Fahim Farook
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fahim.farook.org
Fahim Farook
@fahim.farook.org
1.2K followers 660 following 720 posts
Coder, writer, and wannabe artist. I talk about #Coding, #Movies, #TV, #Writing, #Art, #Language, and #Technology.

https://www.amazon.com/author/fahimfarook
https://books.farook.org

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fahim.farook.org
Instead of the usual "Animal Antics" paintings, I did something different this week — I call it "Alien Dreams" 🙂

#Art #Painting
A painting of an alien landscape with orange sands and a purple sky where a green planet with a golden ring around it hangs on one side of the sky. The landscape is dotted with mounds or stones on which glowing red plants appear. There's a green semi-transparent creature looking down on a yellow-golden plant with glowing branches.
January 27, 2026 at 1:53 AM
fahim.farook.org
Continuing on with my "Animal Antics" series, here's "Doggerel Writer" 🙂

I'm happier with this one than I was with the previous paintings since I see fewer issues, but I still feel there's room for improvement.

#Art #Painting #AnimalAntics
A painting of a furry dog standing in front of a stone archway in a stone wall, possibly that of a castle, with mountains and a river behind him. The dog is standing on two feet and is holding a piece of paper in one hand and has the other hand raised, as if perhaps reading a poem?
January 21, 2026 at 2:02 AM
fahim.farook.org
Created a quick PHP app with multi-user functionality for managing reference/inspirational art.

It has some features that I really love — the ability to create colour palettes from an image and allow downloading to Procreate as a colour swatch 🙂

#Coding #Art #WebApps
A screenshot of a web app showing a list of images in pinterest style with a top menu of options that say - Explore, Collections, Favourites, Shared, and Search
January 20, 2026 at 3:34 AM
fahim.farook.org
To go along with the previous painting titled "Mouseketeer", I've created a new one called "Catechist" 🙂

In fact, I'm thinking of doing a whole series of these ... Will I get there? Or will my Apple Pencil break? Tune in next time to find out 😛

#Art #Painting #AnimalAntics
A painting of a tall building with a spire and a mountain covered with vegetation stands in the background while a cat with a red fascia around its midriff stands on two feet with raised hands.
January 15, 2026 at 5:31 AM
fahim.farook.org
I've been slowly building an ecosystem of apps - an issue tracker for bugs, an app to send builds to my android/iOS devices like AirDrop (for Android) which auto installs apps, an ebook reader which actually works etc.

It works beautifylly together. Now I can work on my art 🙂

#Planning #Dev #Art
January 14, 2026 at 2:20 AM
fahim.farook.org
This is an image which has been rattling around in my head for a few days now. I call it "Mouseketeer" 😛

#Art #Ideas #Painting
A painting of a mouse wearing a belt and a sash with a sheath and wearing a feathered hat holding a glowing sword up. Behind the mouse there's a big mountain range from which a waterfall comes down and turns into a steam.
January 13, 2026 at 5:05 AM
fahim.farook.org
An icon for an app that I'm trying out. Not quite sure if it works or not, but the first bit of drawing I've done in a fair bit ...

#Art #Icon #Ideas
An image with a yellow background where a big blue letter "B" has an orangutan hanging from it with one hand. With its other hand the orangutan is holding on to the letters "ook"
January 11, 2026 at 10:21 AM
fahim.farook.org
Created a simple, lightweight, and easy to install/deploy issue tracker yesterday for our presonal use. We like it so much that I've decided to release it as an open source project:
github.com/FahimF/Buggy

Let me know if you've any feedback 🙂

#OpenSource #BugTracking #IssueTracking
A web-based bug tracker showing a list of project cards where each card shows the name of the project, total issues, active issues and a few other details.
January 2, 2026 at 2:25 AM
fahim.farook.org
Created a quick and lightweight bug tracker 🙂 Been using multiple solutions but none of them really worked for us. This one is customized to meet our requirements.

Within an hour of creating it, the wife has already added a bunch of projects - and that's not even half!

