When given lemons…

…one positively must make lemonade.

So I shipped 11,000 pieces of spam to Kylie as ingredients for her quest to find a use for spam.

This was a good deal more satisfying than feeding it to a rendering-down script which generates (107,000 so far) blacklisted sender addresses for my email server, especially since it represents about a month & a half of spam (with the server putting a knife through the throats of about 90% of them before they come in the SMTP door).

Actually, my spam is down from over 1,000 a day circa two years ago to about 70-100 a day now, despite the overall increase. These figures are after the server bins 90% of them for sins like invalid domain or identifying themselves as an unlisted host.

On a completely different topic, I note that I didn’t mention an important feature of Drama Triangles: the participants are typically either blind to their place in this system, or misinterpreting it.

For example, it must be OK to help people (Rescuer) but there are so many around who just won’t take good, clear advice (Victim) so I must try harder to help them — & never mind (Aggressor/Persecuter) the screams, protests & other signals which indicate that I’m playing with the wrong band. Or instruments. Or tune. Or planet (small ‘p’).

It seems harder to combat (or even identify) when it blends so well with established human nature. Human nature is too big a problem to fix (or sometimes, even face) en bloc.

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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