Being an #Apple user in 2024 is basically:

- I LOVE their hardware.
- I’m AFRAID of what they’ll do to their software and operating systems.
- I’m DISGUSTED by everything else they do to developers and users like myself.

Hey friends, I’m trying to keep my family afloat. Work is rather light on ATM.

Things i can do for you:
* design and build custom one off machinery/tools/electronics/toys/cosplay
* research recommend and deploy iot solutions
* build hardware firmware and software
* manage teams/projects
* tech writing
* commissions for flash fiction (see bio)

Accepting work anywhere in the range 30min to full time. #Fedihired

Trip Tunes v1.2 is now live on the App Store! It has greatly improved variety and uniqueness in playlists due to some updates to the prompt and some client-side magic.

If you give it a try, let me know how the playlists are!

@stroughtonsmith Every time I hear about Phil Schiller, or have an interaction which is somehow connected to him — like an App Store rejection — I always think that he's Apple's Ballmer. Seems to have the same kind of attitudes, and the same overall net effect for his company.

@orionkidder It lets you figure out overused words at the moment, possibly 🙂It shows you lists of unique words in your text as well as repeated words and their count.

It also does some other text analysis about words which appear together but that's not quite ready yet.

The idea is that I'll add additional functionality which allows you to add a list of words or phrases that you want to watch out for and the app will highlight the occurencce of these in the document too. But that parts not done yet.

I've been working on my Scrivener text analyzer over the weekend and while I initially thought that it might take about 3 - 4 days at least to see progress, I've been able to get to a fairly functional level in just two days 🙂

At this point, I have a working app which can load a Scrivener document, extract just the manuscript text, parse it and provide information and identify components of text — like unique words, or repeated words and the word count.

If you select one of the words from the list, the viewer highlights every occurence of the word in the document. So I'm very pleased with where things are now 🙂

All that remains is to do the following:
1. Add the ability to detect specific types of words like nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.
2. Add the ability to detect/hightlight specific words or phrases added by the user.

At that point, I believe it does everything that I want it to do. This should work on any platform but I have only tested under macOS. If anybody is interested in testing it out, let me know and I'll see about setting up a download.

#WritingTools #Coding #Scrivener #Flutter #macOS #SideProjects #Writing
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I watched three Indian movies this weekend in a mix of languages: one Tamil and two Malayalam. I liked all of them to one degree or another, but they all had one frustrating feature — they all ended with a hook for a sequel.

Two were blatant in the story wasn't really even complete. One was a little bit more unobtrusive. But it's really annoying that this happens more and more often.

One of the things I hated about TV shows was that the season would end in a cliffhanger and you don't know if the story would continue or not. Now it feels as if more and more movies are doing that too. I want a complete story, darn it! 😛

#Movies #Indian #Contemplations

I first became aware of Mammootty in 1991 when he did a Tamil movie. He's better known in Malayalam cinema and I hadn't started watching Malayalam movies back then. But I watch Malayalam movies now and "Turbo" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29608104) proves that Mammootty hasn't lost his touch. He's so great in it from the very first frame he's in 🙂

The movie itself is a fun ride which just keeps accelerating as it moves forward. From a small incident involving a personal matter, it gradually builds up to a financial scam which affects the whole state of Tamil Nadu. I loved how the story built up and except for a few missteps towards the end, I think it was great writing!

#Movies #Malayalam #Mammootty #Turbo

I've been working with Flutter again for less than three months now. And in that time span, I've created three apps which are at least semi-functional, not to mention several others that I've started but not finished.

The three apps are:
1. A FediClient which is mostly complete. It works for my needs but doens't have content warnings and shortening of long posts.

2. An EPUB viewer. This one needs work because the viewer works but doens't have searching or ability to highlight words in a book and take actions with the highlighted content.

3. A Scrivener file analyzer. This ones my latest and was started yesterday but already pretty close to what I want.

Given that a Flutter app can be multiplatform and I've gotten so much done within such a short time, I think I'm definitely sold on switching over to Flutter for all my personal projects 🙂

#Coding #Flutter #Swift #Decisions

Okay, so it's now been over a _year_ since my last contract ended, and this is now officially my longest stint of unemployment ever in my life.

@moira and I are still getting by on our extremely tight budget, but it sure would be nice to have a bit more pocket change.

