/dev/wireless/null?

Well, moving the TP-LINK router across by two fairly thin-looking walls (about 6m) bought us another 6 or 7dB in the back rooms, & maybe 5dB across the highway, but moving it as far as 25m further on didn’t help the back rooms at all (probably even cost a few dB), & bought across-the-road maybe 2dB if that.

So... Mr TP-LINK will be sitting next to the TV (flat on the wall with antenna sticking straight up) & we’ll probably get another router to plonk across the road as a bridge.

It does leave me wondering whether the original router site somehow formed a wireless black hole, though.

Oh, I notice that Mr Shuttleworth found a way to fill up the Gutsy DVD, specifically Win32 versions of things like Firefox, ThunderBord & AbiWord. No OpenOffice there, but I guess asking for an extra 150-oddMB for that & a few localisation packs turned out to be a little over-hard.

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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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