My friend David has long podered how to change the world. Everyone agrees that education is the key to peace and less poverty. But how can we give more of the poor an education?

The linked video shows his first experiment with getting poor children an education. David has paid the woman in the video to teach children who don't already attend school. She receives $6 an hour, and there is some cost to transferring the money and supplying teaching materials.

Davids goal is to teach 1 million children, who otherwise would not have had any kind of schooling, in english reading and writing. It's an experiment, but it'll be an interesting experiment to follow. Do write him if you want to participate. Of course, I've chosen to participate myself, in addition to spreading the word.

If you want to send a contribution, you can ...

Amazon's customer service was really great to me! My wife and I had bought a nice christmas present for my father, a book he'd long wanted, printed in 1976. We couldn't find it half-decently priced new copy in Europe, but we found one through Amazon in the US. Order placed, postage charges being as much as the book, we waited for it to arrive. But when it did, it was clearly used. Not badly used at all, but a couple of ear marks, pencil lines in the book and... sigarette marks on the cover. Disappointed we took pictures of it, and contacted Amazon.

Against my fears, they didn't object to our description at all, and didn't even want to see the photos I'd taken. They told me I should return it, they'd refund the shipping charges for me sending it back to the US. They refunded the book and since it was through a 3rd party, we could ...

Open source code is legacy, buggy code. Closed source code is often worse, having had fewer eyes inspecting it. Including it in my projects would be a really bad idea if it wasn't for that (1) they have spent time thinking about how to solve problems I have and (2) my code is at least as buggy and is going to be legacy code in just a few hours, with few people probably ever reading it again. With these odds, it's no wonder that 80% of my time as a developer is debugging code.

With this in mind, let's have a look at Carthage, the new dependancy manager for Cocoa. It takes the open source projects you want to use, and compiles them into a binary framework that you can then include in your project.

Cocoapods, on the other hand, will wrap your ...

Following up on my little SSD series, today I finally got my Seagate GoFlex thunderbolt enclosure from customs. The SSD arrived around two weeks ago, and I had already done a SuperDuper copy of my home-made Fusion drive to the SSD via USB 2.0. Three days later, I could start using it, via USB. First I preferred the extra speed from my Fusion drive, but pretty soon I took the quiet of the SSD over those extra MB/sec.

Speed-wise I was surprised to find I would get about 34 MB/sec via USB 2.0. I guess I under-estimated USB 2.0 a little bit, assuming I would get ~20 MB/sec. The Fusion drive solution would give me bursts of 114 MB/sec write and 180 MB/sec read, but over time I would often get around ~30 MB/sec. I must admit I had forgotten exactly how slow magnetic disks can be, I assumed I would get around ~80 MB/sec from it, but I was ...

Following up on my little SSD series, today I finally got my Seagate GoFlex thunderbolt enclosure from customs. The SSD arrived around two weeks ago, and I had already done a SuperDuper copy of my home-made Fusion drive to the SSD via USB 2.0. Three days later, I could start using it, via USB. First I preferred the extra speed from my Fusion drive, but pretty soon I took the quiet of the SSD over those extra MB/sec.

Speed-wise I was surprised to find I would get about 34 MB/sec via USB 2.0. I guess I under-estimated USB 2.0 a little bit, assuming I would get ~20 MB/sec. The Fusion drive solution would give me bursts of 114 MB/sec write and 180 MB/sec read, but over time I would often get around ~30 MB/sec. I must admit I had forgotten exactly how slow magnetic disks can be, I assumed I would get around ~80 MB/sec from it, but I was ...