I’ve never been one for role models — once you see your role model’s feet of clay, things change forever.

The closest I’ve come to a role model is probably Terry Pratchett — from all accounts, he was a good person as well as a great writer. I’ve never met him, but in all my online interactions with him, that’s the impression that I got.

But before PTerry, one of my favourite writers (if not the most favourite) was Isaac Asimov.

I started reading Asimov in my teens. He wrote on a huge array of subjects, across multiple genres, and always spoke about himself in his writing in a way that made me think that I knew him.

It was only in the last 10 years or so that I learnt that I didn’t know him at all, and that he might have been *all* clay feet 😕 Apparently, Asimov was somebody who harassed women, a lot.

He appeared to have thought that this was part of his charm — or, his admirers/supports/apologists made that out to be the case. I don’t know. But what was evident was that he did harass women and seemed to think that it was fine — that it was all fun. I suppose for him it was.

Interestingly, I found out recently that Alfred Bester, another great from the golden age of science fiction, would effusively kiss Asimov on his cheeks and pinch his bottom whenever they met — somewhat similar to Asimov's behaviour with the women he harassed. Apparently, Bester did not do this with anyone else, and so one has to wonder if he was trying to make Asimov realize the error of his ways.

Asimov seems to have almost come to a self-realisation since he writes that this made him feel uncomfortable and he even wonders about the women he treated the same way. But that’s about where the self-realisation ends since he ends with “It took the joy out of my interactions” or something similar. Basically, going back to me-me and not worrying about his victims and how *his* behaviour affected *them*.

I was thinking about all of this a couple of days ago because I came to realize that I don’t trust anything I hear/read any longer, and I used to. I used to think that the impressions that I got from reading somebody’s writing defined that person. Alas, no more …

But in this day and age, where people believe that artificial intelligence exists and are happy to believe anything that is churned out by a glorified random word generator, can we afford to believe everything we read?

I wonder …

#Reflections #IsaacAsimov #AlfredBester #Harassment #RoleModels #Trust

Karl Guttag always has very detailed, technical, and thorough write ups about AR/VR headsets. I love reading his analyses because I come away learning something new 🙂

He’s done a write-up on his thoughts about Apple Vision Pro and while I have not read all of it yet, it already sounds like something which asks the hard questions, unlike any of the thoughts/discussions I’ve read yet from people who did get to spend some time with the headset.

Or, as Karl says in his article: “Unfortunately, I didn’t see a lot of “critical thinking” or understanding of the technical issues rather than having “blown minds.”” 😛

If you are interested in a technical and critical look at Apple Vision Pro, you’re probably not going to go wrong reading Karl’s post.

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/13/apple-vision-pro-part-1-what-apple-got-right-compared-to-the-meta-quest-pro/

#Apple #VisionPro #AR #TechnicalDissection

Hello I'm a storyteller, that is I literally tell people stories for money. My special interests are: #walking #trees #london unique human beings and their stories, #wonder #enchantment #esoteric #occult and the #unusual I work with myths legends folktales and fiction. I run workshops and training, I tell stories in #schools #festivals #universities #museums and #weirdplaces #introduction #MeetMe

Plugging myself extremely hard bc I like to work and if I don't remind everyone if that I might miss out on some really great projects.

I want to publish amazing work this year and connect with really commited and driven individuals.

I'm going hard across all socials so everyone knows.

I make websites for creatives and small biz broads www.nineke.net

According to the story linked below, an Amazon Fire Kids tablet was apparently used to spy on somebody, to listen in on Alexa devices in the house, and possibly access other personal information.

Since Amazon says that the device in question was deregistered and they don’t know how it could have gotten access, and since I haven’t done a any digging into the story myself, I don’t know if all the claims in the post are correct/accurate.

But still, it does bring home the fact that what you see in spy/thriller movies theses days might not all be fiction and that we have to be very careful about what we connect to our network of devices and how we dispose of old devices …

https://practical-tech.com/2023/06/13/how-an-amazon-fire-kids-tablet-was-allegedly-used-to-stalk-a-security-pro/

#Amazon #Security #Spying

The ActivityPub federation on my server must have suddenly caught up or something (or there was a slew of activity from @gruber) but I suddenly got a whole lot of posts in my feed from Gruber in reply to responses from people on his post on Apple’s Vision Pro …

I found it interesting reading, just to see all the different responses and Gruber’s take on things. But I also was left wondering how somebody like Gruber deals with all of these strong (at least it feels strong) feelings directed towards him …

I wrote something about SharePlay a few days ago and got somebody telling me how SharePlay was “dystopian” 😛 It feels a bit jarring, at least to me, to just talk about tech because you find it interesting to have somebody disagree with you vehemently. My general approach to things is, if you love it (and it doesn’t harm you or anybody else) then that’s your right, I don’t need to love it too, but I’ll always fight for your right to love/like it.

But to have somebody disagree with something that wasn’t aimed at them and to spend time trying to convince me that I was wrong (or so it felt) just felt a bit strange. But I guess that’s what being on the Internet is?

I just don’t get this kind of thing that much. So I just wonder how it feels when you are John Gruber and you get so many varying kinds of arguments (or just comments) from hundreds, if not thousands, of people?

Not sure I’d have the mental bandwidth for it 🙂

#Reflections #OnlineDiscussions #Responses #BeingOnline

I have a Python script which posts a protest post to Twitter every day using their API — it’s a political thing related to Sri Lanka that nobody else probably cares about 😛 (And that’s my only activity on Twitter for months now …)

Today, the script stopped working. I go to the Twitter developer dashboard and my app which was used by the script is no longer there. It also looks as if I can’t create a new app/project.

