I feel very old again

ABCfm got a bit esoteric while I was driving schoolkids around today, so I flipped the wahless across to 94.5. They played the Boomtown Rats’ I don’t like Mondays, which says...

The telex machine is kept so clean
As it types to a waiting world

...and the epiphany struck: none of the kids I was driving would know what a Telex was. Nor, it turned out, did my sister-in-law Jane or our mutual friend Monica. Jane’s hubby Jamie knew, but only just.

<geezer> I remember working at a West Perth consulting firm (long since defunct) when the boss sent a huge (seven foot (as in eighty-four linear inches of paper with printing on)?) Telex from Malaysia. It was full of meandering generalities, half-formed thoughts and such but very light on for actual information. At the end, it asked a whole pile of long and random questions, mostly unrelated to the preceding waffle. The two leading employees responded, one by replying “YES” and the other by replying “NO”. I remember documents typed up in EDT or TECO and fed to DEC RunOff (RNO) to produce Telex-formatted text, which was then converted into faux Baudot code by a small C program and written out through an ASR-33 teletype acting as a Telex terminal. </geezer>

My 15yod wouldn’t know what a record was if her “bumpa” didn’t keep a (large) collection of ’78s (actually 78.26 RPM, says Wikipedia). Monica’s children will grow up in a world where thick televisions are alien, hot light-builbs are a novelty and you go to a museum to see a floppy disk. I feel like I just arrived in town towed by a a locomotive which eats coal.

sample of a Telex message

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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