Prior art for Qantas' budget branch?

So I was worried about a slightly lopsided star? Well, it turns out that I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet...

This object is called “Herbig Haro 111” (for George Herbig and Guillermo Haro) and the jet pictured is 12 lightyears long, or in other words Proxima Centauri would be only a third of the way up the picture if the emitting star was good ol’ Sol.

Even more interesting was finding movies of the jet, which unfortunately end in 1998... I wonder if there have been any done for the 8 years since? It’s also interesting seeing the knots in the jet “rez in” as the imaging technology responsible for each frame improves. Stop-motion photography at a year per frame!

Still... that there gas is scooting along in a fairly brisk fashion. About 500km/s, they say. And how does gravity account for a “Jetstar” with a 12ly tail? Shrug. It doesn’t.

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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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