"Open Source? You're soaking in it!"

From Brad Campbell on the main PLUG list, comes this interesting and heartening story:

I set my admin desktop at the office to dual boot XP and Knoppix 3.9.
Recently employed secretary sits down at machine with admin manager to show her the ropes and starts using it (I accidentally left it booted into knoppix). Runs through the mornings work until yours truly arrives at the office...
Sit down, introduce self to secretary and start casual banter... observe the KDE desktop and ask about her familiarity with Linux and OpenOffice...
Comment back from both was “Oh? Thats not Microsoft Office? But it looks like it and I had no problem using it. How much does it cost?”
Admin manager stunned and amazed. Considering study to move large portion of his other business over to StarOffice (coz they want $$ support) and canceling pending order for 100 copies of MSO.
Progress little grasshopper

Perhaps we should call this “value subtracted marketing”, in which the artificially inflated value of closed-source products is brought crashing to the ground? (-:

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

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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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