Skip to main content

8000km commute

It looks like we’ll be toddling back to Perth for — amongst other things — a friend’s wedding in December.

If so, I’ll probably have enough work arranged by then to actually pay for the trip.

Which will lead to questions about why we wanted to make a “new start” with a sea change (Indian Ocean for Indian Ocean). That should make life interesting.

Meanwhile, got some more work done on a Perth machine & probably arranged work on at least 2 others while I’m over there. & if I get paid early enough, might pick up the guts(y?) of a new machine or two so I can quit whinging about this one.

Comments

sen said…
did you need me to burn some new disks of ubuntu for you? "gutsy"?
Leon RJ Brooks said…
Actually, burning a new computer to replace this (slightly improved) junker would be more useful. (-:

Amongst other things (I think I mentioned this) the DVD drive on the original wouldn’t read DVDs. The CD-burner fitted to the newbie won’t even eject, so I guess a transplant is on the rolls.

Hmmm. Gazing idly at the sda# partitions on this other server in Melbourne, & the machine was fitted with storage appropriate for the time: a pair of 80GB drives. I’d have trouble buying anything that small these days, they seem to start at 160GB & work up.

My age must be showing, as I can remember installing an awesome 5MB (not GB) RLL drive in a DEC Rainbox in about 1981. By pulling some tricks (overstepping, inter-sector gaps etc) with an ordinary 3.5” floppy drive plus compression, one can easily store roughly that much these days.
sen said…
I could burn them as ISO's.. then you can install and upgrade from mounted ISO's?
Sorry, but I don't yet have a desktop manufacture lab :-)

Popular posts from this blog

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.

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.

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