“Por Thozhil" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27542289) is one of the better Tamil forensic murder mysteries. Unlike what’s usual for the genre, the stupid/impossible stuff is kept to a minimum and the story actually depends on investigation and deduction rather than sheer, dumb luck.

Except for the violence and the gory murder scenes, I really enjoyed the movie.

#Tamil #MiniReview #Movie #Mystery #Suspense

“Heart of Stone” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13603966) attempts to tell a good story, but is hampered by really sloppy writing …

It’s about an “intelligence” agency which shows no intelligence at all. The whole story hangs upon agents making really stupid decisions and not seeing what is obviously right there …

Some of the storyline just makes me so angry at the stupidity of people and their reliance on “systems” that I was tempted to stop watching it several times.

Yeah, it’s that good 😛

#MiniReview #English #Netflix #Movie

The second part of Karl Guttag’s (now three part — it was originally a two-parter) series of posts on whether Apple VisionPro makes a good monitor replacement is now out:

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/09/apple-vision-pro-part-5b-more-on-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

What I find interesting in reading the comments to the previous post is that there appear to be people who’ll come up with “magical” excuses for Apple when confronted with a logic-based analysis 😛

So, you say that based on current hardware and extrapolation the AVP would not display text legibly enough to be read easily by all?

Fine, I’ll counter by saying that Apple actually isn’t looking at monitor replacement at all but had to mention it just to keep people happy till they reveal their magical plans for how the AVP is to be actually used.

Or, I’ll talk about how Apple didn’t really mention that the AVP was to be a monitor replacement and so you shouldn’t talk about monitor replacement. Nevermind that some people might want to use the AVP as a monitor replacement whether Apple specifically said so or not ...

I really find this “defending” Apple thing (whether it is required or not) rather tiresome, especially when it seems a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived slight to the glory of Apple.

Other people can have different opinions. Not everybody has to like what Apple does. And you certainly can be critical of Apple while still liking/using their products. All of these things can be true at the same time.

I wish some people (or all people) understood this 🙂

#Apple #VisionPro #Analysis #Opinions #Reflections

I'm not sure where this thought came from — I think it was to do with the lengths people would go to be “accepted”.

Heels.

Do women actually like/love them? They (especially the very tall ones) seem very painful to me since they contort your feet. Plus, there’s the whole balancing act of staying on top of them.

(Ah, this reminds me where this started — it was when we watched “Fatafati” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27443234) a few days ago. Great movie, BTW.)

So again, do women really like wearing heels? And if yes, why? Can somebody (a woman and not a man theorising) please explain to me?

#Heels #Women #Fashion #TheLenghtsWeGoTo #TheHeightsWeAspireTo

Hi, I am currently looking for a new role as an iOS Developer. I would really appreciate your support in finding a new opportunity.

I have over 1.5 years of experience in developing iOS applications for world-class clients such as Paramount and NewsON. I have used Swift, UIKit, and SwiftUI to develop apps. I am enthusiastic about creating user-friendly and engaging apps that meet the expectations of clients and users.I am open to both remote and onsite positions, preferably in the Toronto area.

There are certain image generation tasks that I cannot try out without installing Sonoma — for example, use the SDXL model natively via CoreML in a Swift app, at least as far as I’m aware. (Though I must confess that I didn’t look into this too deeply …)

So I’ve been wondering about installing the Sonoma beta. But since this would be on my regular production machine (and I do development for regular work), I wasn’t really keen on the possible downtime should something go wrong or some major app I relied on didn’t work correctly on the Sonoma beta.

Beta 5 was the target that I’d set for myself. By beta 5, we should be close enough to release, and hopefully fairly stable, that I should be OK was my thinking.

And beta 5 is here now …

But I’m not sure I want to switch. Just too much going on at the moment …

So I guess I’ll keep dithering? 😛

#Apple #macOS #Sonoma #Beta

Karl Guttag had a series of articles on the Apple Vision Pro soon after it was announced, and I read them with interest since Karl goes into the hardware/technical side of things when most other people simply “Ooh” and “Aah” about the “shiny” 😛

Then there was nothing from Karl for about a month, even though Karl had promised more articles with further thoughts.

