Today's random quote...

...on purposelessness as a cause, with some Islamic (in mostly English) background (if I get an attribution, capitalisation or something like handedness wrong anywhere here, please post a response correcting my blunder so I know enough to repair it):

Humans are required to have iman (belief and conviction in and about Allah) and do ‘amal (i.e., have their iman reflected in a righteous course of conduct vis-à-vis Allah, fellow humans, and the environment). The creation of humans, and their existence on Earth, is a deliberate divine act not an unguided, purposeless event.

[...]

After all, it is absurd to assume that chance causes. Chance describes; chance does not cause. Even in normal linguistic definitions, when we say that two persons meet by chance, we do not mean that they are acting haphazardly in life.

That’s an interesting piece of linguistic realisation... and according to Dad’s main Chinese friend, this works as well (as badly, that is) in Chinese also (and — according to some other friends — Laotian linguistics work the same way).

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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.

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...

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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