Skip to main content

Lightning, pictures, really-south Vietnam

Flash! Bang!

Had a lightning strike a few minutes ago with no delay at all between flash & bang. Very unsettling.

Pix 1

One side-effect of a quite boring ’plane flight has been a number of fairly reasonable cloudscapes, sample following:

One assertion which frustrates & disappoints me is that I will not be permitted to show such pictures to some people I love & respect because apparently it’s too remote from them, too indirect, & not on the very short list of topics I’m allowed to broach with them.

Now, if I described these as being not so much like surfey waves as like big, fluffy candy floss in a gentle blue setting, apparently that’s right out of the question.

However, I can so show them to you, & so describe them, & hopefully you’ll enjoy at least a small fraction of the challenge I faced in getting a cheap little camera to accrue even this much reality through a thick, smudged perspex AirBus window.

Pix 2

The next shot arrived through the cheap, smudged perspex window of a train today, & I'm seriously impressed at how good a job the GREYCstoration plugin filter for GIMP did at recovering believable diggers & trucks from the resulting bland mess.

Vietnam

The area I’m staying in has a predominantly Viet population, I think due at least in part to the non Asian reaction to the suburb’s name.

This predominance has some interesting if minor effects, such as an attitude to junk-mail which represents, basically, ignoring it.

This results in big wads of paper piled in & around the mailboxes of partially-inhabited blocks of units, which in a more Caucasian-oriented chunk of society would signify the clumsy don’t-care attitude which comes with a “lower-class” solution to problems (punch them out) & a seriously deficient attitude, but here there are flocks of pleasant, neatly-dressed, polite residents wandering through who simply view it as someone else’s problem, which they expect to go away by itself when the commercial litterbugs come to their senses & stop wasting effort.

There are also no Thai or Indian restaurants about, but plenty of Korean & Viet places to munch in. This, I view as a good thing. I like a big cross-section of Korean & Viet food.

Comments

Post a Comment

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.
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more

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.
Post a Comment
Read more