Finally, there’s a new article — part one of two — which discusses something that I’ve been very keen on — monitor replacement.

https://kguttag.com/2023/08/05/apple-vision-pro-part-5a-why-monitor-replacement-is-ridiculous/

Monitor replacement has been my goal with AR/VR from the outset. I’ve tried most of the available software solutions, but have yet to find one that really works for me.

Immersed (https://www.immersed.com/) on Quest 2 is probably the one which comes closest, in software terms, to what I wanted. And I know that Renji Bijoy and his team do use Immersed to do work on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, my old eyes still have issues doing work for a full day using Immersed and Quest 2 😕

To be clear, this is not an issue with Immersed. It’s just that the current hardware does not have the display resolution to display text in a way that isn’t jarring, at least for my own use.

So I was pinning my hopes on Vision Pro, but Karl seems to think that this will be just that — a hope, and not something which will turn out to be reality.

I’ll still wait to try it out myself, but at this point, I’m thinking “Maybe the next version?”

#Apple #VisionPro #MonitorReplacement #Hardware #Analysis #AR #VR

I've been testing between the latest version of InvokeAI (https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI) and ComfyUI (https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI) and interestingly, it appears that ComfyUI is not as hard on the system as InvokeAI.

I tried the same model, LoRA, prompt, and batch size, and while the machine stayed totally fine during the ComfyUI generation (even after multiple batches), with InvokeAI, my MBP fan started going after just one set of images.

I do realize that InvokeAI is in a state of flux as they move to version 3.0, but the difference in usability is great enough that I think I’ll stick with ComfyUI for the time being …

#ImageGeneration #Python #macOS #ComfyUI #InvokeAI

If you get a chance to watch “The Collective” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23556408) save yourself some grief and give it a miss.

This was like people acting at being actors — it was horrible 😛 They mostly pose. They’d attack an enemy and then pose, then attack, and then pose. As if the heroic posing was mandatory.

And don’t get me started on the stupidity of supposed “professionals” …


#Movie #English #MiniReview #Horrible

*Ring* - it's the doorbell.

The bell rings twice more before I even get to the door.

I open the door and there’s somebody standing in the doorway of our neighbour’s apartment. The angle is such that I can’t tell if they actually have the door open and are inside the apartment or are just standing in the doorway.

I look at them inquiringly.

“Can I have your WiFi password?” they say, holding up their phone.

I’m like, “What?”

“Your WiFi password. I just want to make a call,” they say as if this was the most normal thing.

“I don’t want to give you my password,” I say and close the door.

That really was the whole interaction. I’m just flabbergasted by the whole thing still. Did they really think that I’d simply hand over access to my WiFi to somebody I didn’t know? (I don’t know my neighbours and they’ve never spoken to me before …)

Do they understand the security implications of the whole thing? Or was it an emergency (like trying to make a call without anybody else knowing for some reason)? If it was an emergency, why didn’t they tell me so?

I don’t know … But I’m still wondering …

#People #Interactions #Security #WiFi #Neighbours

I've been seeing some stuff on Reddit about how difficult it is to work with ComfyUI (https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI) and how it doesn’t work for a bunch of people ...

So I thought it must be even harder to get it working under macOS …

But about 10 minutes of work is all I needed to install it, run it, and get my first image generated. So not sure what the issue is, but it does look as if it works fine out of the box?

#ComfyUI #Python #ImageGeneration #StableDiffusion #maCOS #Ventura

#AmazingWorld
#Edinburgh
#Scotland
Author: hiddenscotland (on IG)

#AmazingUkraine
#Carpathian
https://sl8.online/post/2QMvaA2zemxOcg3XNp0VZQUtx5l

Something I've noticed about a lot of American TV shows — the first season starts off with a great idea but by season two or three it has become all about the personal lives of the characters and their relationships and the core idea gets relegated to the background and gets lost.

“House” was a great medical drama at first and I loved it for the medicine but eventually it became all drama and not much medicine. The same with “The Good Doctor”.

(I can contrast this to UK TV but I guess that’ll have to be a post for another time 😛)

“Warrior” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5743796) is a show which doesn’t do this as much and which manages to maintain a balance between the core story and the character development. Or maybe, it’s because the story is all about the characters 🙂

But what I do like about the show a lot is the fact that the characters learn, grow, and change. Characters who started out looking as if they are pure evil start getting shades of grey as you learn about them and their motivations. Others change their attitudes and stance as time goes on.

