Overclocking a road

Rolled down to Rosebery today to convince Dr Lulu to help untangle some Centrelink paperwork (a perennial process which I hope to interrupt shortly) & on the way back (at 12:15, so midday) noticed some frosty bits on the side of the road.

These even included a frosty road peg, as well as chunks of maybe 3 or 4 acres of frosty bushes & trees. So I stopped to take some photos.

I did get some nice shots of the little waterfalls, which are still running fine, but...

The result was a new lesson in black ice. The road looked normal, & I drove over it OK, but standing on it was an invitation to suddenly sit down & wonder what had just happened.

It wasn’t even shiny, not with the trees etc behind it to block a sunlit sky as a back-light.

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new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

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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

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Plantagenet Penguinista

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