#Tools #Development #Web
A web-based bug tracker showing a list of project cards where each card shows the name of the project, total issues, active issues and a few other details.
January 1, 2026 at 4:38 AM
fahim.farook.org
I've been checking out art courses online and it's interesting how many great artists don't realize that showing "how" to do something isn't the best way to teach 🙂

You need to teachy people "why" - that allows you to re-use the principle in other ways, not learn by rote.

#Learning #Art #Teaching
December 31, 2025 at 3:17 AM
fahim.farook.org
"Now You See Me: Now You Don't" (www.imdb.com/title/tt4712...) was disappointing. It telegraphed what was coming very early - if you didn't foresee the major reveal at the end, you weren't paying attention 😛

And the sequence in the middle with them each doing tricks? Annoying!

#Movies #English
Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025) ⭐ 6.1 | Crime, Thriller
1h 53m | PG-13
www.imdb.com
December 19, 2025 at 1:06 AM
fahim.farook.org
"The Running Man" (www.imdb.com/title/tt1410...) seems hyper-violent (like a lot of stuff these days) but on the other hand, it managed to keep my attention to the end. So probably one of the better action movies in the past couple of years?

#Movies #English #Action #SciFi
The Running Man (2025) ⭐ 6.5 | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi
2h 13m | R
www.imdb.com
December 15, 2025 at 1:47 AM
fahim.farook.org
"Aaromaley" (www.imdb.com/title/tt3658...) - a slow start but really comes in to its own after the interval. It's a beautiful movie about people, relationships, and feelings. And to suddenly hear SPB singing "Anjali" - a feeling all in its own category ...

#Movies #Tamil #Romance
Aaromaley (2025) ⭐ 8.4 | Comedy, Drama, Romance
2h 8m
www.imdb.com
December 13, 2025 at 2:17 AM
fahim.farook.org
I've been coding a web-based library interface to complement my book reading app.

The library simply shows our books and allows the wife and I to have separate user profiles showing the books we're reading, our reading history, and comments.

Working pretty good.

#Reading #Books #Coding #Library
A web-based library interface showing a book listing with large covers, the title of the book, the author, genres, and series information. A web-based user profile with tabs for Reading, Books Read, TBR List, Favourites, History, and Comments. The currently open tab is History and shows a calendar view with books read on a given day.
December 10, 2025 at 6:52 AM
fahim.farook.org
I keep hearing how Firebase has "generous" usage on the free plan. I started working on a library app with 4000+ books. Two data syncs and I was through my free plan 😛

Switched over to a local server with SQLite immediately. Might look at Parse again maybe?

#Coding #Platforms
December 9, 2025 at 10:12 PM
fahim.farook.org
What with the storm and flooding in Sri Lanka and other stuff going on, I haven't had time to do a reading update. But maybe time to do one now to close out November?

After DNFing "Just One Damned Thing After Another", I started on "Clean Sweep". This one I liked 🙂

1/5
#Reading #Books #MiniReviews
A screenshot from a reading app showing the book reading progress for the month of November. Its shows "Best reading streak 112 days" at the bottom and has the covers for multiple books in the calendar for November. The books in the calendar are - "Long Past Dues" by James J. Butcher, "The Fifth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack", "Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch, "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" by T. Kingfisher, "Just One Damned Thing After Another" by Jodi Taylor, "Clean Sweep" by Ilona Andrews, and "Dungeon Crawler Carl" by Matt Dinniman
December 4, 2025 at 12:26 AM
fahim.farook.org
"Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari" (www.imdb.com/title/tt3074...) was a fun movie! Didn't expect too much from it but as is usual is the case when I don't expect much from Varun Dhawan, he surprises you 😛

Another great Bollywood romance!

#Movies #Hindi #Bollywood
Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari (2025) ⭐ 5.7 | Family, Romance
2h 14m
www.imdb.com
December 1, 2025 at 1:00 PM
fahim.farook.org
I wrote a quick, lightweight sync server for Obsidian to sync notes across the local network. It's open source and you can find it here:

github.com/FahimF/GoSync

A bit more detail in the attached image ...

