Where do you go to see dozens of minis racing?

Why, Albany, of course!

No, not Albany, state of New York. Albany, state of Western Australia.

There were also sundry Cortinas buzzing around on Sunday, even a Jaguar sedan, plus some seriously antique rally cars.

Girlfriend would have liked it, born in the Year of the Tiger (like me, Leon the Lion), drives on the wrong side of the road (as for York Street here, other streets they used both sides), has Jaguar Avenue running west from the town of Leon, which is 150km NW of her town (about half a Geraldton but a bit more spread out, has some excellent lakes, less sand, less double-gees, fairly close to the other side of the planet from here). If you like coincidences, she was born one day after & two timezones east of me.

The Albany Car Classic started off a bit damp, but it had stopped raining, was sunny & nearly dry by noon.

Wasn’t today a miserable winter day? Bright sunshine, 19.7°C... (-:

Comments

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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