Apple’s October 16th product announcement begins at 10am PST; 1pm EST. My guesses? Definitely: OS X Yosemite, iTunes 12, and the next-gen iPad Air and iPad mini. Maybe: Updated Thunderbolt 2 + Retina display (I’d guessed at this last year and was wrong), iMac with Retina display, updates to the MacBook Pro line, Apple TV 4 with support for third-party apps. Not a chance: An HDTV, more info about Apple Watch, a mega-sized iPad, or a pull-string-to-talk Steve Jobs doll.

Dear Lockitron

This is the message I just sent to the Lockitron team. I’m tired and frustrated at how poor the communication has been around schedule delays. I ordered in October 2012. My original ship date was supposed to be October 2013. The date passed, and there were no updates. Then, April 2014 was the ship date. Still nothing. It’s now July 2014, and it still hasn’t shipped. I’ve read the blog posts. I know you guys are behind. But how about this — if you’re going to miss the forecasted ship date by a matter of months, why not send me an email to let me know that your website is lying to me?

If your website supports passwords, please stop sucking at it I take password security very seriously. I’ve already written about how people can improve their password habits to keep themselves safe. This piece, however, is for those of you who build websites which provide password-related functionality. This is a list of password crimes that some websites commit. I’ve described these crimes, then point out some criminals (a.k.a., websites) which commit these crimes. (This list is not guaranteed to continue to be up-to-date. This post represents a snapshot in time, and is accurate as of early June 2014 when the first draft of this post was written.

Easily SSH into Amazon EC2 instances using the Name tag

It’s been a while since I’ve written about code, so I thought I’d post this little AWS-related tip for OS X and Linux users. If you have the Unified AWS CLI Tools configured, you can add these functions to your Bash profile (typically either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile) to enable you to SSH into an instance by “Name” tag, or simply lookup the IP address or DNS hostname. hostname_from_instance <instance-name> ip_from_instance <instance-name> ssh-aws <instance-name> Bash code function hostname_from_instance() { echo $(aws ec2 describe-instances --filters "{\"Name\":\"tag:Name\", \"Values\":[\"$1\"]}" --query='Reservations[0].

Games of the Year, 2013

For me, 2013 was a year where I picked back up in my gaming. Looking back, I spent way more time playing video games than I had in the last several years, and began following some gaming publications and podcasts. Top 5 These are my top 5 favorite games from 2013. 5. Beyond: Two Souls (Playstation 3) Beyond: Two Souls surprised me with how good the visuals were. It had some of the best, realistic-looking humans I’ve ever seen in a game.
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