@woltiv Yeah, it felt as if I could do anything back then while being on IRC — now, I hardly get any work done if somebody’s talking in the background 😛

Feist was one of my mainstays of reading for a long time since he’d churn out a book a year fairly regularly. Then he ended the Riftwar Cycle and that was that … I think I had most of his books in my collection but then we started traveling and had to leave all the books behind …

Regarding Mastodon, it was fairly straightforward for the two I tried. I first tried GoToSocial (https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial) and it was extremely easy to set up and was very low on resources back then. It just used SQLite for the DB. But it was missing some of the features I wanted and so I switched to Akkoma (https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/) which was slightly more complicated to run but was still easier than setting up Mastodon 😛

Akkoma has all the features I wanted but does require about 4GB of RAM, if I recall correctly. So if you want light on resources (and possibly running off of a Raspberry Pi) then GoToSocial might fit the bill better. Plus, I believe it’s more mature now and has more features…

I've been trying out ComfyUI and trying different image workflows, but haven’t been happy with the output till now … I finally have a workflow which produces images that I’m happy with 🙂

So here are my images for the day for the prompt: “rabbit astronauts on a arboreal world, colorful, highly detailed, cinematic, artstation”

Of course, dragging any of the images onto the ComfyUI interface should load the prompt and settings for you — provided the server is not stripping anything off of the images …

#StableDiffusion #GeneratedArt #ComfyUI

@woltiv Not sure if I’m recalling your name or Pug from the Midkemia series by Raymond E. Feist, but I do remember the name 🙂

It’s been a long time … Somebody else from those days found me on here a few weeks/months back as well and I was totally surprised.

Those were good times 🙂

@woltiv Yep, that’s me 🙂

If you were active in the LiteStep community, I might remember your name — did you go by a different name/handle back then?

Started watching “Chatrapathi” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13545522) since I’d heard a few comments that the main actor did a great job in the movie …

But then one of the first scenes was somebody saying how much they loved someone and then a few scenes later believing a lie about the person they professed to love, without any proof, and without any investigation. How deep was their love/trust if they are so easily swayed?

That basically coloured my view of the movie from that point on … I haven’t gotten a lot further, but I can already tell that this is not a movie that’s going to be crafted in a way that I’ll actually like it 😛

#Movies #Hindi #Bollywood

Watched "Jailer" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11663228) and while it has the usual Rajnikanth style, though at a slightly more muted level given his advancing age, it was overall not a movie that probably would not appeal to anybody other than die-hard Rajni fans since it really doesn’t make a lot of sense 😛

The first half of the movie might have kind of worked, given some suspension-of-disbelief, since it was a fairly straightforward story which (kind of worked). But the latter half had a heist segment which didn’t make a lot of sense nor was warranted since the application of a smidgen of logic at the end of the first half would have prevented that storyline altogether 🙂

Overall though, it was good to see Rajni in action (and Mohanlal too) and I think I’ll leave it at that …

#Movies #Tamil #Kollywood #Rajnikanth #Mohanlal

Oh, found one app which (possibly) does not work with the Sonoma betas — Defult Folder X.

The current version of Default Folder X does not work with Sonoma. It might be that this is simply a permissions issue and once you grant the necessary permissions (I believe Accessibility and Full Disk Access) it works correctly, but it used to work fine in Ventura but would not work on Sonoma.

However, there’s a new beta for Default Folder X which does work correctly with Sonoma. If interested, you can get it here:

https://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/beta.html

#SonomaBeta #macOS #DefaultFolderX #NotWorking #SonomaUnsupported

I decided to upgrade (well, OK, switch) to Sonoma Beta 6 yesterday since I really wanted some of the CoreML enhancements for #MachineLearning (especially #StableDiffusion model loading) that Sonoma brings along …

The switchover itself was fairly uneventful and I like some of the changes and hate a few others 😛 Overall, it works (mostly) OK and I have not run into any issues with any of my existing apps.

But then today, I ran into not one but two issues with my custom apps 😀

One turned out to be something that I could fix quickly with a code change but I haven’t been able to figure out the other one still. And both of these apps were working fine with no crashes till now …

Ah, well, the joys of living on the crashing edge 😛

#SonomaBeta #Apple #macOS #Swift #Coding

According to this Telugu movie I'm watching at the moment, “Parkinson’s is a disease that affects only rich people”.

