UI considerations

The otherwise brilliant Lucretia opened my eyes once again to my favourite Jethro Tull song (the 43 minute version, natch), in which wise men suffer the handicap of not really understanding how everyday people’s minds work. She was using The GIMP to prepare some photos for eBay and wanted to put lots of images on each listing without having to pay for them, so I set her up a hole in the web into which she could pour photos.

It took aaaaaaaaaaages for me to figure out that because The GIMP, and Konqueror (which she uses as a file manager) and Mozilla’s file selection dialogue all look different, she had them mentally checked off as looking at different things.

Hooray for the people who “naturalised” OpenOffice for KDE; now if only I had time to do the same for the rest of GTK, or at least the bits used by The GIMP. I’ll be bumping her KDE up to 3.4 shortly in the hope of having eBay’s JavaScript work properly with it.

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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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