The Road to Damascus, and a trip around the Planet

Spent too much time reading The Road to Damascus last night. Very addictive. John Ringo is hard to put down at the best of times, and Linda Evans seems to have rounded out his writing quite nicely. Or possibly vice versa, since I’ve not read Linda before.

Did a quick trip around PlanetLA this morning.

Pia, that hackergotchi is so dignified.

Ryan Verner, I feel your pain, we once had a property manager named Ilse. After she passed from our lives, <leap>, <click-heels>, another local Linux user had the same, um, honour ’coz the owner’s wife was a friend of hers. And then, to his infinite sadness, she got taken off the job for telling the owner late one afternoon that she didn’t work 24x7. Our current agents are a bit picky, but follow the rules and are human. Reasonable for a lessee, fabulous for a landlord.

Rusty, in case you haven’t been thanked today, thanks for being the guard-dog of software freedom in Oz.

James Dumay, I think you need to do an “-agotchi” which says, “Aaaaaah! I’m being sucked in!” It may or may not be funny, but it’s probably the truest text that could go there.

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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