Japan goes to Luna too

Japan has an interesting habit of forgetting to stay a minor power, then going out & doing something major in their own interesting way.

The last one I remember of these was measuring an asteroid — Itokawa — with a satellite named Hayabusa in a mission known as MUSES-C & finding it only a quarter as dense as beach sand. Any samples will be returned to Woomera, it being a safer & more obvious target than even Hokkaido.

This time, they’re sending a satellite constellation known as SELENE to orbit the Moon.

It’s a constellation rather than a single satellite so that the two smaller orbiters (“VRAD” & “Relay”) can relay radio from each other to do things like accurately measure Lunar gravitation on the far side. They’ve done a number of such interesting things with the mission planning.

Part of the Nipponese special features include being able to include your wishes in the mission as a kind of payload. You get the rest of this month to submit your wish, which then goes Lunatic in July 2007.

I wonder how many wishes for Duke Nukem Forever will be included? Hopefully, you’ll be allowed more than 16 colours per wish. (-:

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

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boundaries

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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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