People, wormholes in space, updates

I’ve run into another decent set of people, whose ISP (InterNode, & they’re on a RIM, so have a limited range of choices) also features a Mandriva mirror, so my laptop was able to do a monster update last night without banging on their quota.

The cute little dogs are a bit inquisitive but the crying-age baby is a great little fellow. He cries with a tone that tells you that he’s impatient to be answered rather than in desperate despair — which is, in an odd way, quite relaxing.

About a week ago, I misplaced an older-style tickey-type wristwatch, with no idea where it had vanished to. It popped out of the lost-pen wormhole yesterday, amongst a stack of collected paperwork.

The laptop update was surprising large for a week or so, including cups, firefox, totem & a number of other medium-budget systems which all added up.

My Ubuntu workstation has an antenna, & Internode mirrors them too, so tonight’s extravaganza will include updating that. It has a number of great games for a borderline machine, so I have to hope that there’s some, well, 4-8 year olds around my next — more long-term — residence to enjoy them.

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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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