"Too much data" now backed up

The IDE cage (or perhaps card) seems to be happy under lighter loads. It has space on the board for a FireWire socket, and the manual speaks of it being dual-mode, so I’m guessing that the difference between the $50 USB2 version and the $85 dual-mode version is one fifteen-cent socket and one extra hole in the back panel.

I’m amazed by how much trouble went into getting the blue power light to look trendy. The light is provided by blue LEDs in the ends of perspex rods, which appear to have deliberately induced optical flaws in them to produce a deliberately speckled lighting effect. Each of the three lit sides has a parabolic reflector behind it and a black grille. Disk activity is shown with a red LED on the right side of the front panel, which causes the panel to flash to purple during disk activity. In the photo above, the camera somehow caught the reflector at the back of that (clear-cased) LED, which is almost invisible to the human eye. I wish they’d put as much effort into the electronics as they had into the styling.

Now that we have a known-good copy (rsync checksums say so, anyway), the machine is on its way to becoming Mandriva 10.25 (ie, current Cooker, and thank you to Pacific Internet for an excellent WAIX-connected and rsync-able Mandrake/Mandriva mirror) and its owner is already delighted by the new features. Apparently The GIMP 2.2.7 can import Flash (.swf) files now,although I don’t see it in the ChangeLogs.

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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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