository in http mode. By that I mean I had it checked out from a http:// address, rather than the usual svn+ssh:// because Beanstalk didn't support svn+ssh:// . Since then, no-one had touched the project, but today I wanted to do some changes. I went ahead to make them, and before committing I did a "svn up" just in case. It told me:

May 3, 2011 • Technology

32GB RAM for new Mid-2011 iMacs

So today they released the new iMac. Still no reviews so I have no clue whether I was right or wrong about the chipset. So I've started looking into another pet topic of mine: RAM. I really would like these machines to take a bucket-load of RAM, but Apple still limits themselves to 16GB.

May 2, 2011 • Technology

vmc push\'ing Java/Maven/Spring projects

I'm just getting started with Cloud Foundry. So I grabbed Springs samples and compiled hello-spring-mongodb doing "mvn package" and then "vmc push -no-start". That got me:

May 1, 2011 • Photography

Digital film

Wow, I remember back in 1998, me and another photo enthusiast were discussing DSLRs vs digital film. I was holding out on DSLRs until there was a camera that could fit my lenses and was as good as the Canon 500N I had at the time. Turned out I'd be waiting a while, the first one I got (matched the requirements!) was the Canon 20D. Anyway, my friend showed a links on Slashdot and a few papers on "Digital Film", and I had to agree: that was probably a much better fit for the time.