Technicat

PhilChu

PhilChu

📍 Las Vegas, Nevada http://technicat.com/

Markdown

Displaying styled text in an iOS app has always been a hassle, resorting either to an HTML view or cramming together attributed text, but now there's a more convenient option, markdown support provided by iOS 15. And now I have a reason to upgrade my Talk Dim Sum app requirement

How to Hide an Empire

In a bit of karmic retribution for all that personal pandemic overspending on consumer appliances, I'm now TV-less after my robot vacuum knocked over my 4K LG TV (seems there should be market for anti-robot-vacuum defenses). It was just as well, my sporadic monthly netflix subscription expired the day before,

The Road to iOS 15

This has got to be a personal record – I have two updates for the same app, Talk Dim Sum, released on the App Store in the same day, I suspect because I included the phrase "fixes for iOS 15" in the release notes. The first update replaced all the action

Anthology Puzzles

Well, I pulled another unnecessary all-nighter, this one due to a cat jigsaw puzzle. It was happenstance, as I decided to check out the aftermath of Life is Beautiful and see if there's any new street art. Amid the post-festival cleanup, all I found was this. Pretty much everything was

The Mystery of the Play Button that Acts as a Back Button

Even just cruising in maintenance mode, minding your own business, bugs just show up. This week I noticed a weird one – hitting the Play button in the iOS version of my Talk Dim Sum app would pop back to the parent page, acting like a Back button. But only when

Julia Child

My latest pick from the Writer's Block bargain bin is the Julia Child installment in the Last Interview series. It's actually a few interviews, still a fairly thin book, but enough to expand on my flimsy knowledge of her, consisting of dim memories of seeing her show in my youth

Why We Sleep

Ironically, I found Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep a bit of a snooze. It's one of those books that took me a long time to finish because I kept nodding off every couple of pages. It's partly because it cites study after study, which sounds good for science, but also,

Canceling Stock

Somehow I've managed to survive self-employed (otherwise known as unemployed, freelancing, taking time off, and entrepreneurship) for nearly twenty years, a stint far longer than my salaried career. This despite long stretches of low revenue (otherwise known as app sales), whch I'd like to credit to my financial acumen, but

Vegas Ventures

All during this pandemic, I've been thinking Las Vegas is missing out on the move to remote work. I'm not suggesting they go as far as to pay people to move here, like Tulsa, but take me for example: I sold my condo in California, got a much cheaper (and

The Last Kind Words Saloon

I was congratulating myself on finishing The Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler in two days, and then I finished Larry McMurty's The Last Kind Words Saloon in a day. Admittedly, it's no epic-length Lonesome Dove. This is a short book, each chapter a snippet of