Blue clouds in a white sky

Some of the most amazing photo opportunities pop up when you have no camera with you. Driving up to brother-in-law Jamie’s place on Friday afternoon (SIL is still partying on in banana bender territory), the sky was pretty much filled with a big blue pancake of cloud. It felt very “Independence Day”.

Around the rim of the cloud, the sky was filled with a white haze which had been around for several days at the time. In this white haze floated little blue cousins of the motherhsip: blue clouds in a white sky. And no camera.

Earlier that day, sorting through the last dregs of moving, I ran across the memory stick which shipped with my first real camera, a Sony DSC-F505: an MSA-4A totalling a massive 4MB. My current (waaay obsolete) DSC-F707 could — but only if you chose your shots carefully — fit two whole photos on that as JPEGs at full rez.

That brings to mind the full height five megabyte Winchester drives which were an AUD$3000 option for the DEC Rainbow in 1981, or the two megabyte “flying saucer” removable drives which were still being sold for PDP-11s at the time. The Z80-based Osborne 1 luggable PC (with the full 64kB of RAM) was just in the throes of getting double-density 5.25” floppy drives to raise the storage from 92kB a disk to 192kB (IIRC the first cylinder had to stay single density for some reason).

I feel old. Broadcom’s gigabit LAN card drivers are typically bigger than that entire drive. My keyboard probably has more memory. Come to think of it, so does my optical mouse.

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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