At the CLI for too long

I know I’ve been sitting in front of a CLI screen for too long (or in fact at a vim screen) when I notice some things in my word-processor:

Lines aren’t deleted when I hit dd; and

There are extra is where I’ve inserted new text; and

After I type ZZ, the text is still showing.

Then I know my world is turning edge-on when I read that Professor Claus Rolfs of Ruhr University is planning on changing the decay rates in radioactive waste to make it faster & easier to dispose of. That sounds like there’s a little dial on the waste packages marked “years” & you can crank it down from “1600” to “100” that easily, reducing the half-life.

Naturally, it’s a little more complicated than that, you have to cool the material inside a metal container, but nevertheless it’s going to provoke questions like “& just how long was this ‘ancient’ object sitting in this tin in the ice? If you can tell me reliably, of course?”

Interestingly enough, Prof Rolfs discovered that this effect enhanced the rate at which fusion took place in models of stellar fusion, & reasoned that it would also enhance fission... & it works.

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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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