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Delivering on what was promised
In October, I purchased a 50" Vizio TV to go in our freshly remodeled home. It had all the standard TV features, but 2 that interested me were the "apps", in particular Amazon Prime streaming, as my Apple TV didn't do that and the WiFi direct remote. the Amazon Prime app turned out to be such a dud that I ended up buying a Roku box primarily for that feature. However, the WiFi direct feature was one that I really wanted so that I didn't have to aim the remote at the TV. This became even more important due to a poor design decision where Vizio basically put the IR receiver on the bottom left of the TV. Since our TV wasn't mounted above a fireplace, the IR window wasn't really visible, so the IR remote didn't always work.
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Tweaking a web server with Nginx
A few weeks ago, I started playing with nginx as a replacement for Apache. The exact reasons I decided to do this are a bit unclear, but I think it had something to do with me playing with node.js and MongoDB. The initial setup was pretty smooth and the configuration files are much easier to understand than Apache for my sites. However, I also decided to offload the PHP processing to php-fpm and that's where the problems began. My VPS is pretty lightweight and doesn't have a lot of RAM. My blog was running out of memory all the time and php-fpm stopped responding.
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Drones and Privacy
A few months ago, I received a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter for a present. For most people, a quadcopter is called a drone. Call it whatever you want, it is a fun toy for me (tool for others). I have it outfitted with a GoPro camera and a video transmitter so that I can see what is going on during flight. In a conversation with my in-laws where I was showing my father-in-law how it flies, my mother-in-law indicated that she thought the devices were creepy because they can be used to spy on people. This is the same thing that the media is playing up and catering to the fears of people.
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Thoughts on Storyboards
When Apple came out with Storyboards in Xcode, I thought that they would be quite useful in making it easier to see how an app was laid out. However, after attempting one project with them, I determined that they had limited utility as they wouldn't scale and wouldn't work well for multi person teams. I left storyboards for a year and didn't revisit them.