I've been made redundant from my job, effective tomorrow.

So... if you know anyone who's in need of a bioinformatician to work remotely on small bioinformatics projects, please let me know.

@AngelaPreston Sorry about all the negative stuff and I do know how you feel about not wanting to talk about it. But I think you should talk about these things since it does make you feel a little bit better just having talked about it.

For years, till I met my wife, I didn't talk to anybody about a lot of things. Now, with her, I think I talk a bit too much since I talk her ear off 😛And sometimes it's just sensory-overload for her and she'll tell me that she needs some quiet time. It doesn't help that we are together 24/7. But overall we like it and having her to talk stuff out has helped me immensely.

Not sure if any of that actually helps, but if you need to talk, I'm sure that I and many others here are willing to listen 🙂

Hope you have a great day today!

@AngelaPreston We've been using a Roku stick for about 6 years now and when I started reading your post that was what I was thinking of suggesting before I realized you'd used a Roku 🙂

We found the Roku stick so easy while traveling since we can turn any TV into a smart TV. We can share our screens to the TV, and also, as you mentioned, use additional apps to add extra channels that we normally wouldn't have used.

And so far, the same stick has worked fine for 6 years. It does complain about overheating at times, but generally it still chugs on ... 🙂

Affinity has a sale on till the 15th of August which is well worth it if you're interested 🙂
https://affinity.serif.com

I have no affiliation to them but I bought two of the Affinity apps back in 2016 or 2017 and I think it might have cost something like $50 and I received updates for all those years for the $50 I paid.

Didn't update to the V2 apps because I had stopped doing anything significantly graphics related for years. Just started working on some artwork and took a look and I could upgrade to their universal suite (all their apps for all supported platforms — macOS, Windows, and iPadOS) for around $65. I did since that seemed like a great deal 🙂

I have not been disappointed so far. Still loving working with their apps to create graphics and artwork. Will post some samples soon ... (possibly).

Now that I've finisehd my second novel and can put off starting on editing till tomorrow, I am going to do some coding today 🙂

I've wanted to add favourites and bookmarks lists to my Flutter Fedi client and I also discovered a bug wtih really long threads and showing the entire thread. Sounds like enough stuff to keep me occupied for today 😛

#CodingLife #WritingLife

And ... The End 🙂(Though I've never actually put that at the end of a novel since the story always continues ...)

I've finally finished novel #2 — "Sir Lanka Files" (no, not a typo).

I thought I had 1.5 chapters to go according to my original plan (and because I like round numbers and 1.5 chapters would have put the chapter count at 30).

But as I finished chapter 29, I realized that I had a better ending with chapter 29 (and a hook for the next novel). So I stopped at chapter 29 even though a part of my brain was screaming at me for ending on 29 😛

Now I begin the editing. So another month or so at least before it's ready for publishing?

#Writing #SciFi #IndieAuthor #FinallyDone

Forgetting things when you are a certain age is normal 🙂I never remember what I had for lunch yesterday and I'm fine with that.

But I vividly remember a lot of stuff from when I was like 2 years old up to about my 20s and it's a little bit more poignant when I think I've forgotten something from that period ...

Yesterday I was talking to a friend from school whom I'd known since the early 80s. I mentioned another friend from the same school that I'd met in the early 90s (but who I hadn't known at school) and this friend said something like "What do you mean? He was in the same class as you!"

I was dumbfounded. Had I known he was my classmate when I met him in the 90s? Or had we not recognized each other at all? All I remember about him was from meeting him in the 90s. Nothing about knowing himi from the 80s.

So I contacted this other friend. He said that he hadn't known me before the 90s even though we'd gone to the same school (it was a big school ...)

You can't imagine how relieved I felt 🙂 I had not lost a chunk of my childhood memories after all.

It later turned out that my first friend had confused the other one with somebody else who had the same name ... But for a while there, I really wasn't sure if I was losing chunks of memory or if my friend was wrong or if something else was going on.

