Good Things happening to our car #2

Auto Extra fitted some Rola roof racks to our Camry wagon. When I say “fitted” the technician involved reminded me very strongly of Peter Edwards AKA “Sch4dow”, a bloke who could fix anything that ever worked (& I’ve seen him fix things which had never worked, too) in that he measured everything out carefully but quickly, eyeballing stuff off as he went to make sure that it was “just so” when he was done.

The shoes (clips) from the rack sit neatly, quietly & waterproofly in the door seals, & the rack whisks along through the air silently & smoothly.

We bought a “fit kit” from Auto Extra to suit a set of racks we were given from a 4Runner, & accepted their invitation to have the racks precisely cut & fitted for free, which they did... even after I rolled up at 17:00 after having to wait to pick up my laptop’s power pack beforehand.

If you want good racks (& bike racks, carriers, lights, camping gear, name it) give Auto Extra a bell on (08)9201-1888 and they’ll sort you out quckly & well.

Some of their bike racks are amazing: confidently mount six bikes on the back of your 4WD (& get any of them off instantly) and more on the roof if you like.

Comments

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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