Jorge Izquierdo

I'm awarded a WWDC Scholarship

This is AWESOME.

I have won a Scholarship to attend WWDC 2013 in San Francisco.

I got an email today at 2.22AM telling me that I was one of the winners and that I got a ticket.

I had to build a pretty simple app as a resumé and I developed a website that update in real time as the revisor was using the app so he got more info that couldn't be fit in 640*1136px.

My plan is to go on June 7th (Fri) and stay 'till June 14th and leave in the evening. But I still have to manage some stuff with my school since my 3rd term exams are 7th, 10th and 11th :P

I guess I will stay in an Airbnb room (I'm not paying $300 a night for a crappy hotel room).

I'm really excited and I want to be there already! See you in Moscone!

The future of learning

Every once in a while I watch something that changes my vision about future. Whenever someone does something this big the whole world deserves to know about it, so here I am trying to expand this.

This TED talk I'm sharing with you is by and about Sugata Mitra, a former programming teacher in New Delhi that give up his job to experimentate how to teach indian kids how to use a computer just by leaving one there and asking them the proper questions. He sees knowing obsolete and thinks the education in the future might be something were someone asks a question and admire kids 'learning by themselves'

I found the work of this men amazing and I'm really proud as a human that someone is doing this. It is a shame that everybody knows Cristiano Ronaldo but that much people know Sugata Mitra. This is the kind of people who changes the world. Congrats on your TED Prize 2013.

Please share, share, share and share not this post, but the video.

Why I think The List will succeed and announcement

Last Saturday, I saw on ADN a post by @ca asking for betatester for a project of him for 'Avid Hacker News Readers'. I love Hacker News, but I never remember to check the website, but I wanted to betatest it.

The following morning I had an invite in my inbox and 5 minutes later I was surfing The List. The first thing I thought was: 'Man, this is clean'. And it sure is. The UI is super simple and it's been well thought.

The List, as they say, is: 'a social knowledge board for developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. We place a focus on long form articles, and incentivise high quality posts'. You could think of it as a 'great content Hacker News'.

The most surprising thing about the website it is that it requires a user inviting you in order to sign up. This could be a problem at the beggining, the stage of getting users to use the service, but thinking long-term, I think it will prevent the site from getting silly content and it'll make users who generate or find great content to want to post in The List because they know users will appreciate it.

Another great point the developers made, is that posting isn't free. You, as a user, have an amount of karma that you have to spend to post. You need to provide at least the 2% of your karma or 4 karma in order to post. When your posts get points (voted by users) this points will be added to your karma. Another thing related with karma is that you can pay more karma for a post if you want it to be in a higher position from the beggining.

This two differential points make The List always having great and curated content. I enjoy very much browsing it and I check it everyday. This is my profile on The List.

But, for me, the coolest thing about The List is that it is open source. Their code is open to everyone and you can read it or contribute. The backend is written in Ruby on Rails and the position algorithms are pretty interesting. It's totally worth having a look at it. Here you can find the github repo.

I liked it all so much that I decided to develop an iOS client on top of their API. The app is 'Waiting for Review' at the moment of writing this post and it'll be available soon. I haven't spend a lot of time building it yet, but I will as the API keeps improving. My app is also open source and I'd appreciate you contributing and helping me build it. It is a dead simple app, but we can build something really cool together. You can check the iOS repository here

If you want to try The List out, you can shoot me an email or apply for an invite here.

The story behind my forth iPhone 5 and its Earpods

I decided to write this article earlier today when I posted on Twitter that I was writing from my 4th iPhone 5 and I got a lot of replies from people, who from here I'll be calling them: anti-applers.

First of all I'll explain why I 'changed' my iPhones. It all starts on Sept. 28th last year (the day the iPhone 5 was released in Spain) when I queued up for getting it. I told my experience in my old blog and it was amazing. So, the next day I realized it had a dead pixel in the upper-right corner of the screen. Given the pixel density of the screen and that it only was a pixel which was dead, so I don't know what I was looking at to realize it. In the moment, I didn't see it as a big problem, but then I couldn't take my sight off of it.

Just 15 days after getting it, I took it to the Apple Store and the Genius who assisted me (who was really nice) told me he couldn't believe the fact of it having a dead pixel and me seeing it either. Without any problems he brought me a new iPhone 5 in its box (there were no iPhones in stock, or so said a poster in the entrance) and I turned it on to restore my iCloud backup. And when entering my Apple ID password I realized it was something in the 'S' key in the keyboard. I asked him to look at it and he said it had dust inside and that he was giving me a new one. He brought another new iPhone 5 in its box, that one was my iPhone 5 till today. But later that day I found out that the central button of the remote control of the Earpods that came with my third iPhone 5 wouldn't work. So I went to the Apple Store and changed just the Earpods.

