Pbur's Adventures

The life and times of Patrick Burleson

Category Archives: Computers

Committed

Posted on by Patrick

Today, my friend Justin Williams released a great new developer tool called Committed. It’s an OS X application that uses Notification Center to let you know when new commits have been pushed to a GitHub repository. It’s only $5 on the App Store. Go buy it!

WWDC Night of Meat Results

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I haven’t written about this before, but a friend of mine Steve Streza and I have been organizing a yearly event during Apple’s developer conference called the WWDC Night of Meat. This year we made it a charity fundraiser. It’s taken me far too long to gather the final tally and make the donation, but […]

NSConference 2012

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Back in March, I had the opportunity to attend NSConference in Reading, England. Scotty, Dave, Claire and their team have put together a great show from venue to the speaker lineup to the food. One of things that’s great about NSConference is that it’s held a ways out of town at a country club style […]

Watch Out For Counterfeit Mophie Juice Pack Cases

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Recently, I made a disastrous mistake with my Mophie Juice Pack Plus by partially submerging it in some water. This of course destroyed it and with only a couple of weeks until WWDC, I needed to get a replacement pronto. I jumped on Amazon and noticed the Mophie was selling for $65, which was an […]

Steve Jobs: 1955-2011

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Yesterday one of my heroes, Steve Jobs, died. For reasons I’m still trying to understand, when I learned of his death, I immediately had tears in my eyes. Tears for a man I had never met. Steve’s vision and his company’s products are the reason I have a career at all. From programming on my […]

WWDC 2009

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Apologies for the lack of posts. Work and life have been keeping me busy. One of the things that kept me busy was going to Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. I’ve written up a little bit about it over on my Cocoa blog, CocoaDevNation.

MoneyWell

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Ever since I switched back to the Mac, I’ve been trying to find the “right” financial management software to replace Microsoft Money 2000. I’ve tried Quicken For Mac, iBank, Cha-Ching, Moneydance and Horizon. They all fell short in some aspect of what I needed. Either they were missing scheduled payments, balance forecasting, or just had […]

New Camera

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About 2 months or so ago, I was able to pickup what I consider to be my first “real” camera: a used Canon Rebel XTi with a 1.4 50mm fixed lens. So far, I’ve been blown away by how awesome it is. One of the things that had been driving us crazy was how slow […]

Today: A Companion For iCal

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Have you ever wanted to quickly add an event to iCal but didn’t actually want to either launch it or bring it forward? Or you wanted to take a quick look at your schedule for today? Well, earlier this year Second Gear Software released a new utility for OS X called Today that does just […]

TechEd 2008: Visual Studio Team System Today and Tomorrow

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Great talk by a Microsoft Fellow, Brian Harry, about what’s coming in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the next release of Visual Studio code named “Rosario”. Coming up in SP1 for 2008 is some very nice changes for Team Foundation Server/Team Explorer, which is the source control piece. The biggest one that is going to […]

Finished first pass of Cocoa App

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Tonight I wrote the following: git tag 0.1 What that means is I tagged version 0.1 of my first Cocoa App. I was able to get this version done in about 3 hours and it has all the features I’ve learned from the weekend. The UI took the longest part as I had to keep […]

Cocoa First Impressions

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It’s been almost two hole days with Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Book and I’m about three quarters of the way through it. This book is what I have been looking for to help guide me into Cocoa after several weeks of just trying to figure it out on my own. Now with Hillegass’ foundation, I think […]

My new obsession: Cocoa Programming

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Some of you may be asking yourselves, “Does he mean he’s going to be programming hot chocolate?” The answer to that is “No”. Cocoa is the technology behind programs on Apple’s OS X. Learning Cocoa has always been on my todo list, and now I’ve decided to finally tackle it. Tonight I received “the book” […]

Code Monkey

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Wii Remote Headtracking for Living Room VR

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I just saw a post over at Will’s blog about this and I was amazed. Watch and enjoy:

Getting a handle on your Blog reading

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If you’re like me, you’ve subscribed to a ton of Blog feeds. I was up to around 200 until I read a friend of mine Will’s post about consuming blogs. That post has changed my blog reading life. I went from having hundred’s of unread posts when I got home to my Newsreader, to maybe […]

iPhone: First Impressions

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As Maggie pointed out on her blog, I was one of the many who braved the crowds Friday night and got us both an iPhone. My friend Jim has a pretty good account of what we went through to get our phones. After a fairly quick activation, and after having my corporate discount removed, Maggie […]

Game Speed Runs

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I saw a cool site today: Speed Demos Archive . It features movie recordings of people playing games from start to finish as fast as they can. I think my personal favorite is: Super Mario Bros. done in 5 minutes (using the world warps) and just under 20 minutes, playing all 32 levels. I played […]

iPod Vending Machine

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I found an iPod Vending machine at my local mall recently: Yep, that’s right. You can buy any of the current iPods and several accessories right at this machine with your credit card. I was actually amazed it was in a hidden corner of the mall. I figured something like that would be put out […]

Fun with Comic Life

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With my new iMac comes a program called Comic Life which allows you to take your photos and quickly make comic book style pages with them. Here’s my first one which took a couple of minutes: I know it’s not nearly as good as my friend’s comics, but hey, I can still try and get […]