Welcome to Melbourne!

Countryside on the way over was a bit bereft of capturable icons but the ride was gentle & the seats comfy. Food was a tad pricey (e.g. $3 for a Mars bar) but went on special for the last 15 minutes.

Kerry & Haylie were cheerful & helpful plus David & Pat(rick? Irishman) buzzed about the place doing stuff like finding stuff & people. Kerry was pretty amazing as she had wanted to work right where she is since 7yo, started real-life work at 15yo, & was all settled in a train by 17yo. Her hubby works in a car factory & they seem to have made their off-work moments meet up with mutual happiness (for 7 years? some considerable time, anyway).

Power-sockets located under the bench in the dining car, so 4 passengers spent most of the trip there. Think they would do well to bolt a 4-way plug-pack adjacent each seat, later they can get fancy with a satt link & wireless routers. (-:

Aaaanyway, have things-to-do teed up for today & tomorrow, schedules for Conf & work seem to be meshing well. Breakfast time (baked Woolies buns, peaner burr), then away.

Thanks again to the Loxton family (& their cats, & an eeepc, & a WoW addict... oh, & three-flavour non-Neopolitan icecream) for busy accommodation in Adelaide, thanks to George Patterson for digs here, a block from a train station.

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

Search This Blog