It's ugly. Very ugly.

Behold, the ugliest civic building in Australia, possibly the Southern Hemisphere:

Be glad you can't see it

Apparently, they won an award for it, and it wasn’t a joke award or “worst of” competition – you know, funniest government architecture or something – my book-keeper (who lives near and has to drive past it) has a couple of daughters; their name for it is “the plastic rubbish skip”.

The footpaths outside are a testimony to the Vogon mindset which spawned it. The footpath crosses the south-western driveway, then stops and is vectored across the 4-lane highway. When it re-crosses about 20 metres later (<thwack!>), it joins the head of a wheelchair access ramp. A long, straight one, unbroken by flattened resting spots. An long, straight, expensive one, for which much landscaping has been done. A long, straight, totally pointless one, since better access would be provided by just running a footpath alongside either or both of the driveways.

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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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