Can anyone tie a rope with telekinesis?

Thought knot.

Hi hi, if you are a #sff writer, or #yalit or #mglit writer, or writer who write cross-genres and age groups - *waves*. :)

For work, I'm working on a custom macOS installer at the moment …

"Why an installer when installing a macOS app is as simple as dragging and dropping into a folder”, you ask? Well, because this is for a macOS login/authorization plugin …

At this point, most people will probably go “Huh?” and I don’t blame you, because this is a dark corner of macOS coding that most probably don’t venture into 😛

A macOS login plugin allows you to customise the macOS login flow so that you can add your own layer of authorization/security or carry out some specific tasks that need to happen during the login process.

Unofrtunately, none of that is very well documented. In fact, I spent months scouring the Internet and going through documentation to get our implementation of a macOS login plugin working correctly.

In fact, somebody at work said that I was one of possibly 10 people in the world who understood this stuff. Honestly, I don’t believe that since I think that if I could figure it out, anybody else could too since the information is all out there 🙂

Whatever the case, our login plugin requires particular authorization rules to be set and what most people seem to do is to use a shell script to do this since that’s fairly widely documented. But in our case, while that’s the option we are using now, I want to actually do this via code because it simplifies a few logistical issues.

So here I am, exploring the macOS documentation again to see how you can do what I want to do in Swift and finding that this is not very well documented at all 😛

I do wish that the Apple documentation was excellent throughout instead of being very informative for the areas that everybody is interested in and then getting rather opaque, terse, or downright non-existent for the areas that people don’t venture into often. But I guess that’s how it works out — afterall, why bother spending the time on documenting something that not many people will use?

#Coding #Apple #macOS #Authorization #Documentation #Security #Login #Swift

A little piece inspired from my trip to Scotland, the forests felt positively primordial!

It's started to get hot on this side of the mountains and not for the first time I'm looking forward to cooler weather... but maybe not that much cooler!

#MastoArt #ArtistWorkout #landscape #cowboy #DigitalArt

For a couple of days, I was seeing an above-average number of messages in my home timeline without me following anyone new, but now we seem to have settled down to the older levels.

So I guess the latest migration is over? Or at least has calmed down? 😛

A #picturebook celebrating Hokkien culture and tradition. A letter to grandma.

https://closetfulofbooks.com/products/oyster-girl

#bookstodon #kidlit #kidlitSEA #sgheritage #writing #writingcommunity #pepperdogpress

⚪ Ein "Wunderbarer Wunderbaum"
und... ein Lieblingsfoto.
🟤 A "Wonderful Wondertree"
and... a favorite photo. 🌲
📷 by Artist: #MariaTRodgers in Loc.: #Klamath CA USA 🇺🇸 - Title: "Huge tree holding another tree" #Streetart #Art #Mastoart Trees #Photography #Fotografie #WonderTree ➡️ #APhotoLove

Akkoma uses V1 filtering (as I suppose does Pleroma?) But Mastodon support V2 filtering. So, quite a few Mastodon apps seem to only consider supporting V2 filtering.

The app I'm working on now (which is a fork of IceCubes) is running into this issue at the moment. I can kind of get filtering working, but there are a lot of gotchas and edge cases ... Ah, the joys of coding .. or something 😛

#Coding #Akkoma #Fediverse #Clients #YayForDifferences

Do whatever you can to tell the author that you liked their book, if you indeed did. For those of us who aren't ever going to make a living at this, good reviews are the best thing we can reasonably expect to happen when it comes to our writing. I had a coworker tell me today she read Girl on the Moon and was "enthralled" and she's on book 2 now. It really made my day. #writing #WritingCommunity

One more #Junicorn before month ends! I has so much fun doing this and I'm happy with the result. It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. What you think?

#mastodonArt #mastoart #digitalart #animalart #equineart #horse #unicorn #digitaldrawing

Writers of the Fediverse!

Do you blog? I'm going back to blogging and I need folks to read/follow. Comment and let me know where to find you! (Esp. science fiction, horror, and fantasy folks).

#writing #blogging #SFF #SFFH

I had been waiting for “Adipurush” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12915716) since there was a lot of hype surrounding the movie.

Unfortunately, the hype was just that — hype, pure and simple, and the movie was very disappointing in multiple different ways.

The CGI seems to have taken a lot of its cues (at least in terms of buildings and landscape) from “Lord of the Rings” (the TV series) and “Game of Thrones” and sometimes looked rather amateurish.

The CGI character designs (at least the ones I saw) were laughable since it looked as if they used stock skeletons to create demons.

The story was a chaotic mishmash since they just land you in the middle of the “Ramayan” with a disjointed infodump at the start to tell you what happened before the movie started. The characters aren’t fleshed out and if you came in without any knowledge of the “Ramayan” you’d have no clue as to what was going on …

#Movies #Telugu #Adipurush #Disappointing #TooMuchCGI

I read about "Storyteller”, which was described as a “bookish” puzzle game and I thought it might be interesting since it had slightly different mechanics than a lot of other games out there — you have to set up a story in panels, like in a comic book.

I had played something similar a few years back for (I think) iOS and I thought this might be challenging …

Unfortunately, it turned out to be not challenging at all. The puzzles are extremely basic and you can figure out the panel order fairly easily 😕

Yes, the graphics and the characters changing expressions/actions based on the panel order is a bit interesting, but given that it’s only 52 puzzles and I was able to complete about 32 of them within an hour or so, it’s not very challenging at all so far …

#Games #Puzzle #Storyteller

I’d forgotten how much I enjoy "Warrior" till I started watching it again 🙂

I was beginning to think that it was gone for good after the Cinemax cancellation and the whole HBO reshuffle. But I was glad to see it back.

