Skip to main content

We're biiiiike!

I’m very glad that I was forewarned about my fitness levels. It was an easy ride – although it seemed for a while that Steven “Masochist” Hanley was going to take us via Dairy Farm (on top of a hill nowhere near Dairy Flats). We got to see the scene of the original Penguin Bite, a dam, some excellent shady forest paths, some swans, some nice shiny rent-a-cruiser road bikes, the Canberra foreshore and lots of other stuff. It was excellent and I am knackered. The after-ride yard party was great – oh, the calories! – and we’re currently sitting around watching Shrek2 (or typing up blogs, developing Exim etc) while we wait for airplane time to wander around.

Tridge is, as always, an excellent host and Susan an impeccable hostess. They say you need to look at the people someone surrounds themselves with in order to truly know what the person is like, and at the moment we’re surrounded by some remarkable people, including roughly a dozen children ranging from near zero to 16yo. Apparently, you need nine xterms open at once to develop Exim stuff, and I don’t know how Marc would cope if he was forced to use a 1024x768 screen like this one. (-:

Happily, it turns out that the adaptor for my OpenBook is willing to drive both Bernard and JamesA’s laptops as well – Bernard took the one shared adaptor home with him when he went.

My 15yod would like a souvenir of Canberra, but Tridge and Susan have both strenuously declined requests for their oh-so-cute little dog, so if anyone has any other suggestions...?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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.