It's funny the things we cling to 🙂

Fantasy, Lore, & More: Lightning & Ember

Hi, I'm indie fantasy author, Melinda Kucsera, and in this episode, E.B. Repetto is joining me to talk about her book, Lightning & Ember. What's it about? Akina de Kitamura and her twin sister Miki, bastard children of a Volandrian nobleman and a Solterrean commoner, struggle for acceptance in Volandrian nobility. Despite their uncle's favor, they face scorn at the prestigious Academy.

http://melindakucsera.com/2024/07/13/fantasy-lore-more-lightning-ember/

@jann Me too 🙂I haven't laughed this much at a movie in a long time ...

I didn't expect much from "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3083016) but I haven't had so much fun in a long time watching a movie 🙂This is old school movies as I remember them!

#Movies #English #BeverlyHillsCop #Action

@MichaelWhelan These were the covers that made me buy (and read) science fiction back in the day 🙂

@liaizon Yes 🙂

Since Mastonaut, I'd done two other customized clients in Swift. One based off of Tusker and another based off of IceCubes but aimed more at macOS. I was using the IceCubes based one for a good while and it had all the features I wanted but that was the one which was getting too slow for certain things ...

The Flutter one is a completely new project but it allows me to run on a bunch more platforms than any of the Swift ones did.

After waiting like a couple of weeks, my author page on Amazon is finally up 🙂

Only 3 books there (and two are on iOS programming) but hopefully, I'll have one more to join the fiction category soon since I’m 1.5 chapters away from completing my second novel …

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Fahim-Farook/author/B0D7789CLF

#Writing #SupportIndieAuthors #SciFi

I have been using my Flutter Fedi client more and more and it continues to be faster than the Swift version that I wrote previously.

I'd be really curious to see if this is an issue with the Swift code I wrote or if it is an inherent issue with Swift itself. Not trying to start a holy war here, but I am curious.

But given that the Swift codebase is huge and relies on a local database and I had stripped out database functionality from the Flutter app to make it simpler, I can't really say that I'm comparing Apples to Apples.

But ... the Flutter app was faster even before I made any of the optimizations.

Anyway, I guess I'm sticking to the Flutter app since it's more cross-platform friendly and allows me to take the app to a new platform should I decide to leave Apple-land ... and that actually looks like a possibility at this point.

@BobWilliams LOL. I guess we just got to do the best we can, Bob 😀

@BobWilliams Not sure how old you are, but I believe you since I find it harder to learn things now too and I'm 50+ 🙂

I've never read the manual either. I find it easier to just do things and learn that way. But that means I need a project that I'm invested in. Toy projects just don't work for learning.

That was what was stopping me from really learning Affinity Designer. Hoping that the new project I'm working on cures that, but no idea if it will or not 😛

@AngelaPreston I don't like games where I have to fight either 🙂In fact, I specifically avoid games which involve fighting except probably for "Diablo" but that's probably a hang-over from younger days .. Plus the fact that I can play it with my wife 😛

Will let you know if I actually get some time to play "Planet Crafter" beyond the initial gameplay 🙂

@AngelaPreston Sorry about the tangent on "No Man's Sky" ... just thinking out loud 🙂I like exploration games but "No Man's Sky" is huge and all you do is explore. It just gets a little unfulfilling after a while.

But I'm hoping that "Planet Crafer" will prove more satisfying with the terraforming aspect. I just need to find the time to play now 😛

@BobWilliams Yeah, you can't beat them for the price .. and (mostly) features 🙂I think we bought v1 about 7 years ago and we got updates for all those years for that one single payment ...

But I am in the same boat as you when it comes to using it 🙂I forgot everything I knew after the last time since I didn't use it for several years. Now re-learning since I want to do some stuff at the moment but it's already very easy to get back into ...

@BobWilliams Us too .. I mean happy with Affinity 🙂 We used to use it all the time for personal projects and then I got really busy and personal projects tapered off.

So we didn't upgrade to v2 when it came out. But we realized yesterday that we can get a universal license at the moment for like $60 (with upgrade pricing + discount) and be able to use the whole suite on macOS, Windows, and iPad. Seemed like a great deal. So we went for it 🙂