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I’ve been playing around with Tinrocket’s relatively new app Cinemin. While admiring what they can do, I do not normally choose to use apps that give photographs a artistic look, this one I am enjoying though. The images that Cinemin produces is,

Inspired by traditional animation art and films

Here are a couple of my first dabbles with the app, conjoined by Tinrocket’s collage app, Photo Tape.

A collage of two photos. On the left, a view from an airplane window shows the wing and a vast expanse of clouds under a clear blue sky. On the right, a serene waterfront scene is illuminated by a bright sun on a clear day with boats gently floating on the calm water.

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Well it took a couple of attempts, but with the new Tapestry TestFlight build, Micro.blog is now on my Tapestry feed.

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This evening’s sunset view from home.

Between the rainbow this morning and this sunset, the day has felt oddly discombobulated. Slowly productive, but sort of disjointed along the way.

A picturesque sunset sky, painted with vibrant hues of pink and purple, stretches over a tranquil grassy landscape and distant trees.

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This morning’s rainbow, accompanied by the moon 🌈

A clear blue sky with a faint rainbow arches over lush greenery and distant treetops, with the moon just above its apex.

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🥵 The last couple of days have been very humid. This morning outside it is like walking through a thick bath.

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A part of the ruin of the old Sugar Mill in Paia, Maui.

An aged, rusty watchtower stands among dense vegetation under a partly cloudy sky.

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Apparently today is National Ice Cream Day, at least here in the US, and I am sad to report we have no ice cream in the house.

Thanks to President Reagan, we celebrate National Ice Cream Day every third Sunday in July, meaning July 21 this year.

For more information on this important day, click here.

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I’ve been playing around with muting keywords on two Mastodon apps. I don’t know what is involved with the coding, though I would have thought that catching individual words is not that difficult? However, from my experimenting I’ve decided that each one catches some, but neither catch all.

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Where’s that mute button when I need it?

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I was out last night searching for slugs and snails who might be eating our young lettuces, and instead I found this spider standing guard.

A largish spider is perched on a lettuce plant illuminated by a flashlight, or torch, in a dark setting.

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I don’t know. Some days just feel to me as though all the pieces are not fitting together correctly. Today everything felt scratchy and irritating. Nothing felt smooth and as though it was running well.

I’m hoping for a reset tomorrow.

For now I will enjoy the quiet, still evening and the moon rise. That does feel as though it is working as it should.

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Those times when on hearing or seeing something I am triggered in a way that nudges something deep down inside me. That perception by the senses stirs something in me. It can be good or bad, or maybe in that moment I am unsure what the feeling is. But that something in me has been triggered is certain.

Such things don’t happen without a cause, and an investigation into that cause can be helpful. It can reveal a purpose as yet uncovered, an aspect of my personality as yet unknown, or some pain that needs healing.

And yet in that moment I am occupied with something else, distracted by the demands of others, or maybe adverse to wanting to explore what the cause of that trigger is. Then before I know it that feeling is forgotten about, subsumed under the activities of life. But it wont go away. It just lies dormant until a fresh trigger brings it back to the surface, returning the sensation back to consciousness and awareness.

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Oohh, in the time for the weekend the first early beta build of The Iconfactory’s Tapestry project has just landed on TestFlight.

I’m sorry, no screenshots or specifics to share as per The Iconfactory’s request. For now I am just happy to give this a whirl and see where the project is heading.

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The moon casts ghostly shadows over the landscape last night. The images were taken through the windows of our house.

Four photographs taken during a moon lit night, are arranged in a grid, each showcasing a different perspective of a lush, green outdoor area with varying sky conditions from overcast to partly cloudy.

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🚘 In other news, my eyes do not enjoy me driving at night. I’ve said it before on this blog, but my aging eyes find the glare of the car headlights, especially the bright LED lights, too bright for comfort.

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🔥 I’m back from sitting in the fire of what was my men’s group this evening - at least for me. That’s not necessarily bad, in fact from my experience it is good, though it can be uncomfortable at the time…and require some wind down time afterwards.

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A boat moored on the River Sado. The photo was taken while out on the River Sado in a more modern boat, powered by solar power and completely quiet.

A sailing ship is docked at a pier during sunset, with a calm body of water and a distant bridge visible on the horizon.

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Rethinking Kagi Adoption

I’ve been using Kagi Search for about six months now. I am on the lowest tier of the paid plans which allow me 300 searches a month. It turns out that that is quite enough for me. I have never hit that limit.

What I don’t know is if I need Kagi? Or perhaps to be more specific, if I should pay for search?

I do like Kagi. It generates its own results. I feel good from using a search service that is not keeping an eye on what I search for or where I am searching from. I have only dipped my toe into some of Kagi’s related search services.

Before Kagi I had been using DuckDuckGo for a number of years. DuckDuckGo is another privacy related search engine, probably the most popular. Its search results come from a number of search sources, including Bing, Wikipedia and Yahoo. DuckDuckGo does not save your IP address, although will save searches while not tying them to you,

we only save these anonymous search queries — completely disconnected from any unique identifiers like IP addresses — for just enough time to analyze anonymous trends like popular searches, so that we can better serve you.1

I cannot speak to the quality of the searches, Kagi vs DuckDuckGo. I have never searched the same term side by side in the two search engines - perhaps I should test that? However, I sense that the quality of my work, such is my need for search, will not be improved by one engine over the other.

I think that I will cancel my Kagi plan and return to DuckDuckGo. If I feel that DuckDuckGo is unusable, I’ll rethink this idea.

  1. duckduckgo.com/privacy ↩︎

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While going through some old notes I came across these few lines:

Who am I when others don’t see me?

Who am I when I don’t see myself?

But don’t let the second be an excuse for the first, because rest assured that the first does happen.

I have no idea where this came from or what prompted this train of thought? However, since finding them these words have been playing in my mind. Not only what did I mean by them, but why did I write them down?

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I don’t see these hammer head worms very often. This one I caught a couple of mornings ago. I have since learned that they are an invasive species to Hawaii.