The duck got fired...

...although Mount Murchison still has a crust of snow atop it.

I got about 5m of lawn re-cleared to garden bed (& I say re-cleared because I uncovered some plant tags & other buried evidence which confirms that there was once a garden there already) & imported a wheelbarrow-load of topsoil from the other side of the football oval.

The topsoil is excellent exercise, since I use a small shovel, which makes the operation low-stress but aerobic & this gets followed by about ten minutes’ toting the load back past the oval & across the Murchison Highway.

That was well-timed today, since dark clouds were accumulating over Mount Black from the general direction of Strahan, & it started to rain just as I arrived home.

Clearing the bed is not good exercise since it’s well-bound-together grass being pulled away in a solid lump, which is quite difficult & stressful (it unrolls back into the ground, if you let it), plus involves quite a bit of bending over & lifting under load.

This was quite pleasantly low-tech after sitting before a screen all morning.

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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