The rain in Perth falls mainly on the earth...

...ending a long fine spell, at least in the northern suburbs. Big, dark clouds built up to the northeast and then it came splatting down at about 15:30 and has been (on and off) since.

Niece Danielle married the incomparable Scott yesterday at Mulberry Farm, and we definitely could have used some cloud cover at that point. It’s a very pretty riverside function centre but the entire ceremony was held out in the blazing sun. Both participants got top value out of the union, IMESHO. Then there were cold drinks and excellent scones.

It seems that Pia is going to visit this largely-forgotten patch of Australia near where the sun goes to sleep at night. Top stuff! Note to all sandgropers: Pia is good value, take full advantage of this opportunity.

It also seems that BlogSpot’s photo upload thingy is kinda broken. First time I’ve tried to use it. The image from doesn’t show up on either the LA Planet or the blog post itself, yet it did at the time and does if you visit it directly. Do that, it’s funny.

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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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