Hi-tech tools: hammer & chisel

I’ve been glad to have some older tools sitting around in recent days, for doing those odd little jobs... but it seems that the ISS carries a few as well. It seems that spacewalk to repair a cargo ship will require the astronaut to bash away at the offending part with a hammer & chisel.

It seems incongruous to have a bloke bashing an object with a hard rock, in orbit a few hundred km above the normal hard rocks, but it illustrates a point: sometimes, the newest, trendiest toys are simply not appropriate for the job.

Many times I’ve set up a few simple little bulletproof services on a Linux box, & saved the owners thousands in licence fees alone on trendy but vulnerable software which they didn’t have to install any more. Oh, & a complete new server to carry ’Doze, because the trendy services required that & refused to run on Linux — & ’Doze wouldn’t do some of the vital stuff that the Linux box was doing.

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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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