Personal computers with high-resolution visual displays come in a range of sizes, from those small enough to be embedded in clothing and jewellery up to the size of a thin book.

That’s Retina Displays and the tablet revolution sorted. Although, the price of display technology really hasn’t reached the tipping point were we’ll see it embedded in clothing in anything but bespoke or very high-end products. I would love to see this happen.

Kurzweil continues:

Cables are disappearing. Communications between components uses short-distance wireless technology. High-speed wireless communication provides access to the Web.

Namely, ZigBee, NFC, and UTMS, LTE, or any other number of acronymized services the cellular industry have concocted. Coincidently, I’m about to subscribe to microwave broadband, which is promised to be approximately 10x the maximum speed I can get over DSL. Yay for rural broadband.

Kurzweil’s predictions aren’t always accurate. At least, not yet anyway. Most notably:

The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition. Also ubiquitous are language user interfaces (LUIs).

Speech recognition is still proving to be a hard nut to crack, although the dictation service built into Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion does a reasonable job. We’re still a while off having continuous speech recognition as a viable replacement for text input via a keyboard. Even longer if you’re a software developer—programming languages are highly optimised to be written languages, not spoken. I’m not even sure if it will ever be that useful because a person’s writing style is often very different from their speaking style. Unless, like, you want every other word, like, y’know, to be, like… like. If ya know whadda mean.

However, using speech recognition to delegate individual tasks to a virtual assistant is making great strides with the advent of Siri and Google’s voice search. Kurzweil even predicts these kinds of services, although the use-cases and interfaces he suggests aren’t exactly there yet¹:

Most routine business transactions (purchases, travel, reservations) take place between a human and a virtual personality. Often the virtual personality includes an animated visual presence that looks like a human face.

So does Kurzweil have some crazy crystal ball that allows him to see into the future or is this just a case of causality and I happened to stumble across Apple’s playbook for the last decade?

I’ve had this book since the early 2000s and this weekend I decided to take another look. It may be 13 years old now, but The Age of the Spiritual Machines is definitely worth a read.

¹ Updated on November 5, 2012: It seems we’re closer to being able to this than I thought, according to this TechCrunch piece.

I’ve updated my iPhone wireframe template for iPhone 5. Let me know if you find it useful.

then you need to upgrade your version of pip to the latest. Fire up Terminal and enter this:

Additionally, make sure you have the latest Xcode (v4.4) with Command Line Tools package installed.

if ([myArray objectForKey:@"identifier"] isEqualToString:@"myID"]) {
    DebugBreak(); // Step through the code from here
}

The macro below will allow you to write code like the example above. It will work on both real iOS hardware and in the iOS simulator:

#if TARGET_CPU_ARM
    #define DebugBreak() __asm__ __volatile__ ("mov r0, %0\nmov r1, %1\nmov r12, #37\nswi 128\n" \
                                            : : "r" (getpid ()), "r" (signal) : "r12", "r0", "r1", "cc")
#elif TARGET_CPU_X86
    #define DebugBreak() __asm__("int $3\n" : : )
#endif

Anything that makes debugging easier and more efficient is a good thing in my book.

Ingredients

• 1 medium-sized Onion, white will do, but I prefer red for the colour
• Half a Leek
• A good couple of handfuls of garden peas; fresh or frozen
• 2 rashers of good quality back bacon. Pancetta, lardons, or even that old faithful, streaky, would work.

That’s enough for one hungry person.

Preparation

Slice the leek and onion and fry off in a hot, dry pan for a couple of minutes. You could add a splash of olive oil, if you want to, as it’s a pretty slim feast, fat-content-wise. Slice or dice the bacon and throw it in the pan with the leeks and onions for a couple of minutes. Bung in the peas. Boil the kettle and make a brew. By the time you’ve done that, you’ll be ready to serve.

You can do quite a lot variations with this, but I like to keep it simple. Swap out the bacon for sausage, black pudding, or well-seasoned steak. Actually, any meat that’s a bit salty would balance out the sweetness of the leek, onion, and peas. If you’re feeling a bit naughty, stir in a couple of dollops of creme-fraiche and season with black pepper. Leftovers, if there are any, make a nice cold lunch the next day.

Ingredients

• 4-6 medium Green chillies, de-seeded
• 2 Shallots
• 5cm chunk of Ginger
• 2 Garlic cloves
• A fistful of Fresh coriander
• 2 Lemongrass stalks
• 3cm chunk of Galangal
• 6 Kaffir lime leaves (can swap out with extra lime zest)
• Zest and juice of 1 Lime
• 1 tsp Ground black pepper
• 1 tsp Cumin
• 2 tsp Fish sauce or light soy
• 3 tbsp Olive oil

Preparation

Whack everything into a food processor or blender and blitz into a paste. Yeah, it’s that easy.

This is enough paste for about 8 servings and will keep in the fridge for a couple of weeks.

When preparing the curry, put the paste in the pan first and fry it off for a minute or two. This will heat the oil in the paste and start to draw out all the amazing aromatic flavours. Add some coconut milk, stir well, and you’ve got the perfect base for tasty Thai curry.

This goes well with chicken or turkey, fish, prawns, beef, or a bunch of veggies (use a mix of soft- and firm-fleshed veggies–courgette, squash, potato, cauliflower, broccoli, carrot, peas, etc.).

