Glad to see dial-up

Sad but true. No ADSL in this town. The community connection office uses ISDN. Thanks, Nathan, for one of your modems.

Tasmania has repealed all flat roads — except for a few they keep along the northern coastline to fool visitors with. They also appear to have repealed sunshine, at least temporarily. (-:

Our seatainer has arrived, which means furniture, electronics, some food & a distraction. The truck driver was great, he turned up while Roadworks were resurfacing our street, & put up with it in good humour. He also helped us find some thick concrete tiles to put the seatainer down on so it rusts less.

Ah, the wonders of modern technology: my USB cable for the camera’s card reader has dropped a connector, so it will be a while before I can send any more pictures. It’s rarely the technically-exciting things which fail.

I learned a fair bit about OpenOffice Writer’s forms-handling capability, setting up a local lady with a set of invoice forms as templates, so double-clicking an icon fires up OOW & walks her through the important fields. Functions calculate the GST for her, or back-track from a total price to the GST & “real” price. Too easy. Now for the General Ledger. (-:

Comments

Kylie Willison said…

Good to see you back online :-) looking forward to seeing the photos of Tas!

01 April, 2007 04:52

Leon RJ Brooks said…

Hyley, Kylie

You must dream of new rhythms for your name. (-:

Some photos up at http://tullah.fit2.bur.st/ and many more will be added. It’s very hard to not take photos since there’s lakes, forests and mountains constantly in front of the lens. (-:

03 April, 2007 19:40

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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