Lunch today at the beach...

...the bitingly cold, blowey Scarborough beach.

The food was excellent & we had a dude running around on a sailing thingy with wheels on, pulling broggies, which was entertaining.

There were also some extremely climbable trees in the playground & some excellent beach-walking — including some very heavy, very dark little stones & some interesting shells. And a cap, which said “Cowboys”. Young Ryan wore it home.

Afterwards, we stopped & looked at a bunch of surf-kiters, which was amusing in itself as one of them stepped off his board & accidentally went barefooting. We were impressed & evidently so was he.

Traffic on the way home was sluggish, once we’d got to the Gateway bridge, as the peak-hour traffic bunched up on us heavily after that.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Scarborough Beach ... there, I fixed your post for you :-P

12 September, 2006 22:54

Leon RJ Brooks said…

Sorry, Cameron, wrong Scarborough Beach. (-:

This one's stuck north of Redcliff, a suburb of Brisbane.

14 September, 2006 10:49

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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