Oi! There's a local recumbent maker!

Instead of balancing on your bum and your fanny on a tiny wedge of leather that rapidly cuts off circulation to both and leaves you feeling like someone’s taken to your nether regions with a baseball bat after a couple of hours on it, you get a nice, comfy chair to cruise along in.
Instead of leaning on a metal bar that rapidly cuts off circulation to your hands, and constantly craning your neck upwards to avoid staring at bitumen all day long, you wrap your hands lightly around two upright handlebars down by your hips, lean back, and the world unfolds before you like a movie on a cinema screen.

After a recommendation like that, who wouldn’t want a recumbent? (-:

Number One Daughter also has knee issues, and the recumbent makes it easier to gear down rather than loading up.

The downside is that these are about 10-12x the price of a K-Mart bike; the upside is that they’re built really well. Hydraulic brakes with reinforced (braid-armoured) tubing and that sort of stuff. And of course, the Fat Chick has been around Australia on one.

How did I find that site? It’s being hosted on a Linux box for an MS-Windows-addict friend (who knows quite well what would happen to a Microsoft server in the same circumstances, unless its paid far more attention than he has for it), and neither FrontPage nor CoffeeCup are very good at producing intact websites from a sliced-up MS-Word document (although kudos for CoffeeCup for not totally raping (as in completely botching rather than doing a clean wipe and replace) the existing site during updates.

I’ll drop in and have a play with some personal/portable/real-life “cinema screens” on Sunday.

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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