Brasil pulling financial rabbit from hat

Brasil, with a booming economy, is doing something almost unheard-of: not only paying its USD$15.5 billion IMF debt, but early, and on top of that, it’s paying off a USD$2.6 billion debt to the Paris Club early as well.

Many countries take out IMF loans only as an act of desperation, and the IMF usually interferes quite heavily in the country’s autonomy as part of the conditions. Many IMF loans are also never effectively repaid.

Not only is FOSS-loving Brasil on target to repay the loans, they also issued a global bond offering backed by Reals, not foreign currency and it was extremely well received.

/ME is now wondering which FOSS-supporting country will be next to demonstrate obvious signs of prosperity. Pia in particular has spent a fair bit of time telling us how motivated the Sudamericanos are (particularly about FOSS, but that’s not all) over the last few years, now we’re starting to see some tangible, measurable, obvious results.

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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