Glow-in-the-dark planet

I’m sure we’ve all seen Theodor Geisel’s wettest dream, glow-in-the-dark green ham [as reported by Chris Hogg, thank you BBC] by now, but how about a green, glow-in-the-dark style planet?

This a snapshot of Earth in the extreme ultra-violet (EUV). Like the auroral corona?

Good, ’coz it’s there 24x7. It gets wider and narrower, fuzzier and more intense, but it’s always there, even if we can’t see it with our carefully tuned little eyeballs.

The fuzzy ball represent Earth’s “plasmasphere”, which like the magnetosphere, ionosphere et al surrounds Earth and protects it from lots of cosmic nasties. It also fluctuates, depending upon a variety of factors, not all of them well understood.

/ME has to wonder what effects this has on the ionosphere, global warming, yadda yadda. With all of this plasma happening, starting a few tens of kilometers up, it’s a wonder that Red Sprites, Blue Jets, ELVEs, TROLLs and the like weren’t officially noticed a long time earlier.

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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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