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I'm a bit of an eclectic mess πŸ™‚ 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: πŸ‡±πŸ‡°πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¦πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈπŸ‡³πŸ‡ΏπŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬πŸ‡²πŸ‡ΎπŸ‡¦πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡«πŸ‡·πŸ‡ͺπŸ‡ΈπŸ‡΅πŸ‡ΉπŸ‡ΆπŸ‡¦πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦

Fahim Farook

Sun Tzu said: β€œIf you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

With cockroaches, it's: "If you kill one and leave the body out and wait long enough, others will come to take the body away and you can kill them too." πŸ˜›

#TheArtOfWar #Cockroaches #AncientWisdomModernTwist
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Hey friends, I’m looking for my next role. I like building native iOS apps, and I’ve got experience with SwiftUI, UIKit, TCA, all of the good stuff. Any shares and leads are appreciated

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Fahim Farook

I like Santosh Shoban (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9922589) β€” each of his movies that I've seen so far has had something different/unique about them.

It looks as if "Prem Kumar" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15340716/?ref_=nm_knf_t_3) is in the same mold in that it doesn't follow the typical Telugu movie storyline.

So far, I’m hooked and I’m curious to see where it goes ...

#Movies #Telugu #PremKumar #SantoshShoban #SomethingDifferent
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Fahim Farook

After looking at AnyType and several other solutions, I decided that none of them have the flexibility that I want for adding data from various sources and being able to define any type of data storage.

So, working on my own solution …

Decided to use the latest in Swift and SwiftUI, and also throw SwiftData in to the mix since this’ll probably be a personal app and not for public release β€” there are many such solutions out there, but they just don’t have what I want πŸ™‚

Some interesting things to solve to accomplish this β€” How do you define a data structure which is not predefined in a way that can be used via code? How do you generate a SwiftUI interface dynamically to represent these data structures?

I believe I’ve solved them but the app is very rudimentary at the moment. I’m curious as to things hold when I add in more complexity …

#Swift #SwiftUI #SwiftData #Apple #macOS #iOS #PersonalDataManager
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Fahim Farook

Being multi-lingual sometimes leads to weird situations πŸ˜›

In Tamil movies they sometimes pronounce "graphics" in a way that sounds like "gira-piss" and in Sinhalese, "gira" is "parrot" (or rather, parrot-related) and "piss" would of course be English β€” so parrot pee?

Do parrots even pee? πŸ˜€

#Tamil #Sinhalese #Language #Funny #MultiLingualWeirdness
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Fahim Farook

"Billiions" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4270492) has always been a favourite of mine, but this season has felt very weak.

The dialog is overly talky without getting to the point, and hasn't had as much punch.

Now that the final setup, which I assume was what they were aiming for but were getting lost in the weeds getting to, maybe it'll get better?

#TV #English #Billions
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Fahim Farook

While it is a battle between two behemoths, I can't help but feel like supporting Quest 3 just because of the language used by a lot of reviewers.

Like saying, "there’s almost nothing compelling to do in mixed reality on the Quest 3". And you know that Apple Vision Pro does have compelling experiences? How do you know this?

It's not as if any of these people have used the AVP for longer than half an hour .... So how do you know that AVP will have compelling experiences whenever it launches? Faith in Apple?

Also, will these reviewers actually buy an AVP at 7x times the price of a Quest 3 for themselves? Or is this just hatchet jobs for a paycheck?

I don’t know … but excessive praise for an as yet unreleased product, or damning something that exists for pie in the sky, always makes me uneasy …

#Quest3 #AppleVisionPro #Meta #Apple
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Fahim Farook

It almost feels as if every episode of "Gen V" has a theme and you have to discover it πŸ˜›

For episode 3 it's β€” parents (or better yet, family). How parents affect you as a child and the sometimes love-hate relationship you have with them. It's also a tiny bit about trust maybe?

Alliances are made, people begin to trust each other and I'm kind of curious as to how the show will evolve and if the writers will stick to this level of writing …

#TV #English #GenV #Writing
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Fahim Farook

"Gen V" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13159924) episode 2 is a lesson on trust that really drives home the point in multiple ways.

You know the characters shouldn't trust certain people, but they themselves don't know due to how their character works.

It's interesting in how people work and yet, has me screaming at the TV for them to not fall for it πŸ˜›

I’m still enjoying the core story and I do like these little touches of psychology and the inner workings of people ...

#TV #English #GenV #Writing
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Fahim Farook

From AnyType (https://anytype.io/) and it's inability to import data in a way that is easy, I went on a whirlwind tour of similar applications β€” some open source, and some only freemium.

I tried NoCoDB (https://nocodb.com/) to BaseRow to SmartSuite to Fibery to Mathesar to Budibase β€” there are a lot of interesting solutions.

