Low tech implies high tech

Had a look at a property south of Yolla today, & noticed a few unusual things about it...

Firstly, it had a nice wood stove — not so odd up front, until you notice that there is no other stove, no light fittings on the ceilings, no power fittings on any of the walls; indeed, no power at all.

Hmmm.

So you ask, & yes, there is no ’phone line, either...

Fixing the former (over a distance of a few km) is worth about AUD$30,000.00 including about $4,XXX for a transformer; fixing the latter is probably only a few thousand but the line will be grotty, noisy, & will in no way support anything like ADSL.

So... scratch the standard approach. What else can be done?

It turns out that a workable RAPS system is down to about AUD$12,000.00 to $15,000.00 for a wind-gen (steady-ish NW winds) plus a modicum of solar panels & for a thousand or so more, we could add one of those Banki-turbine high-flow low-pressure thingies to the permanent creek for a small but persistent source of watts.

All of this would provide more than enough watts for a satellite link which could also sport a VoIP ’phone service.

There appears to be a revolution underway which would make reliable solar panels much cheaper, & another (oddly) less-technical revolution which should see satt links drop to about $20 a month... so RAPS plus satt more than halves the cost of power, plus lops about 30% off the cost of ’phone, plus throws in a bonus Internet link.

Is also enviro friendly since it saves a few km of 11kV power lines (poles & wires) & a ’phone trench.

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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