Good showstopper headline, Chris...

...I certainly blinked when I read “Petrol prices not high enough”, in this day and age of “shall I buy a tank of juice or an eighty gigabyte hard drive?”

spider orchid

Your point about the wildlife is certainly true. One of the things I notice about cycling is that even with big noisy mtb tyres, a bicycle on bitumen, cement or stone is quiet enough that you see things missed even by the pedestrians, and sometimes your steady motion makes things more visible (or less alarmed) than the more rhythmic gait of a walker.

Admittedly, not everyone wants to see a dugite when they’re out walking (which happened to me a few days ago) but OTOH I’d rather see it from a fast-moving bike on which I can draw my feet up than from Shanks’s Pony. I’ve also ghosted past a lass photographing a bird with her camera on a tripod, and neither photographer nor subject flinched even slightly. OTOH I’ve also ghosted past another daydreaming lass who abruptly flung her milkshake up into the air (most of it landed in the scrub) and squeaked about a bodily function after I passed.

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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