The show is constantly changing and alliances constantly shift. And it’s marvellous to see these happening and to see a story being told so deftly 🙂

As the end of season 3 approaches, I can see a lot of changes and a bunch of new alliances happening. I hope there’s a season 4 since I want to keep on watching!

#TV #US #English #Warrior #BruceLee

Back in the day, Tamil movie songs used to have meaning — some of them espoused deep philosophies in song. Then things changed. It seemed to become all about the rhythm and the beat and less about meaning.

"Maamannan" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20242416) made me acutely aware of this because one character in the movie sings some of the old songs and I realized how much I'd missed these meaningful songs.

But that wasn't all of it. The movie has a very melancholic vibe and I keep expecting bad things to happen. And they do.

One of the characters sings "the only thing that humanity hasn't learned is how to be human" (or words to that effect) and the movie is all about that — how humans endlessly oppress and kill other humans in the name of constructs that they've created such as caste, status, authority etc. to keep humans separated from other humans.

A couple of characters buck this trend and stand for equality and not bowing down to "authority"/bullies, but it's a telling sign that even one of these characters has to tell others what to do in several situations. This is a characteristic of almost every Indian movie — the "hero"/protagonist has to tell others what to do, even when the actions are fairly self-evident (as in taking an injured person to the hospital). It's almost as if people are being told, you shouldn't act/think for yourself — let somebody who's "the one" tell you what to do ...

And that probably is the most harmful thing that a movie which preaches the opposite message can do? If more people would think for themselves, perhaps they might not fall prey to those who try to control them by sowing division amongst them?

#Movies #Tamil #MiniReview #Reflections

I’ve generally not been keen on Varun Dhawan movies — maybe it’s my general dislike of the kind of movies his Dad used to make seeping through, or maybe it’s because most Varun Dhawan movies I’ve seen have had him playing comedic roles without much weight.

But “Bawaal” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19755170/) is a movie which changed my opinion of him. It’s an interesting and impactful movie in many levels.

Based on the description, I expected a war movie and half didn’t watch it since I dislike war movies intensely. But this was good, it talks about war, the impact I has on people, but it’s also about society, how we want to portray ourselves, relationships, and a lot more.

While this part gets a little lost in the rest of the story, it’s also about teaching and teachers. That’s something I’ve loved since “To Sir, With Love” and while this is not on the same level, it does have some of the same impact, in a way.

#Movies #MiniReview #Bollywood #Hindi

I’ve been following the discussion by @alexito4 about adding extra tags to a followed hashtag on Fedi clients generally (and @IceCubesApp specifically) with interest …

Since this is a feature that I’d wanted myself, I decided to go ahead and add it to my custom IceCubes fork with an additional change — the ability to specify how the extra tags are used for selecting posts …

This should reduce my main timeline clutter quite a bit — with an additional change, of course. Currently, followed tags appear in the main timeline and I’ve added filtering to remove them.

But I realized with this change that I don’t have to follow hashtags at all — I was simply doing that as a backup mechanism so that I can have all followed hashtags saved on the server so that when I switch clients, I don’t have to set up hashtags all over again.

However, if I add saving my local client config to iCloud, I might have a much better system here … Hmm ….

#FediClients #Swift #SwiftUI #Coding #Hashtags

Reminds me a bit of Will Wright’s “Spore” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game) …

Guess I’ll have to give it a go and see how well it works on macOS? 🙂

From: @alexito4
https://mastodon.social/@alexito4/110741928929528729

So ... I've heard of shadow banning on Twitter, but is there also shadow blocking of being able to post? Or is it just that the Twitter macOS app is now broken?

I used to post a protest message to Twitter everyday via their API. But the free API access kept getting blocked/banned etc.

So I switched over to using a macOS shortcut to post via the Twitter app. That too stopped working about a week ago. Every single time I try to post, it says “posting failed” or something similar.

However, if I go to the web interface, I can post the same thing fine.

So not sure if this is shadow blocking or the Twitter edifice crumbling slowly into the oceans of time 😛

#Twitter #Posting #Blocking #ShadowBans

If you need to be delighted by something this morning, I present the tree goats of Morocco.

I was driving near Essaouira the first time I saw this and literally slammed on my brakes because I thought I was suddenly hallucinating. But then you learn how common it is and after a day or two it's, oh, yeah, more goats in trees.