I won't move to Sydney! You can't make me!

Did some work in Kewdale yesterday, and got down to the top of the freeway at 07:19, transit time from there to Kewdale: 50 minutes.

Doing some more work there today, got to the top of the freeway at 06:59, transit time to Kewdale: 27 minutes.

Only about 20% less traffic, but probably 90% less skitterish morons.

I’ve been driven around Sydney by the Waughs several times, and the CBD’s as choked from 6AM to 8PM as Perth’s freeways are for two hours each day each way. If I had to suffer through that every day (no! no!) it would be car-adaptor time for my laptop and find a way to strap a small keyboard across the boss of the steering wheel plus a flatscreen on the dash as a HUD. Can the Xorg server display upside down in mirror image? I’d be surprised if it couldn’t, and determined to fix that.

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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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