Skip to main content

Holiday? Pfui!

Well... that’s what some hedonists are calling my visit to Perth, WA. However, an average of more than one medical appointment per weekday well & truly digs (doctors, please pardon this allegory) a grave for that idea...

Aaaanyway, the medics so far have been saying generally benevolent things about my health (not “all fixed” so much as “good progress”) which is, on the whole, good.

A few in particular have been saying pleasant things about the practical aspects of said progress, along the lines of “above average” & “recovering well” which lines up with earlier medics wanting my case declared “miraculous”.

Computer people have been saying nice things also, as well as unique social groups, & a handful of random strangers that I run into on trains & buses, so who knows? Miraculous or not, I may yet have a future. (-:

Perth has also been something of a reformation, in that I get to meet people from years back, bump into a few excellent friends, & pick up the threads of a few individual pieces of work.

One thing has left me aware of the benefits of marketing, but strangely pleased that I wasn’t able to claim said benefits.

I rang an old customer to see if they were interested in having their (7 years old, compare that with Win32 boxes) main Mandrake (not Mandriva) Linux server updated, since the thing sends me daily reports that all is well with its world. No, they said, it has been working flawlessly, & we’ve been replacing the outlying servers with small network appliances, one by one; ten minutes in a web browser sets each up correctly, & all is going so flawlessly that we’re about to replace the main box with a large-ish network appliance & retire it.

So... over seven flawless years of life, but no time or $$$ to be spent on updating it. That worked out well in practice, since I’m running very short of time to do what’s left despite the lack of work there, & it’s kind of heartening to have the old beastie die in action. Or, more accurately, get a pink slip rather than a visit from a fork-lift.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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.