Serve with rice. Jasmine or coconut rice works extremely well.

Ingredients

• 100g self-raising flour
• 15g cocoa powder
• 60g caster sugar
• 60g soft margarine
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
• 2 tbs milk

• 125g icing sugar
• 100g soft margarine
• 1.5 tps lukewarm water

Preparation Method

Preheat your oven to 190°C. Line two 20cm circular cake tins with baking parchment and grease the sides with a little margarine.

Cream the margarine and sugar together in a mixing bowl. Slowly add the cocoa powder, flour, egg, and milk. Divide the cake batter between the two cake tins.

Place in the centre of the oven and bake for 30 minutes. I have a fan-assisted oven and usually 20-25 minutes is more than enough.  When the cakes are baked, turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool.

Meanwhile, cream the icing sugar and margarine, adding a touch of warm water if the mixture is too dry. When the cakes are cool, generously spread the buttercream over one of the cakes to a thickness of about 1cm. Place the other cake on top and dust with icing sugar.

Rather than dusting with icing sugar, my Mum would top the cake with chocolate icing (1 tbs of icing sugar, 1 tps cocoa powder, some cold water; mix the lot) and decorate with hundreds & thousands or glacier cherries or Smarties. Let your imagination run free.

Bits you’ll need

• Mixing bowl
• Spatula
• Kitchen scales
• Food mixer (or wooden spoon and a strong arm)
• Loaf cake tin—ideally 20cm x 12cm
• Baking parchment or grease-proof paper

Ingredients

• 175g unsalted butter, softened
• 175g sugar (half light muscovado, half golden caster)
• 75g hazelnuts or chopped mixed nuts
• 2 free-range eggs
• 175g self-raising flour
• 2 very ripe bananas (about 250g total weight)
• drop vanilla extract
• 175g good-quality dark chocolate—my preference is Green & Blacks 90% cocoa solids
• a little Demerara sugar

Preparation

Crank the oven up to 170°C (150°C for fan-assisted ovens) and by the time we’re done mixing the cake batter, it should be hot enough to go.

Line the base and sides of a loaf tin with baking parchment.

Whack the butter and sugars into your mixing bowl and beat together with the food mixer or wooden spoon. Keep on beating until the mixture is light and milky-coffee-coloured.

If you’re using hazelnuts, lightly toast them in a dry frying pan for a couple of minutes, rub them in a tea towel to remove their skins, then grind quite finely.

Slowly add the eggs to the creamed butter and sugar, then mix in the toasted hazelnuts or chopped nuts and self-raising flour.

TIP: If you add the flour slowly, you don’t need to sieve it.

Peel the bananas and chop them the small pieces. I generally go for about 0.5cm cube. This way the banana takes less time to cook. If you want your cake to be a bit sticky and gooey, use larger chunks of banana. Blitz or smash up the dark chocolate into fine chunks. Gently fold the vanilla extract, the bananas and the chocolate chips into the cake mixture, turning gently and taking care not to over-mix or else the banana chunks turn to gloopy mess.

Scoop the cake batter into the loaf tin. Dust with a little Demerara sugar. Whack it the oven for between 1 hour and 1 hour 10 minutes. If the cake starts to brown before the batter firms up, cover it with a piece of tin foil.

It’s good to eat the cake as-is, or serve with a scoop of top quality vanilla ice cream.

Photo: © Neil Cowburn.

If you’re one of the people and you’ve tried the various fixes that can be found, but you’ll still having issues, then this is what worked for me:

1. Download ProKit 5.1 from Apple.
2. Double-click ProKitUpdate5.1.dmg and you’ll see ProKitUpdate5.1.mpkg.
3. Right-click (or Ctrl-click) ProKitUpdate5.1.mpkg and click Show Package Contents.
4. Expand Contents and Packages revealing ProAppRuntime.pkg and ProRuntime.pkg.
5. Right-click (or Ctrl-click) ProAppRuntime.pkg and click Show Package Contents.
6. Expand Contents and copy Archive.pax.gz to your Desktop.
7. Double-click Archive.pax.gz and the Archive Utility will extract the contents to a folder called Archive.
8. Within the Archive folder, navigate to System/Library/PrivateFrameworks and copy the ProKit.framework folder to your Desktop.
<br/>You now have version 5.1 of the ProKit.framework ready to replace the 6.0.1 version.
9. Open up Terminal (which can be found in /Applications/Utilities) and enter the following command:

sudo pkgutil --forget com.apple.pkg.ProAppRuntime

Since you’re running the command through the Super User account, you’ll be prompted for your Administrator password. Type in your password and click OK.
10. In Finder, navigate to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks and copy the ProKit.framework folder to your Documents folder.
11. Delete the ProKit.framework folder from /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks. You’ll be prompted for your Administrator password.
12. This is important. I’ve seen users inadvertently copy ProKit.framework 5.1 into the existing ProKit.framework folder. Deleting the existing ProKit.framework folder will ensue this does not happen.
13. Copy the ProKit.framework folder from your Desktop to /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks. You’ll be prompted for your Administrator password again.
14. Launch Final Cut Studio and you should be good to go.