XP is most unforgiving

Trotted along to Morely Seventh-day Adventist Church this morning, to watch some school-children sing. The projector spent the first half of the ~~show~~ service displaying candid shots of the Principal’s XP-based laptop rebooting. It was running really, really, slowly, to the point where it couldn’t even play CDs without skipping. I prescribed AdAware and SpyBot and sat back to enjoy the singing a capella until the machine finally cooperated about half an hour and six or seven “lucky (gypsy) reboots ” later.

Had some of the most delicious mushroom soup ever for lunch afterwards, and chatted with some of the ~~audience~~ congregation.

Of the three computer people I found, two are using Linux, one for his J2EE servers (backed by ibFireBird) and one for his desktop (SuSE).

I like these people already. And their food. Heavenly! (-:

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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.

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...

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