Hah! The things you learn (and I say this very loosely) from movies 🙂

#MovieWisdom #MovieFacts #Surreal #WhereDidTheyLearnThat

@lishaberzins I do enjoy hearing about #writing (which is how I found you since I follow the hashtag) though I don't write about writing that much these days 🙂

One way I’ve found to make my timeline more interesting is to follow hashtags of interest and then follow the people who make interesting posts under that hashtag … but you might be already doing that? 🙂

@penciledpage You’re welcome 🙂 Weinbaum wrote some great stuff but unfortunately, if I recall correctly, died very young ….

@guybrooker Thanks 🙂

I hadn’t considered releasing because I wasn’t sure if there was a need for another editor since I myself have purchased like three different editors over the years 😛

The trouble generally is that releasing means that I have to make features discoverable for others, not just myself. But I guess if it’s useful to me maybe it helps others too? I’ll think about it …

If you want to test it out, let me know. I can always set up a quick TestFlight release and that’ll always help me figure out if a feature is immediately discoverable/easy to use or not, I guess?

@penciledpage The sense of wonder was what got me into science fiction in the first place. I still remember reading Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” and how it painted Mars …

I think that story was partially instrumental in getting me to read Bradbury in the first place because he too had stories about Mars and I wanted to feel the same sense of wonder 🙂

I have at least 3 - 4 subtitle editors installed on my machine. Each one of them does one particular bit well, but falls down on others …

For example, one will take a subtitle file which does not quite match the movie and re-arrange the subtitles by rearranging the time to somewhat match the movie. But if there’s an unexpected addition to the video (a left over ad for example) all the subtitle would be quite off. It doesn’t have an option to let me fix things block by block easily nor add missing subtitles to the file.

Another lets me add missing subtitles or edit subtitles easily, but often gets the timecode and/or subtitle number wrong and doesn’t let me modify easily.

In fact, some of the above editors mess up the original subtitle file so much, that it’s hard to use the subtitles afterwards at all 😛

I finally got fed up of this and decided to create my own subtitle editor which has the features that I want.

Started with somebody else’s abandoned initial work and was able to get something working fairly quickly. The original was meant to be simply a subtile editor — you could edit the text for the subtitles and that was it …

I wanted to fix subtitles or the timecodes, insert new subtitle lines, delete existing ones, or move lines around. And also, be able to see when there are issues with the original subtitle file.

I think I’ve managed to achieve all of that and for the first time ever, I was able to fix a full subtitle file for a movie without getting frustrated 🙂

So yeah, progress …

#Subtitles #Apple #SwiftUI #Catalyst #Coding #PersonalProjects

@penciledpage I’m glad that it was a book that you didn’t own already 🙂 I have only vague memories of “The Martian Chronicles” since I think I read it over 30 years ago but I remember the feeling of wonder I had while reading it still …

@penciledpage I was thinking “Bradbury” when I saw the clues, but not a specific book. So didn’t really have a guess 🙂

Plus, I was certain that this would be a more recent book than something by Bradbury …

@alsv_ @CTGT @Violinknitter @BarrenPlanet @agasramirez @noellemitchell

Part 3 in (what is now a four part series) of posts by Karl Guttag on using Apple VisionPro as a monitor replacement is now out:

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/20/apple-vision-pro-part-5c-more-on-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

This part compares a desktop monitor set up to the Meta Quest Pro and extrapolates the results to guess at what the experience might be on the Apple Vision Pro.

Disclaimer (since it appears that I have to add this to this type of post 😛) — I am not the author of the post in question. I am also not affiliated with Karl in any way.

I do find his opinions useful as a yardstick for figuring out AR/VR related stuff and for making my own mind up.

If you are annoyed because somebody dared to “besmirch” Apple or discuss a product that’s not released yet, please vent somewhere else and not at me 🙂

On the other hand, if you’ve experienced AVP yourself or have experience in the field and have a differing opinion, or even a similar one, I’d be interested to hear about what you think since finding a compact, portable monitor replacement has been a goal of mine for years …

#AppleVisionPro #Apple #Hardware #Analysis #MetaQuestPro #MonitorReplacement

@penciledpage I did find your post due to the hashtags. So it’s working … It might be that people don’t know what to guess at maybe? 🙂

I wondered what the book was, but had on guesses and so would have just kept on wondering and not responded if I hadn’t seen this post in the replies …

@ruthnineke Yes, please 🙂 Would still like an invite. Please let me know what you need from my side …