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I'm a bit of an eclectic mess 🙂 I've been a programmer, journalist, editor, TV producer, and a few other things.

I'm currently working on my second novel which is complete, but is in the edit stage. I wrote my first novel over 20 years ago but then didn't write much till now.

I post about #Coding, #Flutter, #Writing, #Movies and #TV. I'll also talk about #Technology, #Gadgets, #MachineLearning, #DeepLearning and a few other things as the fancy strikes ...

Lived in: 🇱🇰🇸🇦🇺🇸🇳🇿🇸🇬🇲🇾🇦🇪🇫🇷🇪🇸🇵🇹🇶🇦🇨🇦

Fahim Farook

One thing that's often annoyed me about Mac Catalyst apps is that when you close the app (via the Close butotn on the top left of the window) the app terminates instead of minimising to the dock.

This behaviour can be changed with two Info.plist changes:

Application Scene Manifest > Enable Multiple Windows - YES
Application can be killed to reclaim memory - NO

#Xcode #Catalyst #Coding #Fixes
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Fahim Farook

I had a Python script which would post a daily dynamically composed tweet to Twitter. That stopped working last week because something went wrong with Twitter’s API set up. The service came back a couple of days later but my old info was gone and registering again apparently did not fully work.

So I decided not to rely on the API service and looked around for an alternative …

One possibility was to use macOS Shortcuts to create an automated tweet. Most of that seemed fairly straightforward and I got a workable workflow, but on macOS, there is no way to run a shortcut on a schedule …

So I thought of coding a quick app to do the job. The job would compose the tweet with the dynamic bits set up in Swift and then pass the tweet content to Shortcuts to be used as input. The app would also handle the scheduling so that the shortcut is executed daily at a given time and give me some logs indicating how it all went …

Seemed simple enough and the basic implementation was pretty easy. The only fly in the ointment was that I decided to use a third-party library to handle the scheduling 😛

It was a great library. It had all the features you could think in terms of defining a schedule, but it also seemed to not quite work in subtle ways. I discovered this only after I’d used the new app for a couple of days and had to debug scheduling issues.

I ended up writing the scheduling part as a custom component which handled only the scenario I was interested in and not the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. But using the third-party library did give me some great ideas about features to add to my own scheduler to make it (and the reporting) better 🙂

#Coding #Swift #macOS #Shortcuts #Automation #Scheduling
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Fahim Farook

When I can’t find an app that does what I want, or, if I feel that the available apps are too heavy/resource hungry, I tend to write my own apps to fill the need.

The trouble with that approach is that I sometimes end up with a lot of software to support/maintain. Since I’m also the customer, it can get a bit hectic 😛

This week was one where I was reminded (once again) why I try not to write my own software — I had at least two apps that I’d coded over the past couple of months that needed that one extra feature that I wanted. Then, I discovered that I needed a whole new app (because of Twitter shenanigans … grr) and that I had to add a new feature to yet another one of the apps that I’d coded.

That was a lot 😀

I managed to get quite a few of the changes I wanted done over the weekend (and also coded a new quick-and-dirty app for the Twitter issue) but I’m not sure if I should continue doing this … sometimes it just gets to be soo stressful juggling all these to-do items 😛

#Coding #PersonalSoftware #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #iOS
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In case you’re not aware - I’m working with the Mastodon team on and community 🚀

If you’re building a client on the I would love to get connected and help you stay up-to-date. Drop me a line andy@joinmastodon.org and let me know what you’re working on! 🙏🏻

(pls boost for reach / tell the devs of your fave apps)

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Fahim Farook

Part 2 of Karl Guttag’s series of articles on his thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro is now up on his site.

He discusses the possible issues with the AVP this time around from a hardware perspective. If you’d like to get a thoughtful perspective on all the various factors that you might want to consider when trying to decide if AVP is for you or not, you might want to give the articles a read and so that you can make your own mind up instead of relying purely on hype, or how excited others are about it 😛

https://kguttag.com/2023/06/16/apple-vision-pro-part-2-hardware-issues/

#Apple #VIsionPro #Dissection #Analysis #Hardware
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Fahim Farook

Edited 1 year ago
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
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Fahim Farook

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
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Hello I'm a storyteller, that is I literally tell people stories for money. My special interests are: unique human beings and their stories, and the I work with myths legends folktales and fiction. I run workshops and training, I tell stories in and

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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

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Fahim Farook

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
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Fahim Farook

Edited 1 year ago
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
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Fahim Farook

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

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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

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Fahim Farook

Edited 1 year ago
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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Dear ACL Community, If you are PhD student, postdoc or are preparing for your PhD right now after http://M.Sc., we invite you to share your experiences and thoughts on working in the field of NLP. We plan to present the main results of this survey at the upcoming ACL'23 , Toronto & in a future publication, of course always in anonymous form. The online survey will take about 5 minutes to complete. To participate, please click on this link https://lnkd.in/gzmRhamu

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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.

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Fahim Farook

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 …
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Fahim Farook

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
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