Crikey! Where did that day go?

The Lappivator is working, but it’s an uphill battle. Like climbing loose shale.

Had a weird problem with an hp desktop today: NumLock was all funny on the USB keyboard, and while it was plugged in the PS/2 mouse ceased working. Hmm. Scratches head, runs lsusb — gets squat. Eh?

Seems that the hp BIOS is turning the USB keyboard into a pretend PS/2 keyboard (and botching it) so Linux sees PS/2 not USB, and that either the BIOS rashly presumes that a USB keyboard present == a USB mouse present, or the PS/2 character stuffing interfered with the mouse. I tried modprobe usb-echi and everything suddenly worked right.

Not sure why Mandrake’s HardDrake didn’t auto-detect the USB interfaces, lspcidrake lists the modules reliably.

Had a few mail servers smashed flat by spam in recent days. The spammers or their zombies seem to have started batching stuff per-server so that one poor innocent machine will suddenly be facing a dozen or score kinds of messages addressed to a handful of people at once. The queue rapidly goes from quiet to hundreds of messages inbound, then back to quiet for a while (minutes or hours) as the spam and virus scanner processes struggle to deal with the big bucket of literary vomit they’ve been handed. Then repeat.

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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