My microwave beeps, so of course I check on my bread in the oven and wonder why it's about five minutes underbaked. It still has five minutes left on the timer. 🤪

#baking #cooking #WhatThe

Moonlit Blossoms

2023 04 06 day 287 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

I started with painting a bird, but it wasn’t going well. I then realized I had a massive headache happening (yes, it’s true – I don’t always realize these things immediately), and those tend to impair my ability to think clearly when they’re that bad, so I dropped the bird and did a tutorial instead. I’ll do the bird another day.

I ended up doing a Joel Create tutorial. Follow the link below.

https://lmashton.com/moonlit-blossoms/

#Procreate #DigitalPainting #DigitalArt #ArtistsOnMastodon
A digital painting of a pink-bl…

2023 04 05 day 286 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

I don’t understand abstract paintings. I fully admit this. And yet, today, I did an abstract painting in my attempt to understand them better. I would like to improve, but I think this will require a more immersive approach.

I followed the tutorial by Flow Works in the link below, as much as one can follow an abstract painting tutorial and still making one’s own original. I used my own colour set and brushes.

https://lmashton.com/abstract-1/

#Procreate #DigitalPainting #DigitalArtt #ArtistsOnMastodon
Abstract painting in pinks and …

Spring Forest

2023 04 04 day 285 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

I did this following a tutorial by James Julier. Link is in the link below.

https://lmashton.com/spring-forest/

#procreate #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #ArtistsOnMastodon
Digital painting of purple flow…

Lemons

2023 04 03 day 284 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

And yes, I’m severely behind posting. Oy. The life of the chronically ill.

This is a tutorial by Tatyworks. Link is in the link below. I went rogue, of course. 😀

It’s done using gouache brushes in Procreate. And this is where I mention in passing that I have no idea how gouache is pronounced. I heard another artist pronounce it in his youtube tutorial the other day, and it sounded entirely wrong, so I have no idea if he’s pronouncing it incorrectly, or I am, or we both are. Alas.

I really like how this turned out, by the way. I’m really happy with it.

https://lmashton.com/lemons/

#procreate #digitalart #digitalpainting #artistsonmastodon
Three lemons handing from a bra…

What are your favourite recipes for beef or lamb tongue, kidney, or heart? Any cuisine. Oh heck, if you have a favourite for liver, I'll take that, too.

I've had heart before and liked it. Kidney and tongue are completely new and I like expanding my horizons. Liver is too strong a flavour for me unless it's chicken or preferably duck, but the hubs likes it.

#cooking

When you take a photo, do you expect, in general, that it will also include recording of sound from a short period of before/after it was taken? I'm not asking about recording a movie.
I recently had a discussion on an adjacent topic to this question, and was wondering what's the general opinion/expectation.

Boosts welcome.

Golden green and red dahlia magic

#AYearForArt #ArtMatters #BuyIntoArt #photography #photo #Art #Texas #Nature #WallArt #DigitalArt

IT'S HERE: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1471891082/red-dahlia-with-a-green-background-and

A group of #zebras is called a dazzle.
A dazzle of zebras.

#TermsOfVenery #AnimalGroupNames #animals #wildlife #nature #english #AnimalGroupingNouns #trivia #fun #words #mammals #zebra

Something #dreamy I did several years ago based on a photo of the old Equitable Building in #Atlanta that was demolished many years ago (1971).

See prints here: https://mark-tisdale.pixels.com/featured/fleeting-dreams-of-you-mark-e-tisdale.html

#DigitalArt #Painting #abstract #AbstractArt #MastoArt #Architecture #surreal #CreativeToots #ArtMatters #MarkOnArt

Some years ago I had a cherry blossom tree I planted in my backyard - this was based on one of my photos of it one spring. Still makes me smile.

