Hello friends. Missed me? I know I have not been posting as much lately. I'll explain at the end of this post why Hive has been so challenging for me to interact with lately. It's kind of lengthy to explain, so enjoy some happy photos first if that's all you are here for, and you can skip the rest.

New Gift

Today I am sharing a recent holiday gift. This is a Japanese Black Pine, and I'll be adding it to my bonsai collection.

The gift giver told me this tree came from a Bonsai nursery in Albany Oregon. Apparently they stock traditional Japanese tree species for bonsai, as well as many native tree varieties at all stages of growth.

Knowing that you can buy a large variety of tiny tree for a few bucks sounds very intriguing, so I may end up taking a trip out there myself to investigate. Most plant nurseries will charge a lot more for stock trees, which are not as young or easy to re-style for bonsai.

After snapping the photos, I removed the tree from the decorate paper and mug, and it was inside good peat soil with a well-draining plastic nursery pot. Of course I took off the red bow as well, and tucked the tree and pot inside a thick bed of mulch to help blanket the roots in warm moisture outside during the winter months.

These type of trees should not be brought indoors for too long, or else the needles will dry out and cause the tree to die. It needs moist outdoor fresh air and daily temperatures changes to help the tree regulate water uptake, as all native outdoor trees do.

Tune in later this week for more bonus content. In Winter, most of my bonsai trees cannot be photographed because they are tucked away under the mulch while dormant, but I do have some new things growing, and some old things taking on new shapes to share.

About My Hive Status...

As I stated at the top of this post, I have been having difficulty with using Hive lately.

Problems Signing In

#Peakd has almost always been my primary interface for using Hive. However, I have never gotten it to work well on my mobile phone or tablet. The signer apps tended to sign me out frequently. Eventually I could not sign in at all. Both keychain and hivesigner apps kept forgetting my credentials, and I loath digging up and entering my private keys manually on a frequent basis. The more I am asked to show my private keys, the less safe I feel my account is secure.

How many times should I have to create a new password? How many passwords for different devices should I have to access the same profile? I keep passwords secure offline, and don't want to keep re-entering and changing them on my mobile devices.

I really need help with this. Any advice? I can't curate or post often if I cannot sign-in while on-the-go.

Curation Woes

For years I have been rewarding people with manual daily curation activity. I have amassed quite a bit of Hive Power, and want to use that to reward others for posting awesome original content. I am a strong believer that the best authors on Hive are more deserving of rewards than the curators, and I am a part of that movement.

This past Summer, I was considering investing into a new lease to increase my Hive Power. I did this in the past, and my curation votes blessed people with a few dollars per vote, and it really sparked new users to join Hive, be interactive, and work hard to post good content. Currently, I am choosing to wait on buying a new HP lease until I see the price of Hive come out of the dumps. Penny rewards of Hive is only worth a fraction of a penny in real world currency.

HBD, HP, Hive Investment Strategy

From the years I have been on Hive, I know sometimes my own posts may not receive any HBD from the rewards. When the dept ratio is too high, nobody earns HBD. It feels like a famine, and people just disappear. My personal strategy has always been to save HBD income with the intention of using it to buy leased Hive Power, and power up my Hive continue to increase my HP. I never send Hive or HBD to exchanges to cash out.

Over the past few months, I stopped curating almost completely when it became too challenging to curate on a regular basis. Additionally, I ran out of creative content of my own to share. Don't worry, that will change as soon as the sun comes out this next season.

Previously, the Rewarding.app was really helpful to me in spreading out my votes to ensure everyone's posts I curated got as close to a 100% vote as possible. Delayed voting is a great feature! This app features alone allowed me to cast multiple curation votes while I was sleeping, not on random content somebody else picked, but on actual posts I found, read ahead of time, and enjoyed.

For a while the trail vote rules I set up for my alt accounts on the rewarding.app were even curating people with token rewards such as #creativecoin #neoxian and other tribe tokens. However, when the rewarding.app unexpectedly wiped out all my vote rules, I could I could not figure out how to rebuild the trail vote rules to get them working again, so I gave up.

If anyone skilled in setting up curation trails wants to help me out, send me a message on discord (see below), and we can meet to chat. Are tokens still a worthwhile investment to curate with?

Peakd Problems

Today, I thought something was wrong with Peakd, because it would not load or refresh for close to an hour and half. Maybe my PC and browser was just slow. Mostly likely the problem is my PC is getting slow/old and has trouble with Chrome browser when many tabs are open.

Is there any ongoing or recent drama going on with Hive that I should know about? As far as I know, things are running smoothly. Spam comments are decreased, but post activity and onboarding also appear to be decreased. Time to rebuild my personal follower list, because most of them are still inactive. Yes, I know about all the political drama on other centralized social media, but I do not think Hive is even a speck on the big tech censorship radar anymore with all the focus on parler and other platforms.

Which Hive interfaces do you all use the most? Why? Which login signer apps do you use the most for mobile devices to post on Hive? And for videos, do you guys prefer dtube, threespeak, or something else? Why?

Wouldn't it be great if Hive could aggregate posts from all the other major media platforms? I wouldn't need to visit twitter or facebook anymore to read new content from my favorite contacts, and the centralized powers would not be able to remove/revise the original posts once it's posted. Developers, get on it!

How To Reach Me

I have some strong/picky opinions of my own, as some of you know, but I choose to keep most of them to myself. It keeps my blog feed a bit more inclusive and positive for everyone interested in the primary topics I write about (bonsai, gardening, creative writing, etc.). Anyone is welcome to drop into discord (see below) to chat.

Please, drop me a line in my discord channel, and let me know what topic you wish to talk about, and I'll arrange a meeting. Generally, I choose not to make myself available for idle gab entertainment. Anything relating to the topics above, I would love to interact with you about.

Peace!

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Photos in this post are all #originalworks by @creativetruth, unless stated otherwise.

Find me on discord and chat with other tree growers, bonsai enthusiasts, and gardeners.

#teambonsai @hive-193614 #hive-193614 #bonsai

No memberships. Love trees. Make friends. Grow together.

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Post Beneficiaries:

• 1% @mendezand
• 1% @cryptopie

This is my way of thanking each of you for your friendship and support. By sharing my talents on Hive, I can also share to help with your needs.

Let my success also grant you some happiness too.

#japanese-blackpine #japaneseblackpine #black-pine #pine-tree #young-tree #growing #art