New iOS, and my phone seems to drain battery faster ...

Created a document with all the ways to turn off battery draining processes. Seems to have made a huge difference.

Now experimenting with Shortcuts to turn on/off battery drainers as needed. Looking pretty good.

Mix in automated Shortcuts to turn off stuff when I go to sleep and turn them back on when I get up, and things hopefully just work? Maybe? 😛

#iOS #Battery #Automation #Shortcuts #PowerDrain

Recently, British detective shows have not had the quirkiness and humour which makes them so enjoyable and watchable ...

Enter, "Mrs. Sidhu Investigates" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21259542)

It has the humour, the quirkiness ... and it has Meera Syal.

What's not to like? 🙂

This is one of the good ones. Give it a try, you won’t regret it!

#TV #Detective #Mystery #British #UK

I'm trying to get going on a game since I've got the itch to do another game ...

I've been looking at free assets to build a quick demo version to see if the idea holds up and it seems sword wielding men are the most common characters you can find?

What about women/children? Or people not prone to violence?

I just find this interesting ... and telling ...

I can go into more detail — like how the first female character I found was tagged with “extra breast bouncing for sexiness” (or something similar). I found that rather disturbing — is the only attribute to identify you as female, bouncing breasts?

Is this how that particular person sees the world? Or are they just trying to be “marketable”?

#Games #GameDev #Artwork #Characters

"Blue Beetle" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9362930) is just mostly annoying ...

His family are annoying, the situations aren't funny, the beetle AI is stupid, and generally, it was a huge disappointment since I expected so much more from the movie ...

#Movies #DCComics #Hollywood #DCHeroes #BlueBeetle

@whoosh Yep, we really enjoyed the first episode as well 🙂 So looking forward to watching the rest …

The Indian version tried too hard to add comic elements and it just didn’t work … The Indian version of “Flower of Evil” was much better, but maybe a flash in the pan?

Since Indian remakes of KDramas seem to be picking up, I guess we’ll know soon?

"MY3" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28744259) is the Indian remake of "I'm Not a Robot" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7521778)

Watched the first episode of "MY3" and it was rather horrible. Tried the first episode of the Korean original and that actually looks much better ...

#TV #Indian #Korean #Hindi #SciFi #KDrama

Keerthy Suresh (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm7146337), who's 31, has appeared as the sister for both Rajinikanth, 72, and Chiranjeevi, 68.

Not quite sure how that family math works, but who am I to question Indian cinema? 😛

#IndianCinema #Tollywood #Kollywood

I haven't read "Fables" recently, but I do remember how excited I was when I first read it — it was a brilliant interpretation of classic fables.

This is a brilliant move by Bill Willingham to free "Fables" from the clutches of DC 🙂

https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/willingham-sends-fables-into-the

It’s also a great way to let others play in your sandbox and simply enjoy creating new content for an IP that you might love.

So many possibilities …

#Fables #PublicDomain #Copyright #DC #Comics

Apple’s “Foundation" has bothered me for a while since it’s just not Asimov’s “Foundation” except in name …

But today’s episode is so full of crap in so many ways that I can’t even begin to get into it 😛

There were logic holes, plot holes, and holes of all sorts. Ugh.

#TV #Foundation

@Alexbbrown I meant using the shared audio feature of AirPods. The audio sharing wasn't the issue though since that's much improved over using a hardware splitter with the shared audio feature 🙂

The issue is using a single iPad between the two of us for the same content.

Ideally, what I wanted was to be able to watch the same content on two devices (without WiFi, so SharePlay might be out .. though I'm still looking into it) and have the playback synced. This should also lend to being able to use devices like the XReal glasses to get a much bigger screen/display but still have synced playback ... At least, that's the dream 🙂

I know this is a long answer for the headphone question 😛 As far as headphones go, our current solution only works for two. But the solution I'm working on should work for more than two as well ...

So this is my day so far:
Update iPhone to iOS 17 RC ✅
Update macBook to macOS 14 RC ✅
Update Xcode to Xcode 15 RC ✅

Now to actually get work done 😛

#DevLife #BetaCycle #iOS #macOS

Would have had to stay up to watch the Apple event last night. Went to sleep instead.

