The perils of having Too Much Data

My Sister-in-Law is now up to almost 200 gigabytes of raw and processed photos and has suddenly realised that most of it is not backed up. And one of her data drives (yes, all IDE busses on her workstation are full) is starting to throw SMART errors. And she had the fear of God thrown into her by the sudden demise of one of my drives on Monday.

So... quick trip to the wholesaler, one 250GB WD drive, one USB2 cage, and do the copy... and the cage drops the ball about every 8GB. <sigh>.

So, out with the DVD drive and in with the WD. Copying, copying... 74% now after five hours of rsyncing. Would I like a multi-CPU multi-PCI-buss one-IDE-controller-per-drive to do this kind of thing in half an hour or so, neatly and with a RAID? Yes, but they cost money, which some people don’t have. The hard drive and cage cost about as much as a copy of XP Pro – and which would you rather have in hand?

In less than 2 hours, I’ll finally have a chance to upgrade (new GIMP, amongst other things) her machine while she sleeps, so she can get up at Silly O’clock and work some more (no rest for the wicked and all). If anyone’s busier than me in our extended family, it’s her.

In between doing other work on my laptop (hurrah for laptops!), I also got to play with a nice camera and take some shots suitable for slide backgrounds. The Canon 20D focuses pretty much instantly, and lights up a little square or squares on the display to tell you where it found focus. SIL has a nice selection of lenses to play with; one of them can focus on a person on the other side of the yard, and defocus the person standing right next to them. The only fly in the ointment is that the firmware in this one doesn’t like gphoto2, so the 10D gets used as an image downloader.

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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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