Primitive land/Remote control

Working today with a WinME box locally, & a CentOS release 4.3 server in Perth.

The ME box is being a pain. I had to plonk a network card into it, & then somehow get drivers onto it for the card. Naturally, the floppy drive was dodgy enough to not be useful for this, & none of the machines here have a CD burner. Finally worked around the problem child by locating an ancient ethernet card — which doesn’t even have a brand, AFAICT — which ME happened to have drivers for.

The card was out of a machine with both PCI & ISA slots, with the older-style (pre SD-RAM) DIMMs — which the machine had none of — & it had a BNC (video-looking) socket as well as UTP. Shrug, it works.

The CentOS box obviously has a story behind it, as the files are managed by an app called e-Smith & you can log in directly as root on port 22.

All of the shared files went missing recently, & guessing from the debris, I’d put my money on someone running out of space on the server (40GB RAIDed) & making some more room for themselves by inadvertently axeing everything with a point’n’click tool. I’d also guess that it happened 2 Fridays ago, at about 08:30 in the morning, but I don’t actually know the people calling for help, so I’m not quite sure what the best way to put this to them is...

They also want to grow the hard disk (ie, disks), so I strongly suspect that the best solution is to port the setup to a squeaky new machine (all of about $500 these days: dual CPUs, gig of RAM, dual 200GB drives), do without the GUI tools, & let someone with common sense & an Admin password do the managing.

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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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