So I don’t know if this is a temporary outage, or another change in direction, but it looks as if using the free API (even if it is only to post 30 tweets a month and not 1,500) is out — at least for the time being.

I guess the slow collapse continues?

#Twitter #API #NonFunctional #TwitterCollapse

One my fellow #DoctorWho fans will hopefully enjoy.
Prints here: https://mark-tisdale.pixels.com/featured/tardis-in-the-rain-london-mark-tisdale.html

#DigitalArt #Painting #London #BigBen #Tardis #FediGiftShop #MastoArt #MarkOnArt

It is kind of surprising that it took Reddit self-destructing for the Star Trek communities there to join the federation.

Hey folks! I've opened a bunch of new beta testing slots for @radiant, my Mastodon app for iPhone.

Get them while they're hot 🔥

I'd love to get any feedback and find any new bugs before I submit a day zero v1.0.1 update to App Review.

Boosts / reblogs appreciated 🙏

https://testflight.apple.com/join/ZIPbEz2e

#MastodonApps #MastodonClient #IndieDev #SwiftUI #iOS

Without knowing anything about gameplay, and based purely on first-impressions, “Star Wars Outlaws” and “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora” look interesting.

The fact that they are both available for PS5, Xbox, and PC doesn’t hurt either 🙂

https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-outlaws
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/avatar/frontiers-of-pandora

Guess we’ll find out if they are any good sometime towards the end of this year and the beginning of the next (hopefully)?

#Games #StarWars #Avatar #Console #PC

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#NLPRoc

Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, and James Earl Jones, who provided the voice for Darth Vader in Star Wars in 1977, met for the first time on a 2014 episode of The Big Bang Theory.

Installed iPadOS 17 on my iPad and thought that I discovered a new setting “Use Large App Icons” only to realize that it’s there on iOS 16 too 😛

For some reason, I never noticed this setting. But it’s rather useful when you’re as old as me and icons aren’t that easy to see. So, just mentioning in case there are others who didn’t know about this setting.

The Settings app section is different in iOS 16 — I believe it’s called “Home Screen & Multitasking” instead of “Home Screen & App Library” but the setting is the same.

#iPadOS17 #Apple #iPadOSBeta #LargeIcons
Screenshot of the “Home Screen …

When Apple first introduced SharePlay a couple of years ago, I was certain that this was to support their to-be released AR headset 🙂

But then time passed and nothing much appeared to happen with SharePlay. In fact, I had almost forgotten about it since adoption of SharePlay seemed to be mostly limited to streaming service apps or music apps, and that was about it ... Even amongst streaming apps, the ones I used like Neflix or Amazon Prime did not have SharePlay.

But this year, it appears that SharePlay is back with a vengeance 😛 Check out the following WWDC session to find all the new functionality being added to SharePlay:

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

My Favourite? SharePlay over AirDrop so that you can start shared activities with people in the same room by just bringing your phones together — no need to start a FaceTime call!

The thing I don’t know at this point is, will SharePlay work if there is no network (or at least, no Internet)? I’m guessing not, but I’m curious to find out.

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #SharePlay #SharedActivities #VisionPro

Even if you are not looking at translating your app to support other languages, you owe it to yourself to take a look at String Catalogs in Xcode 15 🙂

With String Catalogs it’s easy to set up number and noun agreements (1 book vs. 2 books) or noun adjective agreement for languages which have gendered nouns (such as French, Spanish, Portuguese) very easily.

Just for the number-noun agreement part, I used to litter my code with ternary operators. But it’s so much easier to set up with String Catalogs. And that part is the least of the functionality of this new feature 🙂

Check out the following WWDC 2023 session to find out more:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10155/

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #Strings #Grammar #StringCatalogs

Sometimes, you know something exists (like Xcode Playgrounds) and how to use it, and yet fail to see the possibilities in terms of how you can integrate that thing with your regular workflow 🙂

The “Prototype with Xcode Playgrounds” session was such an experience for me 😛 I watched the session and immediately realized that there were so many ways that I could have used Xcode Playgrounds in the past to make my work easier!

Give it a watch, I’m certain you won’t be disappointed …

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10250/

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #XcodePlaygrounds #Prototyping

I’m curious, does anybody use (or have ever used) SharePlay?

When it was announced a couple of years back, I was like “This is Apple’s initiative to bring shared media consumption to their AR headset when it arrives!”. But it doesn’t seem to have gone that way? I don’t think I’ve seen much adoption of it …

I can’t use it personally since it requires FaceTime (at least for video, I think?) and FaceTime does not work in the UAE 😛 Plus, our other use case, sharing videos while on a plane wouldn’t work either …

I know some of the streaming service apps have SharePlay integration but I don’t believe the ones I use, Netflix and Amazon Prime, do 😀

So I’m curious, is anybody else using SharePlay a lot (or even a little bit)?

#Apple #SharePlay #VideoSharing #MediaConsumption

It’s interesting to me how some people see Apple as not being capable of any wrong, and others see it as not capable of doing anything right 😛

Why get so worked up (one way or the other) over a corporation? They are not there to make friends, they are just trying to sell products and make money. Sure, if you love their products, by all means talk about it and how good they are. But don’t get so fanatical that you think that everything they do has to be right. Look at everything critically …

And the same thing applies to fans of Google or Meta too … It’s just that I run across Apple fans way more than I do the others 🙂

#Fans #Fanatics #Antics #Reflections

New SwiftUI changes — @Observable is going to make life so much easier … once I can actually use it in my work apps that is 😛

I have a lot of computed properties in my objects and updating the UI when those value changes has sometimes been a bit of a challenge. But no more! I’m looking forward to being able to use @Observable!

More info here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10149/

#Apple #WWDC #WWDC2023 #SwiftUI #Observable #NewStuff