Palming off bees, Miss Dinocycle, chain

About 1/4 of the many things falling from this flower are... bees. I have no real idea what kind of palm this is, but the bees treat it like Nirvana... except that they often konk out after sitting on it for a while.

They tend to bounce off the ground and fly wonkily away, so I'll guess that they finish up well despite their dramatic (non-)starts.

Miss Dinosaur (not pictured) has a pushbike with trainers, now. The wheels go around in the correct direction, and very fast... I'm kind of amazed that she hasn't come a cropper from it yet (helmet always on, JIC).

I finally worked my way up to joining up an unlinked pushbike chain today.

Due to the many limitations consequent on the risk of me suddenly blacking out, I had to use a small, threaded windey link-pusher tool to fiddle the links — rather than a big "real" one and "real" tools — and get someone else (Sydney) to take the bike for a test-spin to check the results.

Finding the dexterity to scrape some oil and grot from the chain and gears was a bit of a battle, but if I stay with at most one bike a day I could probably get by.

That's hardly employable, but it is progress.

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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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