We were both big fans of “Lost” when it started … and then kind of got tired of the constant shifting sands in terms of storylines and were totally pissed off at the ending (mostly because the writers themselves had dismissed the ending early on, but relied on people’s short memories when it came to the end). But we never knew, or even considered then, some of the implications of the stories being told or the background.

The following Vanity Fair article casts the spotlight on some horrendous things going on behind the scenes and be warned, it was so horrible that I couldn’t complete the article. I have no respect for Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse (not that I had before, but I did recognise their names and would watch shows involving them … but no more!) and it is horrible how human beings can behave this way …

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/05/lost-tv-show-culture

#Lost #WorkCulture #Racism #TV

Black Cat

2023 04 12-13 day 293-294 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). I’m doing something art related every day for a year in an effort to develop art skills. I’m very much a beginner.

I did this painting using four brushes:

Calligraphy/Monoline (for sketching)
Ittai Manero’s Crazy Nebula brush (for the nebula in the sky and reflection)
Ittai Manero’s Randomized Dots 01 (for the stars)
Ittai Manero’s Super Wet Flat Brush (for everything else)

The monoline brush is a standard Procreate brush. The Ittai Manero brushes were free as part of his freebie packs.

I have projects where I’ve used 15 or 20 brushes, maybe more, and I’ve done projects where I’ve used only 2 or 3. It’s interesting limiting myself to only a few brushes. I don’t think it makes art necessarily better, but I learn from it nonetheless.

https://lmashton.com/black-cat/


#ArtMatters #Procreate #DigitalArt
#DigitalPainting #WomensArt
A black cat looks out a window …

Sleeping Cat

2023 04 11 day 292 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off). I do some kind of art every day as an effort towards developing some art skills. I’m still very much a beginner.

https://lmashton.com/sleeping-cat/

#ArtMatters #Procreate #DigitalArt
#DigitalPainting #WomensArt
A watercolour painting of a bla…

Toucan

2023 04 09-10 day 290-291 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

This is me playing around with watercolour-esque painting. And having fun. 🙂

https://lmashton.com/toucan/

#ArtMatters #Procreate #DigitalArt
#DigitalPainting #WomensArt
Watercolour painting of a touca…

Moonlit Tree

2023 04 08 day 289 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

If you’re new to following me, this is me learning how to be an artist. I started nearly a year ago with close to no art skills and decided to trust the process – do something art related every day in the hopes that I can develop some art skills.

#Procreate #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #WomensArt
Night. A lone tree with dark pu…

Butterfly

2023 04 07 day 288 of doing art every day for a year (mostly – I took sick days off).

I created this, using standard Procreate brushes:

Luminence – Lightpen
Luminence – Bokeh Lights

I used assisted drawing in vertical mode for the symmetry.

https://lmashton.com/butterfly/



#ArtMatters #Procreate #DigitalArt #DigitalPainting #WomensArt
A butterfly painted to look lik…

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…

Someone broke into my house last night and stole my limbo trophy. How low can you go?

Every week for the past few weeks I’ve been working on a mini side project each week 🙂

This week, it was a site/feed checker. I have been using the excellent baRSS (https://github.com/relikd/baRSS) for at least a couple of years now to monitor updates to a few RSS feeds I follow.

But this week I realized that I might also want to follow updates to non-RSS feed items, for example, a list of posts on a forum. I realized that there was no solution to do that — at least, not the way I wanted it to work …

So I started work on a quick-and-dirty replacement to baRSS in Swift that would do both jobs at once — monitor RSS feeds, and monitor a given site for updates to a set of items identified by an xpath.

The basic implementation took only about a day of work and it is working quite nicely, if I do say so myself 🙂 Plus, when I compared memory usage, my implementation uses like 25% of the memory that baRSS did — granted, baRSS was written in ObjectiveC and my implementation was SwiftUI, but I didn’t expect that huge a difference in memory usage …

I do have more things to do — add a Settings screen (currently all settings are hardcoded) and add a xpath tester so that you can easily figure out if the correct data would be extracted for a given site, to name a few. But I’m happy enough with the basic functionality for the time being …

#RSS #SwiftUI #macOS #Coding

I told a joke on a Zoom Meeting and no-one laughed.

It turns out I'm not remotely funny.

I was just let go from my job and I’m looking for a new place to land.
If anyone knows of an open role for a Senior QA with 10 years of experience, please let me know.

I have extensive skills in Agile, SDLC, Jira, Confluence, Smoke and regression testing, Postman, documentation and more. I’m in the US (NY) and am looking for something remote / WFH.

Even if you don’t have a role but see this post, PLEASE BOOST IT so someone else may see it. Thank you.

#FediJobs #GetFediHired #NeedAJob

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

Blind woman born and raised in Nebraska, now living in Baltimore where I work as the Education Programs Coordinator for @nationsblind. I love to sing and am trying to figure out how music fits into my life. Also into #knitting, cooking, and baking, and have managed to keep my pandemic #sourdough starter alive and rising decent bread. I enjoy creating things from scratch, dreaming about future possibilities, and working to make dreams reality. #introductions

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…

A Cake Sandwich by @nao2748

I think I’ve talked about the old “Trek” game on here at least once or twice 🙂

I think I might be obsessed with it — mostly because there is this one magical version I remember from the early 90s that I can’t seem to find anywhere. (Of course, the magic might be all in my mind … or in the fact that I can’t find it 😛)

I did some fiddling with a Mac OS 9 emulator this weekend and in the process ran across the “Trek” game again and it got me looking at “Trek” games in general again. In the process, I came across a version of the game for Windows 9x that is probably the most feature-filled version that I’ve seen (screenshot attached).

That made me think of re-writing a version of the game myself and I kind of got started last night. All I have so far is a plan for what I want it to look like … or at least half a plan (second screenshot).

Not sure if I’ll actually go through with completing it, but it’s a nice thing to dream about 🙂

#Game #StarTrek #Coding #SwiftUI
A screenshot from the game “Sta…
A screenshot from an early atte…

The postdoc position #MachineLearning #MedicalImaging #HCI I'm hiring for is finally online! Please reach out if you might be interested, if you happen to be at #CHI2023 physically or virtually we can talk offline or on the Discord channel! https://candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationInit.aspx?cid=119&ProjectId=181571&DepartmentId=3439&MediaId=338