Worms don't come easy, to me...

...well, actually, they do; & to SWMBO, nearly a centimetre in diameter & maybe 10-15cm long. Fairly impressive worms down in a non-apple part of the Apple Isle.

Miss 6 went totally spare when asked to fetch a lone slug with her rubber-gloved little hands, though.

SWMBO finally felt inspired to work on the front garden for a bit, & it’s got a healthy-looking layer of plants in it now. Might even have an Aram Lily which appears to have squeezed under the fence from next-door-behind’s place, too.

The lawn’s showing obvious signs of recovering from the thrashing I gave it with the mower, so it obviously needs another one. Funny, most of the gardens hereabouts are fairly bare & barren... so I guess their owners simply can’t be bothered trying to grow stuff — native plants have no worries, grow straight into the rock as needs be.

Back in technical-land, it’s time to learn about web-cams, it seems. Not for this little blip on the map, but there’s a place up in Stanley which wants some. Hmmm... it seems that el-cruddo USB webcams are about $40, & ethernet cams start at about $270 (640*480, 30FPS, that includes WEPped wireless), $750 with pan & tilt.

Hmmm. There are some decent still cams for around the $200-$300 mark — but that would mean a USB cable, & they’d be a security risk &/or difficult to mount externally. Wireless gives some unexpected benefits on top of reduced wiring: remote/flexible mounting & lightning resistance.

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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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