Kyle @ikyle@mastodon.technology

#introductions I'm Kyle. 👋

iOS developer 📱 (now Android too actually, by accident; long story).
Started programming making simple games for iOS, then iOS jailbreak tweaks, then making apps as my job.

Love tech, programming, sci-fi, StarTrek (TNG 👍), Marvel, etc...
Also love Snowboarding and parkour.

I've been on Twitter for years (90k posts, mostly retweets). Was on mastodon.social but have moved here now.

"A French ski resort has used helicopters to deliver snow after mild weather dried out its slopes." - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-51524278

"Secure ShellFish - SSH in the iOS Files app" https://secureshellfish.app/

Going to be doing some more things like adding the social media graph tags and building some API's and bots (like a Twitter bot) but I'm happy with where it is right now.

Previously, every time I thought of writing a blog post I just remembered the missing features of my blog engine and started work on modifying it or rewriting it instead of actually writing the blog post itself.
Hoping to get over that now I've actually got the rewrite live.

I'm trying to start blogging again more frequently.

Starting small with a post about quick script I wrote to fix an annoyance with my 360 camera's software not tagging exported files with the date the photo was taken.

I recently rewrote my website (looks the same mostly) to make it simpler and easier to maintain, as well as able to support images and other attachments to blog posts now.

And also added JSON feed support alongside the Atom feed.

Automatically Correct Insta360 Studio Snapshot Dates - Kyle Howells https://ikyle.me/blog/2020/correct-insta360-one-x-snapshot-date

"Boring is good. Boring means that it’s been around for a long time. Boring means that its limitations are well known and there are plenty of horror stories explaining why it sucks. The longer I’ve been a programmer, the less I appreciate clever solutions. Boring is not clever. Boring is maintainable." https://youngdynasty.net/posts/radblock-deep-dive/

Computers really are a fractal of complexity.

I wanted to programmatically change the creation date of some photos and started researching EXIF data to discover there's actually 4 different, but related, metadata dictionaries used (at the same time).

"0th", "Exif", "GPS", "1st"

So I've now spent the last hour reading documentation, the TIFF image format spec's PDF and trying to work out the history of why.

"List the UTIs for a given list of file extensions" https://gist.github.com/simonwhitaker/2157405

Printing a wall-sized world map https://www.dominik-schwarz.net/potpourri/worldmap/

"“Almost too easy” are three words no one has ever said about XML." https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/18/maxime-vaillancourt-json-feed-viewer

watchOS 7: A Concept https://birchtree.me/blog/watchos-7-a-birchtree-concept/

10 years later this is still an amazingly impressive demo of web tech more advanced than anything available today.
"280 north Atlas - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouzAPLaFO7I"

Scaling SQLite to 4M Queries Per Second on a Single Server « Expensify Blog https://blog.expensify.com/2018/01/08/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a-single-server/

Extract the plain text from markdown (for plain text search, for example) https://gist.github.com/kylehowells/fde24fe684467ca49f7ff01c6b601813

Nice tips on using SwiftUI previews with UIKit https://nshipster.com/swiftui-previews/

"it’s less about setting goals, and more about working backward from those goals to become the kind of person who would routinely do those things"
https://www.swiftjectivec.com/on-forming-habits/

How I rip DVDs and Blu-rays - Six Colors https://sixcolors.com/post/2015/01/how-i-rip-dvds-and-blu-rays/