I’m still on the first episode of the new season but the show still appears to be gritty, witty, and full of old-school Kung Fu which reminds you of the days of Bruce Lee. So, I’m definitely happy to see it back again!

#TV #KungFu #BruceLee #Warrior

When I was younger, I would watch a movie trailer and remember all the details of the movie enough to remember to watch the movie months later when it came out. Now, if I can even remember some details from a trailer a week later, it is an achievement 😛

So, I decided to create a ToDo app which would remember stuff for me — movies, books, TV shows etc. and allow me to add a link to a site with details (such as IMDB) so that I can read about the movie in the app itself instead of going searching online.

This actually works pretty well for me in terms of remembering to catch up on a movie when it came out — especially after I added a release date to the list 🙂

But then, I realized that I can use the same app for coding tasks too. Sure, I guess it should have been obvious, but I already had a separate app for jotting down coding tasks …

Now, my app is morphing again as I look at ways to make the coding tasks side of things work with my regular flow.

Would it have been better to keep this as two separate apps?

But then I’d have to split development time between the two apps. This way, I can do all the dev work in one project.

However, the app might become “heavier” trying to accommodate two separate types of data/workflows …

Decisions, decisions 😛

#Coding #Swift #SwiftUI #iOS #macOS #Tasks #DesignDecisions

Whether it's software development, or simply using software, it’s the little things that get you 🙂

For example, quite a few Mastodon clients (or Twitter clients for that matter) do not allow you to simply highlight a bit of text and copy it … Sure, this might come from platform limitations, but still, it’s something that a user might reasonably expect to do.

Similarly, most URLs can only be clicked on to open in a browser — you can’t copy the URL or share it directly (except of course, by first opening in the browser and then sharing).

I ran into the latter issue with my Ice Cubes fork since I read Mastodon posts on my MacBook but share links to my iPhone to read longer articles there.

“Why?” you ask, well that’s a longer story for a different post perhaps, but the fact remains that we are constantly being constrained as to what we can do with content and software.

Is it just laziness on the part of developers? Or developers thinking that something wouldn’t be needed since 95% of the users don’t do things that way? Or, is it just that we are being herded in a certain direction by the platforms themselves?

I don’t know … But this is probably one of the reasons why I increasingly turn to building my own software — because then I can shape it to meet my own needs 😛

#Coding #UX #Features #UserFriendly

If you are interested in Apple Vision Pro from a technical/hardware perspective, you might want to read the analysis from Hypervision here:

https://www.hypervision.ai/apple-vp-optics-insights

And once you are done with that, you might want to take a look at Karl Guttag’s fourth article in his series about Apple Vision Pro which breaks down the Hypervision article into a slightly more digestible format 🙂

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/26/apple-vision-pro-part-4-hypervision-pancake-optics-analysis/

The Guttag post isn’t very heavy on Vision Pro info (besides what Hypervision said) but it does give some additional background on Hypervision itself.

#Apple #VisionPro #Hardware #Optics #AR #VR

Watched “Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3679040) today …

I’m not a huge fan of post-2000 Salman Khan. I used to enjoy his 90s movies a lot. In fact, his “Maine Pyar Kiya” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100095) was instrumental in me getting back into Hindi movies and for me learning Hindi. But the post-2000 (or somewhere after the 2010s maybe?) Salman Khan became a bit of a cliché for me — he lost the charm that he had in the early movies and became all about the muscles and about speaking a certain way.

This movie started in the same style that has become habitual for Salman Khan movies these days. Then I began to get a sense of déja vu, it felt as if I’d knew certain plot elements from somewhere but couldn’t quite put my finger on it …

A little bit of research revealed that this was a remake of 2014’s “Veeram” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3320578). OK, so that made sense 🙂

The good parts? The callbacks to “Maine Pyar Kiya” (and the Bhagyashree cameo) which brought back old memories, the appearance of Telugu stars like Venkatesh and Jagapathi Babu and the bit of South Indian exposure.

The rest, for me at least, was mostly average. I find it interesting that “Veeram” was written for an older Ajith Kumar and it mostly worked, but here, Salman still tries to be a young man instead of playing an older character 😛

#Movies #MiniReview #Hindi #Bollywood #Remake

So, I've been working on a new Mastodon client. (It’s what, my fifth or sixth Mastodon client? 😛)

I started with IceCubes since it seemed to work well with Akkoma and I simply wanted to add a couple of features that I wanted and then be done …

But unfortunately, “seemed” turned out to be the operative word here 😀 The existing implementation worked relatively OK with Akkoma, but there were things which were failing behind the scenes with no warnings.

Basically, their POST implementation for API endpoints was flawed, especially when it came to non-Mastodon servers. I had pointed this out a while back and they seemed to have made some changes but the changes basically worked for some API endpoints but not for others and when it failed, there was no warning to the user.

So I had to either know that something failed, or run the app via Xcode and watch the console for issues.

I basically ended up reworking the project totally so that it was easier to work with and then began adding the fixes that were needed for Akkoma and the features I wanted.

It’s taking shape slowly but I’m happy with where it’s going …

#Coding #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #iOS #MastodonClient