I haven't liked the tone, plot, or the feel of a lot of Hindi movies of recent times.

But "The Great Indian Family" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18561736) is something I can get behind 💯 It's a feel good, thought provoking, and funny movie which satirizes a lot of racial tropes. Loved it!

What can I say? I do love a good Yash Raj Films movie 😛

#Movies #Hindi #Bollywood #FeelGood #Satire

I'm often amused by how some Indian filmmakers try to depict "manliness" — "They say several brothels are in business due to me," is the latest example.

Will they also include how many clinics and pharmacies are in business due to the diseases that guy must be spreading? 😛

Mind you, this is said by the “hero”, who is 55 years old in real life (but probably playing a 30 year old), to a 28 year old who is playing an 18-20 year old ...

Feels a little bit off to me even if this is how the dream machine works ...

#Movies #IndianMovies #Telugu #Manliness #Stupidity

Spent what free time I had yesterday on adding Trakt access to "ShowMan", and that allowed me to get access to my calendar of shows today.

I'm getting pretty excited about the app now since the integration of the multiple services allows me to do a bunch of different things — all in one app 🙂

Now I can see what I have not watched over the past few days and also get an idea as to what is coming up. When I watch something, I can tick it off the list by simply checking the box ...

Next, I need to add more Trakt integration to let Trakt know when an episode is watched and then add BetaSeries too for the same purpose. Lots of fun stuff to do!

#Coding #App #Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #ShowManagement #Entertainment

"Label" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt25965602) looks interesting based on just the first episode ...

It has flashes of violence and brutality, but it also has moments which are thought provoking — not just the hyper-violence that seems to be prevalent in Tamil shows these days ...

The show hooked me within the first few minutes and didn't let go till the end of the episode. Quite keen to see where things lead.

I really like the fact that the show is about the marginalised, and the people who are automatically labeled as one thing or another and how, at least some, people try to change people’s perceptions.

#TV #Tamil #Perceptions #Label #Labels

I didn't get as much done today on my TV/Movie manager app as I'd hoped because I got stuck in several different SwiftUI issues ...

But at the end of the day I'm able to at least see all shows I'm watching, the seasons for the show and episodes.

So hopefully done by next weekend's end? 😛 (I kid ... I don't think I'll have everything done, but I'm hoping that I'll have TV show management complete at least.)

#Swift #SwiftUI #macOS #Apple #Entertainment #ShowManagement

A few days ago I discovered "TVMaster" (https://noben.org/tvmaster) by way of @keyle

It's a great looking app and it helps you manage the TV shows you watch via this very nice interface.

But I wanted more 😛 I wanted to monitor both TV shows and movies I wanted to watch. I also wanted to be able to interact with external sites (since I use several) to monitor the progress on shows and movies.

I’d already created the movie watchlist solution several times in different ways, but this would give me one app which would handle everything and that seemed a rather attractive proposition.

So got to work, and after about a day of work, I have a new app … and the project for this weekend 🙂

Basic functionality — done!

The next part is a bit more complicated since I need to allow the user to connect various sites with the app. But I’m hoping that if it’s not a single-week project, then it’ll only be a week more.

I guess we’ll see?

#macOS #Swift #SwiftUI #Apple #Entertainment #ShowManagement

When I mentioned Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) and my new movie to-watch list solution, what I totally forgot to mention was how easy it was 🙂

Given the lack of details, I didn’t realize at that point, that someone might think that you had to maybe copy and paste every value from IMDB or something. But really, it's much simpler ...

Once set up, all you do is search for a movie by name, select the right one from the results, and you're done!

I also forgot to point people to instructions that let you set it up yourself. Sorry about that!

Instructions here: https://minimal.guide/guides/movie-database

#Obsidian #MovieLists #SimpleSolutions #FreeSoftware

@Rycaut I think I told you a long time ago that I would let you know if I found a solution that worked for me for maintaining my to-watch movie list ... (Not sure if it was really a long time ago or not, but it seems like it ...)

So just letting you know that I found one with Obsidian 😛 I know you already saw that post but in case you want details on how set things up or any help with setting things up yourself, lemme know ...

I recall you mentioning that you had a collection of Apple Notes and if it helps, Obsidian seems to import Apple Notes fairly easily. It imported in all of my Apple Notes with very little effort and the only thing I miss from Apple Notes is the ability to collaborate/share certain notes with my wife.

But even that might be solvable since I see some solutions out there which might work ... Or, there is the paid option from Obsidian itself — but I'm cheap/paranoid and would prefer a self-hosted option 🙂

I've been looking at various solutions for managing my to-watch movie list. I looked at software, writing my own solution etc. I didn't like any of those solutions for one reason or another — mostly because adding a new movie to the list included a bit too much work 🙂

But apparently, I missed the one solution which I already had/used — Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) 🙂

With just a bit of tweaking (and some coding to customize the output) I was able to get exactly what I wanted!

And I love it!

The best thing is, now that I’ve discovered this particular facet of Obsidian, I can rework it and use it for so many other things too!

Obsidian is free, keeps all the data on your own machine in a format that you can read even without Obsidian, and it has so much customisability that I wonder why I didn’t use it more previously!

(The answer to the last question is probably that I didn’t take the time to learn all that Obsidian is capable of … but isn’t that always the case? 😛)

#MovieList #Obsidian #Workflows #FreeSoftware

Watched this Tamil movie where the opening scene has a sign which says "The Chemistri of Love" ...

Every time that sign comes into view, the only thing I can see is the spelling mistake 😛 I can't concentrate on the movie or what's happening ... I just keep staring at the word.

