"So we decided to do something dramatic"

Oh, good. Something else to do with all of my spare time.

It seems that a small UK company has decided that it doesn’t want to be crushed or bought out. I’m wondering if they will suddenly be made an offer that they can’t refuse, but meanwhile it’d be great if they do succeed in Open Sourcing Xara Xtreme. Either way, the cat is out of the bag (another favoured way of putting it is “The can is open, the worms are everywhere!”); they’ve even published a Torrent for it.

Open Sourcing is a good, productive reaction to the threat of destruction. DeScribe launched one last version of their software for free before closing their doors forever, but it would have been even better if they’d also published the source. The GPL wasn’t a major force in those days.

Xara aren’t shy about their big ideas:

To create a new cross-platform industry standard
To change the graphics landscape forever
To create the best drawing / vector graphics software that has ever existed
At the same time create a genuinely useful, general-purpose graphics tool for everyone

The program itself looks very cool, a kind of broad-spectrum/generalised Blender.

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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