Last flower for today, my tulips keep on sharing their beauty with the world https://anne-haile.pixels.com/featured/pale-pink-tulip-flower-wide-open-anne-haile.html #ayearforart

I don't know about you, but I need some #color this morning! #butterflies #insects #flowers #monarchs #monarch #insect #photo #photos #photography #nature #naturephotography #wild #wildlife #wildlifephotography #Thursday #NH #newhampshire #NewEngland

Fisgard Lighthouse, 2022. I loved the weathervane.

#photography #lighthouse #nikon

Rainbow or iridescent clouds in Port Angeles, Washington:

#WashingtonState

I got soaked taking this photo but it was worth it 🌺🥰🐞. A beautiful ladybug in my stunning peach Melba hibiscus 🌺

#Photography #Flowers #MastoArt #Nature @Curator

@snott @steken @axbom Some of the best prices I've found (at the moment) for VPSes come from these guys:

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud#pricing

I was on a 2GB RAM VPS and switched to a 4GB RAM (3 CPU vs 1 CPU) instance with them and I believe I'm paying less now than I did for the 2GB RAM VPS 🙂

I had my Akkoma instance on a 1GB RAM VPS (separate from the 2GB RAM VPS I mentioned above) and I combined both VPSes on the new 4GB RAM VPS. So the new server has about 8 blogs running WordPress (all on MySQL) and Akkoma with Postgres and I still have about 50% RAM free most of the time. So that might be a way to go ...

I haven't used these guys before though, and switched to them based on a recommendation from another Fedi user but so far they've been fine. But I've only been with them 2 days 😛

Oh yeah, to respond to a point from earlier, you *can* transfer users over from a Mastodon server to an Akkoma server. I've done it. Just follow the normal transfer process as described on your Mastodon instance, it should work.

@snott I get that — I mean the wanting to know how things work part 🙂 And for blog software, yeah, I've done a lot of diving into the DB for blogs but that's mostly because I want to take the data and do something with it. Or, import into some other software which does not have a direct import mechanism for my current blog software ... So yeah, I can see that part.

But because you said "instance", I was thinking Akkoma and that's where I was confused. I guess I'd like to know what Akkoma does under the hood too but too many other things to work on at the moment 😛

@snott I would respond with an emphatic "Yes", but what do I know? 😛

@j I have been writing on and off. Wrote my first book laboriously over several months and I think I took another year or so of editing. Then stopped writing altogether (except for short stuff) for about 10 - 15 years. Started writing again last year and trying to do serialized stuff was what motivated me. Just trying to get something out because I knew there might be somebody who'd want to read it and so that I had to keep going and put down at least a chapter each day ...

Then got busy again, but one of the reasons I like the Fediverse is that you can do really long posts on some instances so that you can do daily fiction on here 🙂 So that's what I'm thinking of doing again. Writing daily on here rather than on a blog ... but just need to find the time 😛

Maybe that might work for you too? Knowing that people are reading and getting feedback might be the motivator?

@snott Just curious, but when other than setting up has database access been necessary for you in running an instance?

I started in databases over 30 years ago and so maybe it just goes by without me noticing but the only Postgres stuff I recall needing to do when installing Akkoma was running two scripts. Sure, I needed to know how to dump the DB and to import it in at the right point when I moved servers but again, one script and one command. Didn't need DB access since then. But I might be doing this wrong 😛

Today’s bog word of the day is paludification. From (Latin) palūs meaning marsh or swamp + ficātus to make. Most global peatland area is due to paludification where wetland plants & peat spread into adjacent uplands. Image shows paludifying Sphagnum moss on upland mineral soils. #mosstodon #lichen

Gouache Birdhouse
2023-01-04/05 day 205/206 of doing art every day for a year (mostly - I took sick days off).

This is a Tatyworks tutorial. Taty's tutorials teach me something new every time, and today, it's a gouache painting.

#Procreate #ProcreateArt #DigitalArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #ArtistsOnMastodon


Tutorial: https://youtu.be/1y9XLdC4zrw

Abstract Vase
2022-12-24 day 204 of doing art every day for a year.


Another Tatyworks tutorial, this time doing a sort of watercolour tutorial.

#Procreate #ProcreateArt #DigitalArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #ArtistsOnMastodon


Tutorial: https://youtu.be/frXVzXkFNc4

2022-12-23 day 203 of doing art every day for a year.

Another Tatyworks tutorial, this time playing with mosaics.

#Procreate #ProcreateArt #DigitalArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #ArtistsOnMastodon

Tutorial: https://youtu.be/X0gqzV2zBBk

Watercolour Door
2022-12-21/22 day 201/202 of doing art every day for a year.

This is another Tatyworks tutorials. Taty's tutorials teach ways of doing digital art with a variety of styles, so it's fun and interesting for me.

#Procreate #ProcreateArt #DigitalArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #ArtistsOnMastodon

Tutorial: https://youtu.be/MFgrWkWzGQw
Digital painting in watercolour…

I haven't done any image generation for my Pratchett novel title series for a while because the last one I tried, "the amazing maurice and his educated rodents" gave me results that I just wasn't happy with for #StableDiffusion — maybe it was the really long (for me) prompt 😛

I finally gave the same prompt a try in #MidJourney since it does give you gorgeous images and as expected, had some great looking results there!

#AIArt #DeepLearning #MachineLearning #CV #AI #DiscWorld

"Maelstrom"

Snapper Point, NSW central coast.

Olympus OM-D E-M1X & 300mm f/4 Pro

🤩🌌📷

Lake Kirkpatrick, Queenstown, New Zealand. with The Milky Way core overhead.

This could be a metaphor for many things - parent and child, big and small, controlled growth? Or it could be a print on your wall! See it here: https://www.pictorem.com/686252/Large%20tree%20dominates%20small%20tree%20on%20hillside.html
#AYearForArt #metaphor #nature

Bryce wood and Ents walking