Got up in the morning and discovered I'd missed nothing since all the important stuff had already been leaked weeks in advance 😛

#Apple #iPhone #NewHardware

@Rycaut Since my memory is failing me (😛) I couldn’t remember what the change to SharePlay was this year. So went back through my old posts just now and realized that you can now (supposedly) start SharePlay sessions over AirDrop! That would be interesting to try and as soon as I have two iOS 17 devices (and provided the feature is available now) I want to try that out and see if the lack of Internet access affects things.

As for your suggestion about a small WiFi network, that’s there already with multiplier connectivity 🙂 You can connect multiple iOS/macOS devices without a network to chat, watch videos, or to transfer files. That’s what I’m using to implement my idea …

Just not sure if that’s good enough speed-wise though since I’ve not had enough time to test this yet. The basic idea works, and I’ve gotten file transfers working too. Am working on chat at the moment, but I really need to do more testing …

Oh yeah, in case you’re interested, the SharePlay session from this year that probably has the info (I forget now if I even watched it) is this one:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10239/

@Rycaut Yep, aware of SharePlay, but if I’m not mistaken, it’s pretty limited if you don’t have Internet access. I believe this might have changed with iOS 17 (I vaguely remember a conversation I had with somebody about this after WWDC) but I haven’t bothered to check it out yet …

Should do that soon though, thanks for the reminder 🙂

Also, FaceTime is blocked in certain countries (like the UAE) so that you can’t use it for video calls. So I’m not sure how that ties into the SharePlay part of it … Guess I’ll find out …

My wife and I, we watch almost everything together — movies, TV shows, even YouTube videos.

This can be challenging during travel since we prefer to watch our own content instead of that provided by the airline. Watching on a single iPad with shared headphones is not a great experience.

I'm thinking of an app to fix this issue which allows us to watch the same content on two different devices, but synced.

Not sure if this helps anybody but us? Anybody else find this useful?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have been hoping somebody else would fix it (like Apple VisionPro) but not sure that’ll happen …

So I’m going to take a stab at fixing it myself 🙂

#Entertainment #Sharing #iOS #macOS #Coding

@jimsalter There’s also the inverse to Clarke’s third law which goes: “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. “ ( … and a few other variants)

And so the inverset to your corollary would be:
Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from ignorance 😛

@callimachus "Jawan" is on my list to watch, but given my location, probably won't get to see it till it starts streaming 🙂 No idea when that will be ...

I used to be a huge SRK fan, but none of his recent movies have hit home for me. The last that I can remember working for me was "Chennai Express" ....

The trailer looked interesting though. And with Atlee and some southern exposure in the mix, I have to say that I'm really curious ...

A part of the trailer made me think of "Jailer", and so I'm wondering if there are similarities or not 🙂

"Rocky aur Rani kii Prem Kahaani" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14993250) is a wonderful movie which challenges stereotypes, bias, prejudice, and a lot more things.

Plus, it's funny (if you like a certain type of humour) and revives some great Bollywood songs too 😛

I didn't think I'd like the movie as much as I did since the beginning was a bit ... umm rocky for me. But then the movie hit its stride and just kept going full steam ahead!

If you’ve watched “Santhosh Subramaniyam”, you might see some similarities, but I think they did it better with regards to highlighting socially relevant themes here …

Definitely worth a watch!

#Movies #Hindi #Bollywood #Indian

I finally got around to trying out the AGD Interactive version of "King's Quest I" (http://agdinteractive.com/games/kq1/about/about.html) and it looks much nicer than the VGA remake from Sierra 🙂

Comparison screenshots below ...

Their macOS app is 32-bit and so won't work on my version of macOS, so I had to resort to CrossOver (https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover) to get it working. But it does work fine on the latest CrossOver (with some tweaking ...)

The CrossOver compatibility database says that the game will install but won’t run. And that’s how it looked on first install with CrossOver 23 too, but once I enabled the DXVK option (which enables Vulcan for Direct3D, if I’m not mistaken), it seemed to work fine …

#Games #KingsQuest #Remake #CrossOver