Our connected little planet

It looks like an Alaskan volcano, erupting in 1783 had a permanent impact on — of all things — rainfall over the Nile River.

The volcano produced aerosols which lowered the temperature of the entire Northern Hemisphere by three degrees (C), weakening the African & Indian monsoon by reducing the temperature gradient between land & oceans. As well as reduced tree growth in Alaska, it also substantially reduced tree growth in Sibera.

The cooling led, oddly enough, to unsual warming; so the reduced monsoonal rainfall evapourated faster, forming less runoff. Or in other words, less Nile.

Since the Nile runs for well over 6,000km it had ample opportunity to be effected. This led to record low river levels across not just the Nile, but the entire Sahel region of Africa, including the Niger River.

I was impressed to note activity in one of the coldest, iciest places in the world having a massive effect in one of the hottest, driest places. I’m wondering what might have an impact on Australia’s weather. Cruzeiro do Sul erupts, Australia gets rain?

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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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