I assume there are others who are affected the same way? Or am I the only one?

#Movies #SpellingMistakes #Distractions

The project for this weekend was to build a usable backup GUI (with rsync as the engine).

I thought it might take longer, but I was able to come up with a working solution in a couple of days ...

It has the ability to do dry runs, runs with deletions (of files which are on the destination but not source), and standard syncing — all with one task config. It also has logging of previous runs and the ability to clone tasks for quick creation of a new backup task.

It still needs notifications and scheduling, but that's about it. So I'm happy 🙂

#macOS #SwiftUI #SwiftData #Apple #rsync #Backup #GUI #Coding

"Jawan" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15354916) was certainly better than "Pathaan" but it was an uneven movie — there were bits which were good and then a lot of parts which were so very predictable ...

The influences — "Indian" and "La Casa de Papel" — are very evident everywhere and that is a minus for me personally since that made the movie even more predictable.

I could predict every plot beat and even some of the dialog.

But there were some funny one-liners and moments, and there was at least some fan service by invoking various movies that some of the actors were involved in.

Overall, watchable, but not brilliant.

#Hindi #Bollywood #Jawan #ShahRukhKhan #Atlee

Got a 2TB M.2 NVME SSD, an enclosure and tried to set things up for backing up ...

About 300GB was written (macOS Ventura 14.1) in 10 minutes and then I'm told that the drive was ejected 😕 macOS can't find the drive.

Works fine under Linux. I can access the drive, format it etc. and then I can plug it back into macOS and macOS detects it ... for a short time. But then again, "disk ejected" ...

Seems to be a macOS issue. So much for "ease of use" ...

I’ve been doing some searches and am seeing a lot of reports of “disk ejected” errors and issues with enclosures under macOS. But can’t find any solutions.

Given that the enclosure, drive, and cable work fine under Linux, I don’t think the issue is with any of them.

Anybody experienced this and have a solution?

#macOS #Enclosures #SSD #DiskEjected #BackingUp #Apple #Linux

We found these 16TB external SSDs on Amazon for like $100.

It was just too good to be true and wasn't really expecting to get what was advertised, but I wanted to know what the scam was and so we ordered.

But I probably should have simply Googled for "16TB scam" first since a day later, when I thought to do a search, I found a lot of posts and videos about it which explained the scam in detail.

Fortunately, item hadn't shipped yet.

Cancelled 🙂

#SSD #Scams #Amazon #TooGoodToBeTrue #SearchFirst

We've enjoyed all the Kandasamy movies since we first discovered them — the only South African/Indian movies we've seen (possibly)?

It seems like so long ago to me but I was surprised to discover that it’s only been about six years …

The latest, "Kandasamys: The Baby" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27048691) can be a bit exasperating at times (due to how some of the characters act/behave) but is still a good watch overall 🙂

But if you haven’t seen the previous movies, you might enjoy it more after you’ve seen the others ...

#Movies #English #SouthAfrica #Tamil #Indian

We use a Synology NAS for backups and media sharing. But it's a bit heavy when we have to travel and take it with us ...

So looked into a Beelink miniPC running Linux as a NAS. The idea worked, but ran into some issues with heat because the Beelink has no fans for cooling.

The SSD drive I added to the Beelink would heat up way too much when there was any sort of extended activity. So looking into other solutions now ...

I originally wanted to use a specific NAS solution like OpenMediaVault or TrueNAS but they were a bit too restrictive in terms of getting things to work exactly the way I wanted.

So I finally settled on running Debian and simply installing whatever I needed to handle the rest and that actually works so much better for my own purposes …

#NAS #Storage #Linux #Debian

Lokesh Kangaraj and Rathna Kumar are listed as writers for both "Vikram" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9179430) and "Leo" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15654328) ...

Yet, there's a huge difference between the two — the former plot worked, the characters were consistent. The latter not so much, the characters do things which make no sense, or take actions which are not consistent with who the character is supposed to be.

Is this due to the actors involved and how they thought their “image” should be projected?

It appears that “image” is very important to Indian actors, but if this was about image (and I’m not saying it was), is sacrificing the plot for the sake of an actor’s image the way to go?

#Movies #Tamil #Plot #Image #Writing

"Leo" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15654328) is just pointless violence and stupidity ...

What kind of court tests a person's shooting ability when they killed somebody in self-defence? Does India not have self-defence laws?

Half an hour in and it's already very stupid with the promise of the cycle of violence continuing ...

Apparently the wife of a murdering thug does not accept that her husband will die by the gun and so wants revenge and so on ...

Movies, especially Tamil ones, have continued to get violent for some time. It’s almost as if each new movie wants to push the boundary as to how violent they can be.

Leaving aside “Leo”, I find this troubling. I hope this is cyclical and it goes away soon, but if not, where are we headed?

#Movie #Tamil #Leo #Vijay #CycleOfViolence

"Kaala Paani" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19072562) seems pretty interesting — at least based on the first episode ...

First, the setting is different from most Indian shows — Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Second, there are all these tiny touches which, if you pay attention, pay off for a viewer. I liked these little details a lot and am hoping that it continues on beyond the first episode ...

#TV #Hindi #KaalaPaani #Netflix

Watched two different Tamil movies today where they mention that China (and other countries) are plotting to stop India's progress by sending drugs and poisoned products to India ...

Seems like classic human behaviour — "others" are jealous of us. They want to drag us down.

We'll never change — we always blame others and want "our" people to be cautious/wary of strangers.

And then we pass on this behaviour to our children ...

#NationalismOrParanoia #PoliticalRhetoric #Politics #Humanity #TheHumanDisease