In December, a line appeared in the camera. Like with the pixel I didn't see it as a big deal but then my Earpods started doing bad. The left one sounded very little. So today I went to the Apple Store and they give me a refurbished iPhone 5 and new Earpods.

This is a picture of the back of my laptop and circled is the line of the camera

Yeah, it's not been very pleasant changing my iPhone 3 times, but the good thing about it is that I have used for the first time 3 iPhones 5. And I have to say that every Genius that assisted me with my iPhone 5 has been super nice.

Given my experience I'm not really sure about what to think. The iPhone 5 is an awesome product and the best constructed and robust phone I've ever had, but this is too much. I want to think that this is bad luck and I know that not everybody has had to change it, but it could also be Apple producing with not the quality they used to in order to produce more.

And now talking about the anti-applers, this people that seems to enjoy people having problems with their iPhones. If you don't like the iPhone, don't get it. Get an Android ~~a Windows Phone or a Blackberry~~, but really, do you enjoy people having issues with their phones? I mean, it is a bit sad. This is not a damn war, enjoy the phone or device you decided to buy, and leave others, us, enjoy alone.

Interview in Álvaro Bernal Podcast

My friend Alvaro Bernal interviewed me for his podcast last week. The interview is in Spanish and we talk about app.net, how I started programming, my projects, the apps I use in my Mac and iPhone and a lot more. I enjoyed talking to him a lot and you can listen it online on iVoox or subscribe to his podcast on iTunes.

PS: I have to say that Garage Band trolled us and we had to record it twice, it was nice though.

Why we never launched picc and what I've learned from it

It is sometimes hard to determine whether a project has been a failure or a success. A lot of people would think that we've failed building picc, that we never got to launch it, but we have learned some things in the path (some of them of our own errors) that I think they are worth sharing.

I remember I had picc's idea while running. The idea was simple: A service that would allow you to have your contact's picture in you Address Book up to date and synced.
I know Twitter and Facebook already do that, but they do it in a crappy way that works only with a few contacts.
I had this idea in my mind for a month or so and I eventually watched The Social Network movie and decided I had to build it. I stayed hacking late that night, but I remember I got to save images to a contact in the Address Book.
I built a working prototype with its backend and talked to my friend Jose Cruz and asked him to be picc's designer. He liked the idea and accepted, so we started working on it.

We decided that the identifier of our users would be their phone number to make it easy to find their friends that were already on picc. And this was a problem, because we needed to check if the phone numbers we were given actually belonged to the person who entered it. We needed to send SMSs to check and we didn't have an investment to pay for them and as our service was going to be free for the users, someone or something had to pay for the SMSs. We talked to a lot of providers, but neither of them liked the idea and they didn't want to take the risk.

At this point, we didn't know what to do, we had been turned down a lot of times so we thought that picc didn't do a lot, so we rethought it and made it a lot more complex. Now it only didn't sync the picture, but all the data you would expect a contact to have so when a user changed it, it would automatically change to all of his contacts using picc. And also we built a way to adding a contact with all his info just by entering his phone number in the app. We lost focus.

The project got bigger and bigger and the code base was hardly manageable by one person. So we got bored and we stopped doing it.

There are 4 things that when we were developing it looked great but that now, looking back, they all look like bad decisions.

• The first of them, is trying to build a all-in-one solution. As I explained before, as people didn't like our product a lot we tried to build more and more onto it and we lost focus. We will never know, but I think a simple solution that only synced contact's pics, would have had a lot more success than the bigger thing we ended up building.

• The second one was not telling the idea to anybody until it was too late. We thought we had the next Instagram idea and didn't want to tell it so they wouldn't steal the idea from us. I am sure that if we had received feedback at the begging we could have focused on the things people really would enjoy about it and built a better product.
  Related to this I learnt that ideas aren't valued a shit. Your ideas aren't valuable if you don't make them real. The execution is the hard part and where people fail. I still think my idea was a good one and we didn't execute it right. This is actually the first time I show screenshots of the app publicly.

• The third one is about redesign. We redesigned the whole app 3 times and had 2 landing pages. We lost a lot of time doing this redesigns instead of worring about launching and finishing the product. I have to say that the app looked awesome but it wasn't worth it.

