For the last 4 years I’ve been using a Keurig B70 K-Cup coffee maker. I always had mixed feelings about it. I loved the speed & convenience. It was wonderful to be able to drop in a K-Cup and push a button for my first cup of coffee in the morning without a lot of fuss. On the other hand, I didn’t like the expense & waste of K-Cups, and it the “my K-Cup” with ground coffee made really weak coffee.
Recently the Keurig started to become more temperamental, often taking as long as an hour to heat up, until it finally died completely. Rather than getting another Keurig or a different pod-based machine to replace it, I got The Scoop from Hamilton Beach.
The Scoop is a single cup coffee maker that uses regular ground coffee rather than pods. It has only two buttons, “regular” & “bold” and will brew various cup sizes up to a travel mug in about 2 minutes. I find it to be about as fast & convenient as the Keurig and the coffee quality can be excellent, depending on the beans & grind.
I haven’t had a chance to write any blog posts last week while I was at WWDC, but I had a great time and learned a lot. This may have been the most important WWDC in recent years.
While last year’s WWDC focused primarily on iOS, this year’s conference was about equally split between iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion. Both systems share some major enhancements including iCloud storage and Objective C runtime improvements that make memory management easier and a lot faster. I can’t write about much of what I saw, since everything except the keynote is under NDA. I will say that I’m running iOS 5 on my iPad and Lion on my MacBook Air and I’m very happy with both and find them stable enough for regular use. I haven’t installed iOS 5 on my iPhone, though.
On Sunday I went on the annual bus Pilgrimage to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. As always, the only thing we were able to see was the Apple company store. I took advantage of it to pick up a USB Ethernet adapter for my MacBook Air, since large downloads aren’t allowed over wireless connections during WWDC. I was pleasantly surprised by how fast the MacBook Air USB adapter is and how it just works without any fuss, unlike USB ethernet adapters I’ve used in the past.
WWDC isn’t all work. There are also a few fun events, starting with Tuesday night’s Apple Design Awards and Stump The Experts. One highlight of the conference is always the Thursday night WWDC Bash. Since the Bash moved from Apple’s campus in previous years to Yerba Buena Garden across from Moscone Center, Apple has been getting major bands to perform at the Bash. In previous years they had Ozomotli, Barenaked Ladies, Cake, and OK Go. This year they got Michael Franti & Spearhead for a great show.
The conference ended at noon on Friday, so I took advantage of the rest of the day to enjoy San Francisco. I walked from Moscone to the Ferry Building & took lots of pictures, which you can see here. I only brought my Canon G12, since I didn’t feel like lugging the D90. I’m very happy with the results, both for still photos & videos.
MacMegasite & parts of the Removr site are down due to server problems. I’ve put it a support request with DreamHost and hopefully it will be resolved soon.
Some background: I had my sites split between two virtual private servers, one running Apache and the other running Nginx. I found that Nginx is much less reliable and not much faster than Apache. In particular, under heavy load the PHP process sometimes died, giving Bad Gateway errors.
To improve the reliability, I moved the sites that were on the Nginx server to the Apache server. Normally the move completes without problems & maybe a few minutes of disruption, but not in this case. After several hours, the server configuration & DNS still hasn’t been properly updated.
Once the sites are back up, I will remove the Nginx server and allocate the additional resources to the Apache server.
Update: There was a network config problem, which DreamHost fixed.
My resubmitted 1.3.1 has been approved and is now ready for sale. This version features 100 levels with 4 new hidden achievements in game center. It now adds levels created with our Level Editor to the built-in levels, unlike previous versions which used a single level database that could be edited. Levels are added using file sharing in iTunes.
A new way to explore Flickr. Use it to find the photography you like using the simple idea that people whose work you like, probably like stuff you'll like. You start with a set of pictures – if you authenticate, it'll use 20 of your last 100 favorites – otherwise it'll start with somebody's favorites. Click any picture to load more. Don't like what that person likes? Scroll back and click a different picture you like. It's that simple.
