Mister Purple Pants

The perfect name for a cavy, no? If you ever want an off-the-wall response to a question, just ask one of my littlies.

Photo of cavy This (the one on the right) is Mr Purple Pants. No purple, no pants. It took us a while to winkle out the foundations of this name. It turns out that new-cavy-owner Xan (5.5yob) is a big fan of John English’s character the Pirate King from the musical The Pirates of Penzance, but doesn’t remember either John’s name or the character’s – but does remember the scene from HMS Pinafore in which John as the Pirate King whips out Rafe Rackstraw’s contract and starts reading it aloud only to discover that it’s a love-letter from Buttercup, starting “I love your purple pants...”

So there you go. There was a reason for it after all. (-:

Chasing down juvenile chains of logic has been an extremely entertaining education for me, something I can recommend to any geek. There is a price to pay in sleepless nights etc, and someone has to stagger around like a cow for 40 weeks beforehand, but it most certainly has its lighter moments.

The guinea pig in question is an ordinary boring agouti about 10cm long, and providentially happens to be a male (that’s one less thing to explain).

Comments

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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