• The forth one, and the one I am more ashamed of, is about the Wanteprenurial actitude we had at some points. We were actually building our product, but we lost time doing things that weren't necessary at that point. We made stickers and business cards of picc before even having money for our needed SMSs. We wanted to have everything so we would look professional the day we'd launch, but we never did, so that was a waste of time and money.

Call it a failure if you want, but as I said at the begging, the path has been a really interesting one. I learnt a lot (I had never built a backend before or done any integration of an API in an iOS app) and I loved working together with Jose.

Moving here!

Hello! This is Jorge and welcome to my new blog. I'm here because my old Tumblr blog didn't feel very good for writing long posts. I didn't like a lot the theme I had and I didn't want to pay for a Premium one. And not loving the design sometimes made me not to write.

To be honest, I had never heard of Scriptogram 30 minutes before writing this lines. I had just downloaded an awesome Markdown editor called Mou and saw they had support for something called Scriptogram, tried it out and immediately fell in love with it.

I know my English is not perfect so don't get mad at me.

I don't have in mind moving all my posts from my old Tumblr blog, in fact I'll only repost here my Raspberry Pi series.

Hope you enjoy it.

Automatically adding torrents to Raspberry Pi (Part 2)

This post was originally written in my old Tumblr blog and I am just reposting it here.

This article is a follow up of my last week’s post about my Raspberry Pi setup. In this article I will cover how I get torrents downloading in transmission in my Raspberry Pi.

As I wrote on the previous post: I know piracy is bad, and I don’t support it. But when it is the only way of enjoying that content and learning I will do it.

I rarely watch movies. I watch TV Shows indeed, I currently watch 7 as you can see in My Showy ;).

I use TVShows 2 in my Mac to automatically download episode’s torrent as soon as they are released in America. I have the app configured so it refreshes each hour and it also does when I turn on my Mac. The app works great so far and I have used it for a long time, even before I got my Raspi.

The other option for automatically download torrents was Sickbeard. This app can run in the Raspi does the function TVShows does on Mac plus post processing. I had this running in my Raspi for a couple of days and it didn’t work very good. I wasn’t able to configure it to work with torrents and it slowed down the system.

So, when TVShows downloads a new torrent it goes to my torrents folder (‘~/Torrents’). Then I have a folder action Automator workflow listening to changes in that directory, so when a file is added to the folder it runs a script that sends the torrent in base64 to transmission in the RaspberryPi. I have uploaded the needed files to GitHub so anybody can collaborate.

Additionally, I wrote a small script to be able to quickly add magnet links to transmission. I saved this script in ‘/usr/bin’ so I can open Terminal and quickly type ‘addt’ and then copy the magnet link like in the picture.

Next article will all about sorting the downloaded episodes in the HD and how do I get notified when the downloads finish.

Here is the github repo.

Setting up a great media center with my RaspberryPi (Part 1)

This post was originally written in my old Tumblr blog and I am just reposting it here.

Before starting, I know piracy is no good. I am against piracy at all points. But for consuming some kinds of content, like american TV Shows (outside of the USA), it is the only way to enjoy the content you want without waiting for the official DVD to be released. For example, I proudly pay for Spotify each month and if a service like Netflix came out in Spain (and had content!) I will be the first one trying it.

Also, I’d like to say that this is not a step by step tutorial and that I’m not a Linux expert at all, I read a lot and finally I got to my current set up.

I got my RasPi because I liked it. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it, but it rocked, so I bought one. When I received it, I played one day with it and didn’t turn it on for 1 month. So, one day I had to study and I was pretty bored, I took it and started thinking about what I wanted to do with it, and I came up with the idea of the media center.

This is what my current RasPi media center does:

• It runs Raspbmc, so as you can guess I use XBMC. It plays 1080p MKVs like a boss when it is not doing anything in the background. The cool thing about XBMC is that they have an iOS app called xmbcRemote that surprisingly you can use as a remote. (The icon is really ugly. Trust me, REALLY ugly)

• I have a 1TB old hard drive attached with the RasPi so I have plenty space for video. I had to format it to ext3 to make it work well.

• I run Transmission (transmission-daemon) in the background in order to download torrents. This works pretty good and I can control the downloads remotely from my Mac using Transmission Remote GUI. As I directly download in the external HD, when I try to watch something and transmission is downloading, the playing experience is very poor and it freezes a lot. So when I wanna watch something I stop the downloads for a while.

I found a very good article for setting all this up. I did not follow it completely because I had to format my hard drive and I did the mounting in a different way, but it really helped.

To finish, I’d like to thank the Raspbmc team for the amazing work they have done.

The next article I will write is about how I did the automatization so when a new episode comes out it downloads automatically.

Part 2 on how I automate torrent download