Random mumblings

The weather has been a little odd recently. We had a coolish but not freezing day yesterday, & when I looked up at Mount Murchison yesterday afternoon, its sides (bare in the morning) were covered with snow.

I also had a tiny event make me stop and think about the complexity of the systems we use. I inadvertantly brushed against the Tab key (auto-completion) when I started to type a command in to BASH, and it said:

Display all 5151 possibilities? (y or n)

All how many? This is a simple desktop machine.

Typing a rarer letter (j) & Tab shows up 37 programs (jpeg2swf, java, jamin & jw, for example) which include complete programming languages, DocBook converters, audio system managers and image translators.

Oddly enough, this illustrates some of the value in Free software, since the people making up this free ($0) Linux distribution would have been packing in software that they had been asked for. Rather than asking if the users are willing to pay $700 for an office suite, the question becomes, do we want to spend the 1/3 of a CD’s worth of space that this will take up?

Quite apart from the “feature” applications like GIMP, OpenOffice, Kaffeine & so on, these thousands of small applications allow this simple installation to do stuff like losslessly rotate JPEG images (jpegtran), edit up sound tracks (audacious) or produce ray-traces (YafRay). These all come in various flavours, such as YafRay versus POVray.

If I want to do the same things on MS-Windows, I need to manually hunt down (maybe pay for) & install the individual applications to do this, then perhaps resolve incompatibilities, & certainly virus-scan every piece before daring to do something shocking like actually run it.

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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