#Obsidian #Sync #Go #OpenSource
I have a lot of notes scattered across multiple apps - OneNote, Affine, Apple Notes, Obsidian etc. So I decided to combine all of them in one place 🙂 Getting everything into Obsidian was easy enough since Obsidian has a bunch of useful importers. So that was done, but then I needed to be able to sync the notes across the local network to other machines and with my wife. Sure, Obsydian has their sync functionality but that's a paid subscription. Then there is at least one open-source sync solution but it seemed a bit heavy for my needs. So, as one does when one is a developer, I decided to write my own 😛 I wanted something which only syncs over the local network, is easy to deploy and install and is light-weight. I think have all those boxes ticked. It's a tiny Go server for the server-side and an Obsidian plugin for handling the client side. And in case anybody is interested in using it (or testing it, or contributing to it), I decided to make it open-source. You can find it on GitHub here: https://github.com/FahimF/GoSync
November 30, 2025 at 12:07 AM
fahim.farook.org
So the wife and I did our cartoons for this week based on a Facebook video ... or at least, my/our reaction to it 😛

write.farook.org/idle-thought...

#Cartoon #Drawing #Art
Two cartoons by different people about somebody exercising saying: "Here's how you can get a body like this ..." and the resulting thought about where they keep the body, or how they get the body
November 25, 2025 at 6:50 AM
fahim.farook.org
I don't think I've ever DNFed a book before. But this week I DNFed two.

So, overall progress has been three books this week but I'm not happy about it since I DNFed two and started the third yesterday.

I'll discuss why I DNFed each one (broadly - no spoilers).

1/4
#Reading #Books #Thoughts
A screenshot from a reader app showing a calendar wit the books read for the month of November 2025. There are books displayed from the 1st to the 22nd and the books are "Long Past Dues", "The Fifth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack", "The Rivers of London", "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking", "Just One Damned Thing After Another", and "Clean Sweep". At the bottom it says "Best reading streak 101 days"
November 23, 2025 at 1:13 AM
fahim.farook.org
Another double-cartoon from the wife and I 🙂

write.farook.org/idle-thought...

Any resemblance to real people is purely unintentional 😛

#Cartoon #Drawing #Art
Two cartoons by two different people where somebody asks a cassava chip seller about the spices they use. They say "chillie" and each cartoon is about the play upon the word to misinterpret it.
November 18, 2025 at 6:20 AM
fahim.farook.org
Recently, I've been reading different authors instead of sticking to a single author. I'm trying to find an author whose writing I really enjoy without nitpicking. So far, not a lot of success 😛

James Butcher's first book looked promising, but the second not so much...

1/7
#Reading #Books
A calendar view showing reading history for the month of November. Shows the covers for four different books from the beginning of November to the 15 - "Long Past Dues" by James J. Butcher, "The Fifth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack", "Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch, and "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" by T. Kingfisher
November 15, 2025 at 11:44 PM
fahim.farook.org
We (the wife and I) did two more cartoons - this time about that ever popular Sri Lankan food, hoppers!

write.farook.org/idle-thought...

#Cartoon #Drawing #Art
Two cartoons by two different people about tourists/foreigners thinking that the Sri Lankan hoppers are called opus.
November 14, 2025 at 8:31 AM
fahim.farook.org
And we managed to get another cartoon done today 🙂 I'm not sure if I can sustain this pace though. I guess we'll see?

The story behind today's cartoon is here: write.farook.org/idle-thought...

#Cartoon #Drawing #Art
Two cartoons by two different people where each cartoon shows people wondering how to pronounce the name of the Sri Lankan city of "Galle" and how hard it is...
November 13, 2025 at 9:49 AM
fahim.farook.org
The wife and I are drawing a cartoon a day (hopefully) to improve our drawing skills.

The full story is here: write.farook.org/idle-thoughts/

Here's our first day's efforts ...

#drawing #cartoons #art
Two cartoons drawn by different people where somebody at a fabric store says "It's a very nice fabric. Very breathable..." and one cartoon has the other person thinking "Why does the fabric need to breathe? Is it alive?" The other cartoon has the other person thinking "Why would I want to breathe fabric? Is this like sniffing glue?"
November 12, 2025 at 4:01 AM