You never know who...

...well, anyway:

My teen has been through a fair bit in the last week or so — as you’d expect — the most recent being that she was invited to the Collie victim’s funereal in Bunbury on this Friday afternoon.

That’s not a decision I’d really like to face — either way — but she’s decided to settle for a careful card instead, in order to get her very real sympathies across without the risk of causing any undue personal conflict.

The to- and fro-ing at school during the week was not completely trivial, either. From what I’ve heard so far, I’m satisfied that she’s coped as well as I could expect — possibly better.

I’m glad — not that she’s had to cope with such traumua, no matter how directly and effectively, but — that my teenage daughter is dealing with the many rough items so well. Not perfectly (who could be?) but well.

Daughter’s AmerIndian name means “eternal bloom”, which was an inadvertant piece of prophecy with both good & not-so-good parts. She’s living up to it very well.

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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.

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.

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

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