@mikeymikey Wasn’t my intention to imply that @trode's advice wasn't good, by any means. My apologies if it came across that way, Blake 🙂

I didn’t know of the #macadmin Slack before now but will probably lurk there now 🙂

@trode I’ve actually figured out what I needed to do, thanks 🙂 This was more of a reflection (after the fact) on how difficult it is to find info about certain areas of macOS development ….

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!

The Loo at the End of the World. Now in colour! Made in #Procreate using Frankentoon’s great Nomad 2 #brushes #mastoart #mastodonart #digitalpaint #mastoartist #illustration #drawing #seagull #sea #island #boat

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

@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