Akkana Peck’s presentation

This was truly excellent. I was dubbed manager for Old Arts A at the time, but had almost nothing to do since Akkana was pretty much self-managing, self-timing, the whole enchilada.

Her presentation was very practical & personal, without getting gooshey, & featured a python named “Pearl” — to the consternation of the language aficionados — & it mentioned Joao, a Brasiliano bloke who was very helpful when I first got into GIMP script-fu.

Akkana well earned her speaker’s presents, & I even got to make a valid funny: she’d been working with a demo-script called “blobify” in script-fu, switched to Python & couldn’t think of a name for that version of her script, so I suggested “blobipy” which was promptly accepted & used.

The delegates (audience) did well for themselves, too, with a few short, interesting questions.

Comments

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

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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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