https://www.lilback.com/Personal blog of Mark Lilback — full-stack developer, gamer, and software architect living in Pittsburgh, PA. 2026-05-18T19:35:18-04:00 Mark Lilback https://www.lilback.com/ Jekyll © 2026 Mark Lilback /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-05-17T19:19:44-04:00 2026-05-17T19:19:44-04:00 https://www.lilback.com/introducing-alcove/ mlilback

For the first time in a very long time, I’m working on a project for the Apple ecosystem. I’m now devoting my spare time to Alcove. It is an ebook library manager (and eventually a reader) for Mac, iPad, and eventually iPhone. It uses iCloud to (optionally) sync libraries and their books. You can have multiple libraries and switch between them. It can import DRM-free ebooks, PDFs, and mobi/azw...

2026-05-09T17:21:13-04:00 2026-05-13T14:30:54-04:00 https://www.lilback.com/life-update-2026/ mlilback

A lot has changed in my life the last five years, I plan to start blogging again, so I figured an update is past due. I moved to downtown Pittsburgh in April 2021, met a wonderful woman named Trish, and moved in with her in April 2023 at her house in Munhall, a suburb South of Pittsburgh. I continued working on Rc² which morphed into NoteCalc, then Enlighten as the goals and target market cha...

2023-01-11T19:12:31-05:00 2026-02-27T13:45:48-05:00 https://www.lilback.com/compress-image-ios/ mlilback

I’ve been playing Marvel Snap a lot recently and wanted to share screen shots on Discord. However, free Discord has an 8 MB file upload limit. So I created this shortcut Select it from the share sheet when viewing the screen shot and it will make a duplicate that is a lot smaller and can be uploaded to Discord. When you click on that link from your iOS device, it should offer to install it. ...

2022-03-30T09:48:37-04:00 2026-02-27T13:45:48-05:00 https://www.lilback.com/quasar-tsloader/ mlilback

I’m working on a few projects using Quasar and Typescript. I got tired of writing my own type guards, and found ts-type-checked which ends up working great. They have an example for webpack, but quasar does some tricks behind the scenes that required a different configuration. Here’s a snippet of my quasar.config.js that involves getting this to work: const { configure } = require("quasar/wr...

2022-01-07T13:35:17-05:00 2026-02-27T13:45:48-05:00 https://www.lilback.com/typescript-yup-tree/ mlilback

I’ve been working in Typescript lately using Yup for validating my objects. The site I’m working on has a tree of categories, so I needed a way to model this and validate the objects. I couldn’t find an example of how to do this, so I figured it out and this post is to document this for my future self and others. import * as yup from 'yup' const baseSchema = yup.object({ name: yup.string(...