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

@davemark I’ll be trying out Threads. It’s good to know the options out there and to figure out what works for you personally 🙂

Got access to T2 today, so trying that out too …

⚪ 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

@090905x Right now, probably no 🙂 But my “right now” is generally like within the last few days since that’s as far as I can remember most details …

We (my wife and I) did enjoy “Duranga” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21370880) a few weeks back but that’s TV and not movies. At the moment though, most of the Indian stuff that I really remember and liked are TV shows. Like “Farzi” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15477488) and “Dahaad” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19868314).

“Duranga” was interesting but got a little logic-challenged towards the end. In case you hadn’t heard of it, it’s a remake of a Korean show “Flower of Evil” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11691684) and we are watching the original at the moment since we can’t wait for season 2 of “Duranga” to come out and unfortunately, even the Korean show suffers a lot from this lack-of-logic issue in the second half 🙂

The last movie I do remember watching and really liking was “Ashoka Vanamlo Arjuna Kalyanam” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15373594) but that was a month or two ago?

What have you seen lately that you really liked?

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

@090905x Welcome 🙂 I like some of those stuff too and occasionally (OK, more than occasionally) post about Indian cinema … But my stuff tends to be more South Indian (Telugu/Tamil) than Hindi/Bollywood since I can’t seem to find that many good Bollywood movies any longer — at least, ones that I like 🙂

@SoniaSulaiman I blog but infrequently 🙂 Used to do some serialised SF here:

https://write.farook.org/

But haven’t done the stories in a while. The blog became more about machine learning and then it just kind of stopped getting updates. These days, I just do long-form posts here when I feel like writing ….

Did try a serialised story on here too but ran out of steam/interest 🙂

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

@AndrewMettier LOL. Well, I used to have a semi-photographic memory, but now I have to rely on my phone 😛

But yeah, I guess I might as well put those processor cycles to work since I certainly don’t use it for making phone calls 😀

@AngelaPreston Thank you. Honestly though, I thought it was overkill — who else was going to use it besides me given that there’s like a ton of ToDo apps out there? 😛

But creating an app which met my exact needs seemed like the way to go when I did it. And here we are 🙂

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

@Bluedonkey Yep, I’ve noticed that pattern too — I mean no selection on the main list (probably because a tap will take you to the detail view) but on the detail view you can select text 🙂

I simply implemented a context menu on the main list so that you can just copy the post text instead. Doesn’t have the flexibility of selecting text, but better than nothing?

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