Busy power pole, nuts, pudding, new beastie

Power pole with solar panels Interesting that even with obvious power to spare a couple of feet above them, it was evidently cheaper to add solar panels and batteries to power these instruments (and presumably change out said batteries every 5-10 years) than to step down power for them from the wires. This pole is whare the railway passes under the road near Lake Joondalup Baptist College.

And sorry, Chris Samuel, if what I wrote made it appear that you were making a claim for a solution. No, that’s just what I see implied in the data.

That’s enough about murderous nutcases for a while, let’s change pace slightly. This tastes seriously yummy even if you don’t make it with all of the right branded bits.

Also on a completely different topic, I finally have a replacement for the Blue Beastie, the Flouro-Orange-Shading-To-Faded-Lime-Green Beastie. As you can see from the handlebars, the price was definitely right.
$15.00^W$10.00

All it needed was ten seconds of TLC with an Allen key to tighten up the handlebars, and a couple of quick hisses of air into the tyres and she rides just like a real bike. (-:

Picture of new treadly

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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