So Mastodon, if anybody out there would like to hire me for any of the following for freelance work, I'd love to hear from you:

- Proofreading or beta reading for any authors
- One-shot test pass of your website
- Consulting with you about how to set up a Wordpress website, or helping you with questions about the one you have

1/

#Proofreading #BetaReading #WebTesting #Freelance #GetFediHired #Writing #Authors

Our latest indie/small press releases:

https://www.limfic.com

The Secret of the Martian Girl
Colin Alexander
Sci Fi

https://www.limfic.com/book/the-secret-of-the-martian-girl/

Ham and Echo: Encounter the Kitchi Mizhe
M. Jay Williams
Fantasy

https://www.limfic.com/book/ham-and-echo-encounter-the-kitchi-mizhe/

------------

Sunflowers In the Snow
Dawn Bonanno
Fantasy

https://www.limfic.com/book/sunflowers-in-the-snow/

Sign up to be notified of new Limfic.com releases weekly!

https://www.limfic.com/join-our-email-list/

#NewRelease #ScienceFiction #Fantasy #Writing

A very long time ago, I wrote a Word macro to help writers detect specific types of words (adverbs, passive voice etc.) in their writing. You can still find that macro here:
https://absolutewrite.com/forums/index.php?threads/helpful-macro.26020/

I was talking to somebody on here about it a day or two ago and I realized that my current writing tool, Scrivener, does not really let me do something similar. I looked into it and it turns out that Scrivener does not have any macro or scripting functionality, but the developers are OK with others writing third-party apps which access the Scrivener files and do stuff with the data.

So I thought I might as well work on that this weekend 🙂Thanks to the helpful Scrivener developers, I was able to figure out how to access the Scrivener file and read only the data I wanted fairly quickly.

The issue here was that a Scrivener file can contain many types of textual content besides your manuscript — there can be notes, research, thoughts, quotes, whatever.

You don't want all that text to be analyzed. You only want your manustcript text to be analyzed for particular types of words. That part (getting only the manuscript text) is now functional 🙂

Now I have to figure out how to do the actual word analysis. My original Word macro was pretty basic. I feel that there might be better ways to do this now. So I'm going to look around a bit and see what approach might work better.

If I go back to the original word lists approach, that's pretty simple to implement. But hopefully, I can find something a bit more automated which doesn't involve people typing in lists of words?

#Coding #SideProject #Flutter #Writing #Scrivener #Authors
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"Indian 2" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8066940/) looked good at the beginning, faltered in the middle, and got really bad towards the end.

Same old melodrama. Apparently, people don't understand that their actions have consequences and will abrogate responsibility when the actions come home to roost. They want a saviour, but won't do anything for themselves. Just annoying, because it's true 😛

Also, the movie doesn't give you a satisfying end and sets it up for another movie which apparently brings up the tired old, "what the British did" story ....

Movies #Tamil #Indian2

@Emmacox I was curious and took a look at the options available with Scrivener. Apparently, they don't provide any way to script or to add plugins. So apparently that path is out 😞

However, they do have an option under Edit > Writing Tools > Linugistic Focus... which allows you to find some types of words. But not words from a custom list.

The Scriverner documents are just RTF files. So it should be possible to simply load the files in a separate app and do any kind of search you want. I might look into this if I have some time.

@Emmacox Yep, me too 🙂I mean once I switched to Scrivener, I stopped looking into whether there is any scripting/automation capabilities ....

You've given me the motivation I needed to look into this. So will probably check into it this weekend. Will let you know if I find anything useful.

@Emmacox When I used Word, I had a Word macro which would find all these words (or a specific type of word) when I ran the macro 🙂 I just had to add a new word to the list and I was (mostly) done ...

Haven't actually figured out what to do now that I've switched away from Word.

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How Arthur C. Clarke forwarded my article to Tom Hanks ...

https://www.tiktok.com/@fahimauthor/video/7401095359490952453

#ArthurCClarke #TomHanks #Writing #Reminiscing #ScienceFiction

well, i've been laid off.

gonna sit here for a bit and lick my wounds. and i've got some runway but i'd like to get back into a job pretty quick.

if you're hiring for a linux admin/ops-heavy SRE role, i've been poking computers and networks professionally for a decade. hit me up.

edit: should probably include my linkedin here, at least. resume available upon request, ofc! https://www.linkedin.com/in/selectric/ #fedihire

@sam I considered doing this since I've written several different Fedi clients, but then I run my own instance and I can set how long a post can be and I set it to 8k characters and the feature didn't seem that important.

I know, it doesn't help you. But maybe that's why nobody has added this feature? I know that when I was doing Twitter clients, I did add this feature because it was hard to type long posts otherwise ...