Feeling truly Oz-wide

Sitting in Tasmania, phoning Western Australia for a link, working on a server there in Perth which is pulling down data from Sydney, and updating DNS delegations in Melbourne for services run in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. Also talking to friends in Queensland — or, more accurately, from Queensland as at now.

All I’m really missing is a stripe down the middle (SA and NT) plus a blotch in NSW (ACT)... well, that’s unless you want to count places like Christmas Island, of course...

Actually, it’s a bit more than Oz-wide, since the owner of another server I’m working on is in San Diego, I’ve got a little work underway for some people just (literally) up the road & I’m getting regular reminders of a friend who lives in the sticks North-East of Perth, & finally a bloke (mostly) from England wants me to write an article for him.

Now I need someone from Africa to make my retinue complete, & maybe someone from Greenland so I’ve hit every contient.

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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