See prints, etc. here: https://mark-tisdale.pixels.com/featured/yoshino-cherry-blossoms-mark-e-tisdale.html

#CherryBlossom #flowers #floral #pink #DigitalArt #painting #MastoArt #CreativeToots #ArtMatters #MarkOnArt

Martha Stonhouse

1740s [1]
Artist Jonathan Richardson the elder
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Martha_Stonhouse.jpg

I’ve posted before about using fitness trackers and how we’d settled on AmazFit since it was cheap and seemed to work well … Unfortunately, after a few days of use it became evident that it wasn’t doing a great job at sleep tracking 😛

It was fine for the price point but it wasn’t totally accurate. I watched some YouTube videos by the Quantified Scientist (https://www.youtube.com/@TheQuantifiedScientist) and finally settled on the Fitbit Charge 5 as being accurate enough and yet cheap enough for my needs 🙂

I generally steer away from FitBit because it doesn’t sync any data with Apple Health and that was a big no-no for me.

But needs must and so got a Fitbit Charge 5 and then began looking around for solutions to the Apple Health data syncing. There were apps around but all the ones I found were subscription based. I didn’t want to pay a subscription to synch my data and so I took a look at the FitBit API, searched for any open source solutions on GitHub and when I didn’t find anything recent/working, I decided to code my own …

It’s been a bit of an adventure, I can tell you that 🙂 I’d worked with HealthKit before but I’d forgotten most of it and so had to do a bit of reading of the docs but once I got going, it was easy enough.

It took me about a day to get sleep data to sync properly to my satisfaction. If anybody wants to talk about (and complain about 😛) syncing (and updating) Apple HealthKit data, I’m your guy for the next week or so — then I’ll probably forget most of this again.

Initially, I thought I only wanted to sync sleep and maybe my step count for the day. But once I got going, I realized that there was a lot more I wanted — heart rate, resting heart rate (which is different), and SpO2/blood oxygen levels .. I’ve got it all now.

But I’m still not done 😛 Now I want respiratory rate and skin temperature too. I guess once you get started, you just can’t stop?

The app doesn’t have much of a UI at the moment since it simply connects to the FitBit API, gets the data and syncs with Apple Health. All the UI does is show logs of the actions going on. So no point in posting a screenshot …

I’m thinking of releasing the source as an open source project so that others can compile the app for themselves too instead of having to pay subscription fees. But that requires documentation since my app is set up only to fetch personal data and so others who want to compile and run for themselves will have to know a few things about configuring the project. So maybe in a few weeks once I get everything working just right?

#Swift #Apple #HealthKit #iOS #HealthTracking

I burnt the beets. I dropped my chicken thigh. I got lunch done 1 hour 15 minutes late. My knees are killing me and I still have to catch my breath (thanks, Covid!)

But. My roast chicken is lovely and I have leftovers for tomorrow. My extra curry leaves are washed and in the freezer.

How's your day going?

A landscape image of rural Ireland at sunset.
https://pixels.com/featured/rural-ireland-john-hughes.html
#BuyIntoArt #AYearForArt #NorthernIreland #Ireland #sunset

A dramatic sunset in Portstewart, Northern Ireland.
https://pixels.com/featured/irish-sunset-john-hughes.html
#BuyIntoArt #AYearForArt #NorthernIreland #Ireland #sunset

Looks as if the “Trek” game re-make is continuing … at least for a bit 😛

I got some coding time yesterday and so did some more work. Now the Long Range Scanner and Short Range Scanner work and you can navigate in either scanner view by simply tapping where you want to go … So progress 🙂

Also made things look a little bit prettier … though that might be my opinion and not yours 😛

Maybe next weekend I’ll get to do some more work, I guess we’ll see … While I think Flutter would have made this even more easy to code, SwiftUI has held its own so far …

#Game #StarTrek #Coding #SwiftUI #macOS
A screenshot from WIP “Trek” ga…

Apple now has Rapid Security Updates available for users running iOS 16.4.x … they are smaller and faster updates for security vulnerabilities.

The update download took like 10 seconds but preparing the update took around one and a half minutes. The update itself was very fast and the phone restarted and was done in around 30 seconds …

The current update is 16.4.1 (a) and if you want to be sure that you are protected against the latest vulnerabilities, you might want to give it a try …

There’s apparently one for macOS as well, but I haven’t installed that yet.

#Apple #iOS #macOS #SecurityUpdates

#durdledoor #sunrise #photography #landscape

Midnight dreams. There is no longer any semblance of dark. No street lights. 24 hour Sun is still about 10 days away. #Nunavut #Arctic