Parent talk - if you can't hack the messier side of parenting, scroll past this

This one’s to balance the cute pictures and high praise, so prospective parents don’t suffer an overdose of the “rosy glow” effect.

So... here we are, having just walked about 250m down a path to the beach (the one off the southern half of Anchorage Drive, Mindarie), then about 50m along the beach, when Miss 4 pipes up, “Dad, I can feel my poohs starting to come out.”

She was wrong. When I checked, I discovered that we were dealing with a... fully emergent phenomenon. And we were equipped with what by way of spares and cleaning gear? Zilch. The help and sympathy I was offered were encapsulated in just three words: “Well, she’s yours.”

I finally managed to beg a handkerchief from Greville, who assures me that he doesn’t want it back again, thank you, dug a shallow hole, levitated madam while she completed her, ah, transaction, then covered it, took the knickers and handkerchief down to the waterline and scrubbed them lots in sandy water, spreading them on the sun-side of rock to dry while she donned her knickerbockers and we caught up with everyone else.

A van’s widnscreen wipers make a great blow-dryer (everywhere north or west of the Brisbane Line, anyway), but it does earn you some startled looks.

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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