Jim Baen struck down

As of last night (Wednesday), Jim Baen's stroke damage has finally taken him out.

I will be but one of many people missing this careful man & all of the powerful work he’s done in the support of unencumbered & reasonable authorship.

If you visit his publishing company, you’ll discover that Baen Books is an EFF member, true to Jim’s staunch support of free and open markets for good literature. You’ll also see a SpreadFireFox button, emblemic of Baen’s support of real alternatives to the run-of-the-mill mainstream products. Lots of excellent books advertised (many hosted in Baen’s Free Library, too).

The world is a poorer place for the now-lack of this determined and energetic man’s presence. Baen Books will continue as a business & excellent writing will still be available (Jim was wise enough to plan ahead), but any new progress & new advances will rely much more upon the combined efforts of Baen’s valiant authors alone.

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

Search This Blog