Way too many to list in about 500 characters for sure πŸ˜›

Sometimes I wish I still blogged so that I could do detailed write ups about all these but that’d probably be too arduous a task given how many of these solutions are out there!

#DataManagement #PersonalDatabase #KnowledgeManagement #Tools
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Fahim Farook

Edited 1 year ago
Just when I think people can't get any sillier, they do πŸ˜›

From, "you believe in what I don't believe in" to "you use a different phone" to, it's now "you don't use an OSF/FSF (or whatever TLA you prefer) license for your open source project" πŸ˜€

Live and let live people! Don't get so dogmatic!

As long as they aren't hurting themselves or others, why does it matter to you how somebody else chooses to live their life or what they believe in?

Why must everybody conform to your worldview?

#Questions #Beliefs #Dogma #Reflections
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Fahim Farook

Edited 1 year ago
"The Boys" is violent, rapey, murdery etc. But I think it's closer to how humans would behave if they had super-powers than what Marvel or DC thinks ...

So, I was ambivalent about "Gen V" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13159924) since "The Boys" is a bit over the top for me. But the first episode of "Gen V" was interesting and has enough in it to keep me hooked. Will watch more to see if the potential pans out or if this is going to just go with over-the-top violence …

#TV #English #TheBoys #GenV #Comics
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Fahim Farook

Edited 1 year ago
AnyType allows me to keep a list of movies I want to watch and create various views based on different criteria such as movie language ... but it's hard to automate adding data to AnyType. Easiest way is to type it all in manually.

My own app lets me do things as I wish and I can automate movie information retrieval easily from say IMDB, but it is task-specific and I can't easily store (or rather, store in an organised fashion) movie information side-by-side with say, book info, or a comic book collection.

Can I find a middle ground?

#PersonalDataManager #AnyType #Swift #SwiftUI #Automation

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Fahim Farook

I started using AnyType (https://anytype.io/) to maintain my movie/TV watchlist, tasks, notes and a few other things ...

So of course, I start working on a #Swift app which will allow me to add movies to AnyType easily by doing a simple IMDB search πŸ˜›

Only about a day of work so far, but the search works. The transferring data easily to AnyType part is a bit more involved but there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.

#Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #AnyType #DataManagement
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Fahim Farook

The second episode of "The Continental" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6486762) is much better.

It gives you a hook, a slightly bigger world, and a wider cast of characters (and backstories for existing characters) that makes things interesting.

Much better than the first episode, IMO. I think I'll watch for a little longer to see how things develop …

#TV #English #TheContinental
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Fahim Farook

Got my old iPhone X out to do some testing ...

The case was falling apart and I took it off. That was the first time I'd ever bought a case (back then) for a phone ...

I had forgotten how slippery the iPhone X was without a case. Just leave it even on a (mostly) flat surface and it starts sliding …

Was that a deliberate design decision on Apple's part to drive case sales? I have to wonder (in hindsight) given that I've bought a case for every new iPhone since then πŸ˜›

#Apple #iPhoneX #iPhone #Cases #SlipperySlope
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Fahim Farook

"The Continental" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6486762) has the bones of a story, but not much to actually like/care for till the very end of the first episode.

I wasn't going to watch further, but the ending did hook me. So maybe one more episode to see where it goes, possibly?

#TV #English #TheContinental #JohnWick
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Fahim Farook

Edited 1 year ago
At least some open source projects seem to go to great lengths (intentionally or unintentionally) to make the PR submission process convoluted πŸ˜›

I just want to make the code better because I feel that others can benefit from it. I don't want to jump through multiple hoops to do that ...

Instead, I just shrug and move on most of the time. There's only so much time to work on stuff, after all.

Maybe I just don’t work well with people? That’s certainly possible πŸ™‚

#OpenSource #GitHub #PullRequests #Hoops
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Fahim Farook

"Adiyae" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27618123) started out as an interesting movie, but the protagonist's utter confusion at anything and his apparent inability to understand anything or to cope with anything except by screaming at the universe just makes it very annoying to watch ...

The protagonist seems to be only capable of showing a confused look throughout (at least the first part) of the movie. I don’t feel anything except annoyance at having to watch him πŸ˜›

#Tamil #Movie #Kollywood #SciFi #ParallelUniverses #AlternateReality
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Fahim Farook

Interesting ...

I use Bodega (https://github.com/mergesort/Bodega) in my Mastodon client app to cache old posts, and my app has gotten progressively slower over time.

In fact, trying to open an image or the post detail screen takes several seconds while the app just sits and churns ...

Since nothing else had changed, I tried deleting the Bodega data folder and re-launching the app. Instant speed boost πŸ˜›

Now if I can figure out if this is just an issue of there being just too much data to read quickly (which I thought I’d eliminated by clearing the cache …) or something else, that would be the real win πŸ™‚

#iOS #Catalyst #Swift #Performance #Caching
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